Meetings

The place we meet. I have to go to one in an hour (yes, on Sunday morning) and take yet another set of minutes to type up. I volunteered to do it, so can't complain...I know it is important to record a group of people in the moment so that we can move forward from there without having to go back too far and start over. Working on craft policy has a satisfying effect, for the most part, clarifying things so people can understand them and get on board with them so we can be more unified. I know how useful that is, and also how it adds another layer of words to things that sometimes get a few layers too many put over them and other times, become transparently clear in a magical way. That's the trick I'm after.

I called a meeting of the Saturday Market membership for this Wednesday. It was a bit bold...I have never done it before, and don't remember any other time a meeting has been called in this way, recently. Usually it would come out of Board actions and be called a task force or some other thing, but I felt an urgency and acted on it. Backed off once and then pushed forward again...the urgency wouldn't disappear when I told myself to wait and see. I've been watching patiently for awhile, as things got more murky and involved, and then had the thought that if they are murky for me, someone who has been watching closely, how muddy must they seem to people who haven't even heard about them yet? When they finally do, won't they say "Why didn't anyone tell me about this?"

A membership organization has to balance involving every member on every level, which is of course pretty impossible, with letting leaders come forward and handle things. Leaders are well-meaning and generally do a wonderful, giving job with making sure bases are covered and tasks get done, but it seems in a big organization there aren't quite enough leaders and not everything gets done, or at least done thoroughly. As someone who has been in the room for many years, sometimes I can walk away and trust that it's all being handled well, and sometimes I can't.

I do trust right now that most things are being handled well and done, if not thoroughly, adequately. Our budget position is good, and we have a special group, the Street Team, volunteering to do promotional things to supplement our ad dollars, and putting that with increased promotions by LCFM, we are having a great sales season on the Park Blocks. We've only had one budget-busting hot day when vendors stayed home, (three last year) and not much rain...the blocks are filled and the tourists are happy with us. We have good relationships with City Staff and the consultants from NYC assured us that we are the best thing going for downtown Eugene, on Saturdays, anyway.

We are an internationally recognized attraction and destination and the heart center of Eugene. Yesterday a gazillion kazoos sounded out a tribute to Eagle Park Slim who recently left this world, and without the stage of the Saturday Market, the community would not have had such a simple way to gather and be together for a meaningful moment. Something like that happens in some small way every single week, something essential. It's personal, so whether it is the Breakfast Club or someone collecting a care package for a friend having surgery or someone buying lettuce starts or cousins reuniting after decades, so many heart-filled moments happen at Saturday Market, if we tried to cancel it on any given day, it would happen anyway. There's nothing so strong and lasting and valued by so many as Saturday Market.

So my last blog about my fears for our future might have sounded too anxious. I probably know too much history about the times we were in crisis to let go of my watchfulness for the next one which will surely come. We're not in one now, but there are too many big things happening at once for me to just trust that everything will be okay without checking in with the rest of the membership to see how we feel together. I know how I feel, and I have a fairly good idea of how some of my friends and neighbors feel, but there's a lot more to consider.

So I called a meeting, and my plan is to restate our essential conditions and what we know so far about what has kept us going for the last almost fifty years. After taking that first step, I want to inform people about the big things they might have missed: the Urban Renewal plans of the City, and the way they intersect with the plans of the County, and the ways they could play out for us, if we consider all the possibilities. There's a lot to pack in and we have an hour.

So I'm going to take a few things off the table for this meeting: I don't want us to do any complaining. I know people need to feel heard and they could have been storing up complaints about various things that might be related to these topics, like what the County should or shouldn't do about Free Speech Plaza. That's too big for an hour and I don't want to talk about it at this meeting. I'm thinking of handing out post-its and asking people to put their complaints in writing in one location to deal with later. I want people to have a way to express their concerns, but not during this hour. One membership meeting for one hour is not going to be the place for a member who has not been paying too much attention out of their busyness to get satisfying fixes for whatever they think is wrong with our organization at the moment. We would need monthly meetings for that. Oh wait, we have those. We have monthly Board meetings and committee meetings and task forces and they are all working on the various aspects of our Market. Standards, Food Court, Budget, Holiday Market, Sustainability, Street Team, Survey (hope I'm not forgetting one) are all groups of members who meet every month or nearly so to work on various issues of our collective needs and keep us moving forward. I hope you feel welcome to join any one of those and work with the dedicated volunteers who keep at it. This isn't about any of those.

