Still the One

I started selling at Saturday Market the spring I arrived in town, in 1975. I've been a continuous member since before we had memberships. As other old members might remember, we instituted memberships as a way to make needed revenue back when our booth fees were $3.50 a day, plus 10%. It wasn't a popular decision, but we were always struggling for funds back then, while we all learned how to be business-oriented as we tried to work in the mainstream of Eugene business in the 70's.

We always had to swim upstream, but now that we have been doing this for 43 years, we have learned how to do a few things well. We worked on all of our relationships to bring them into line with our ideals. Yes, we could operate non-competitively in a dog-eat-dog world, and yes, we could do it on our own terms. We worked out a good relationship with the City of Eugene, the Eugene Police Department, and with Lane County. Each time the personnel changed, which was all the time, we worked out new relationships. This was never easy. Sometimes we had to cut our hair and put on nylons, metaphorically.

We had to explain ourselves a lot over the years. We don't work the way other businesses do, because our motive is not profit...except it is a little bit as we try to create profits for each of our members. Each one, not just those who are good at it. Our collective efforts began from our acceptance and regard for each other, for our orientation as a team, not a collection of individuals, but a group working toward the same goals. We exist for mutual benefit, and our mission broadened to support what became Eugene's weekly gathering place and celebration of human efforts. Plus, we are fun, and we make amazing stuff.

Sometimes we felt forced to be together when we had big issues to work out. There were many contentious meetings up in Growers Market and lots of people took offense at lots of things. What carried us through were qualities such as honesty, integrity, compassion, dedication, loyalty, and a growing sense that we could learn the skills we needed to operate in the world no matter how big it got.

And our world got big, as we got popular. We were able to revive the Farmers Market, which had been killed off in 1959 by the farmers allowing themselves to be moved into a commercially owned building where they lost the right to determine their own fate. They became a grocery store in a land of many of those, and the individual farmers couldn't make it without the collective strength that was eroded when the conditions changed. That early farm history is well documented in the book Market Days, which you can find in the Public Library.

Lotte Streisinger, one of our founders, observed that all successful public markets seemed to have foods and produce involved, and despite resistance from officials, we learned how to have street restaurants that were safe and tasty, with great customer service, and we learned how to partner with farmers to provide what the public wanted. Our guidelines and mission always involved what was grown or gathered. We are natural allies, and often the same people.

We've sold together most of the years since 1969, and the early (unpaid, volunteer) managers will tell you what happened when the proximity was disturbed. Our synergy is one of the most essential factors in our success. So we are now in one of the most difficult times of our history.

Both Markets have long outgrown their spaces on the Park Blocks. So many people want to join our fun that SM turns away as many as 60 potential sellers every week in the peak sunny season. LCFM turns away willing members as well. We could expand, we could move, or we could weather what has become a difficulty.

Saturday Market is not anxious to expand, because running a Market the size and scope of ours is more than complicated. We have a staff of over 20, working year round to focus on the 33 Saturdays and additional Holiday Market days. The burgeoning, unwieldy mass of individuals that converges on 8th and Oak is quite a challenge to manage. Each person has a need for something and expects it to be addressed. We are all owners, proprietors, bosses, staff and volunteers. The person who has an uncomplicated relationship with Saturday Market probably doesn't exist.

Yet, our experience and our collective strength hold us together. We solve the problems that come up. We apply our best thinking, we try to lead from the heart, and we are patient and slow-moving when we can be. We try to let time be our ally and our first approach is to shine a light on the problem, and see if we can involve those who will be affected, to work out the mutual benefit.

The mutual benefit is paramount. Things have to work for all of us.

So at the end of Market last week I had a chat with one of my favorite neighbors at the Market. I had heard he had a complaint, and I wanted to hear it from him. He was grateful to be asked, and not afraid to tell me he found something I had done more grating than one of the buskers we all had trouble being supportive of. More grating. I had to swallow hard on that one, because the thing I had done was really, really fun for me and some of my booth neighbors. It was music, and the intentions were good, and lots of people participated and lots of us had a great time. Yet to him it was grating, and hard to suffer through.

And as it turned out, his concerns were not so much for himself, but for others who were less willing to separate their friendship for me from their need to do what we came there to do, which was to make our rent and sell our goods, as equals. My fun had stepped on their basic rights. My music had hurt them in some unknowable way. There was no proof that sales were lost, there was no clear line between good and poor choice, there was nothing concrete in the mix, there were just the relationships. And I had to tend them.

Which was easily done in this case, by me changing the way I was having fun, to fit back into the spoken and unspoken agreements we have in our neighborhood to work for mutual benefit. I was not the one who got to determine how that mutual benefit was addressed. And it was not a good idea to do it without hearing from those who were not so delighted by me.

We're still friends. We understand that it has to work for all of us. Equality is one of our major tenets, and why we still have one space per person, so that we can all fit (or as many of us as there are spaces, anyway.) We can get annoyed at each other, but we have to repair it, and we have to stand next to each other and do it.

I'm not full of solutions and opinions about everything, but I do feel like an expert on what I do on Saturdays. I've made and still make all the ordinary mistakes of the messy lives of humans. I do know what matters in the spaces between the sales, outside the primary transaction of a person giving me money for one of my creations. I've sat in enough meetings, worked on enough consensus decisions, and watched so many individuals grow and learn together, to get it. And I wrote most of it down. (I'm a visual learner.)

We are all in this together, and it takes all of us. When we grate, when we err, and when we triumph, we share that with each other, and we are so lucky to have that. No cubicle, no boss, no time card, we self-direct. So we have to know our hearts, and they have to be good. Otherwise, we will hear about it.

And we will have to laugh at what we hear, take it to heart, and do better. Fortunately, as humans, we can always do better. I might be singing Saturday, but I'll be doing it from a music spot. That is what makes the most sense for the most people. See you Saturday!