It's a little bit about the Board, but not fully. Members of these committees and the Board have realized their time is diminishing as big-world needs increase and people have prioritized having shorter meetings, keeping them to two or three hours. You would think that would be helpful in getting people to be more prepared and organized and efficient, but it has kind of pressured our consensus-seeking process into a mode of deferral. If there isn't time to discuss something thoroughly, it gets put aside. We have a Bin on our agenda and it gets used, and generally things in it do come out and get more discussion, but sometimes they don't. Right now there is just so much information that has come out over the last year and is in discussion on the city and county levels, no one can really keep up, even those like me who are very interested.

During May, June and July, though I tried to monitor City Council meetings and actions, and do read the newspaper, I just couldn't keep up. I know that if I'm not keeping up, 95% of our members are also not. We're basically trusting that the city and county will tell us what we need to know in plenty of time for us to express our issues with it (if we have them) and they will get our feedback and know our position on whatever it is. For a membership organization this big, this is a naive and dangerous position for us to be in. We have one staff person working with both of these huge entities, and while our relationships are good and things seem covered and fine, we already know that city and county priorities are not the same as our priorities. We're not necessarily in opposition, but we can't assume we are in agreement.

My position is that we have to be informed, paying attention, and prepared for lots of possibilities. We have a history, and it's alive. Lots of people we've worked with or against in the past are still working, and might be more canny and strategic that we are. LCFM has a bunch of committees and volunteers and staff working on things we are not: Site Improvement, what they are now calling "Public Market," and are receiving a giant amount of public funds (4.5 million dollars) to put these ideas into action in some form. We're not in charge of that. We have a presence at the table, one person, but we are not the big players. So we don't really know what they might do, and we don't really know what our positions are as a membership...we don't know enough.

Now is the time, in my mind, to get together and see if we have some positions. We can't assume the City knows our history, what is essential to us, and what we want to see for our future. We want to have ready our statements, our tenets, our rules and higher values. We want to be able to tell them exactly why we take those positions, and why we can't compromise on certain things. When the lovely street closure idea came crashing down on 8th and Oak, we had to fight hard to bring out the actual facts of what that would do to us operationally, culturally, and in fact. They didn't know, and it took some convincing. We really had to wrestle them down to help the farmers see that selling in the street wouldn't really benefit them either.

This site improvement seems exactly like that to me. There's a nice vision that seems good and like it won't harm us, but have we considered everything? Have we read the small print on the feasibility study? Do we have a good idea of what the city and county want to move forward to meet their own goals? We don't. Maybe our one person at the table has a pretty good idea, but our basket is way too large to have only one egg in it, no matter how super great that egg is. We had a strong, terrific leader at the table when the street closure hijack happened, and she couldn't stop it until we put the weight of our organization behind her. The task force got the point.

We don't want a confrontation or even an argument with the farmers or the city or the county and we don't want to get in the way of a vision that might be worked into a beautiful reality. But we have to be a part of the discussion now for that to work for us, we as a membership, we as a big, messy, organization of individual business owners with strong opinions and varying needs. We can't assume a position, we have to figure one out. In our messy, consensus-seeking way. We can't do it in an hour, or in a short tight meeting once a month. We can't put this big stuff into the Bin and wait and see. We have to check in with each other.

I'm sure this isn't just about me and my fears. I'm positive I'm not stuck in history and ready to stop progress and deny the future. I'm ready for the future. I am also determined to carry forward all of the treasure we have created with our inclusive, participatory process of trying to stay, as a group, near each other and working together. Sometimes we have to push ourselves a little to do uncomfortable things, like calling a meeting when we're just a concerned member. Sometimes we have to try to articulate our fears into plans of action to ease them, to prepare for a future we hope isn't coming in a way we won't be able to survive in.

In a best case scenario, our fears will dissipate as we gain knowledge and strengthen our strategies. Excellent leaders will emerge who have been doing other things. We'll solidify our sense of community and feel certain of how our group feels and how united we are. We'll be ready for whatever happens and have tools to adapt or change what is proposed or to learn to work with it in a healthy way. Today I don't feel ready. By Wednesday night, I hope to. Let's get together and see how that works.