Service

Finally attended a fairly satisfying meeting last night, which seems to be a growing trend for me as my year turns from a lot of chaos to a little less. Volunteering way too much for the last year and more, I often was in despair that my constructive energy was too little and not clean enough of my own self-interest to be really helpful. Anyone who volunteers confronts the endless well of need and while we see how many good people are trying, and how hard they are working, more people slip into the well of need and more good people are injured, discouraged, and find themselves too busy or too wounded to keep working.

The political and economic reality is indeed grim as our time tightens and conditions degrade. If you read you know how hard social progress toward equality and justice can become, derailed by desperate survival and emotional overwhelm and actual greedy and evil people who derail us on purpose. The easiest thing is to stop trying, stop working, and retreat to what makes us feel better and more protected, focusing more on our own needs and tasks and letting the bigger chips fall where they may. I am constantly encouraged to give things up, to walk away, told that "someone else" will pick up what I am doing and the implication is that they would do a better job of it, as they have less investment, less energy on the line, and don't care as much for the results I am convinced are worth working for.

In my small universe, my self-interest is built in, as I volunteer for four membership organizations and have been paying a lot of attention to the City and its plans. Those organizations (Saturday Market, Oregon Country Fair, the Kareng Fund, and the Radar Angels) occupy different levels of my commitment (more or less descending order there.) Radar Angels is almost all about fun: singing, dancing, being joyful about Jell-O Art, and putting on our main fundraiser for Maude Kerns Art Center around April Fools Day. As the Queen, I don't do much until it comes time to write and promote the show, except this year I mounted a parade entry and Sunday Streets display of 30 years of  Jell-O Art, which took a couple of weeks of effort and some stellar participation from a lovely group of good people who marched in the parade with me. Indi Stern does far more than I do to keep the Angels going and other people do too...I am a persona who gets to do what I want and most of the year I only spread smiles and click likes on posts by David Gibbs, the Knight of the Realm of  Gelatinaceae (that's my realm) who has more energy for the art part right now than I do. So we can set that service aside as not having a huge impact on my time except for the three months I am in my Saturday Market offseason. The Sunday Streets piece was one of the ways I tried to support the City this year, to turn around the Park Blocks and downtown and preserve our city center for public use. I'll write other posts about that, and have. See my other blog, Gelatinaceae.

Kareng Fund also runs itself with a dedicated group of amazing souls, who far outshine me in FB page, which I will update soon as we are entering our fundraising season. I am very proud of this emergency relief fund for self-employed artisans, and I take no credit for starting it but am dedicated to supporting it, so yeah, not dropping that part of my service.
compassion and gentleness and I mostly take the minutes and handle some of the duties of an officer. My particular officer niche is in the words area...as a writer, I love grammar and spelling and keeping accurate records so I collect all the paper archives and track legal stuff and sometimes run the meetings to a degree, and of course do my best to participate in our fundraisers, which you can find out more about on our

I'll set aside Saturday Market for today. I am an officer, the Secretary, which lest you have sexist thoughts, is not a clerical position though I do a lot of typing and filing and other writerly and traditionally sexist tasks. It is all about standing up for Duty of Care, and maintaining the integrity of the organization. My self-interest is that it function well and not cause me a lot of overwork, as I have other things to do! Making and selling my craft, showing up every Saturday and Tuesday that I can, and putting a positive face out to the community as a member of this unbelievably valuable organization are bigger parts of how I participate, but as an older person I am happy to be able to carry the legacy forward and help the rest of the dedicated members and stupendous staff keep the whole basket thriving. I take it all very seriously and in fact I have based my life upon it in many ways. Walking away from any of that doesn't seem possible to consider. Even the most serious burnout does not deter me, apparently, because as I come out the other side of a difficult time, I can see how close I came to a negative view. We had some hard times. I depended heavily on a number of other people to pitch in too, and we came through with a new staff, a very solid team, and we are rising up so fast I get giddy. There are still plenty of challenges, but the atmosphere has changed.

Last night after Craft Committee met, a Coordinator and I struggled with that silly window shade that takes a particular amount of skill to lower, and I thought to myself that if that were in the SM office, we are now at the point in our rise that we would buy a new one. It struck me as a simple metaphor for an attitude shift in problem-solving that SM has worked through...let's make everything we can easier and more efficient, starting with the small things and working through to the bigger ones. I'm not complaining about OCF's office staff at all. I actually don't care about the window shade as I only have to deal with it twice a month at most, but it's more about the way we are able to approach things that need to be fixed, in the larger arenas of OCF functions. After last night I feel that OCF has made that same shift, although the turning peach has a much more ponderous path than the basket and it takes a lot longer to measure results and sift through the details of change at OCF than it does at the smaller though equal Market. (We do also have the value of not throwing out things until they have completely been used up, and that shade does still have functional uses...but maybe we don't take it to the new office when we get one.)

A nonprofit membership organization is now a rare and beautiful anomaly as efficiency and simplicity may not be realistic goals for a large group of equal members. Finding consensus and parity are more important; gathering the multitude of voices and forging a way forward to solve problems is not simple and making it simple generally short circuits some of the consensus-building process. It can't be top-down. It has to be roots-up. Every little person has to feel the power of working together and dedicate themselves to that process. We don't shed our self-interest, as we are all far too invested to do that. We shape our self-interest into forms that will serve all of us. We are charged with bringing our tiny pieces of the whole to the forum and working together to articulate them, before we even get to defining the fixable problems and working on solutions for them.

You can feel, from your own life, how many big concerns there are and how one has to look at them in smaller pieces to even stay stable. You give $20 to your neighbor who works with the houseless and you try to shop well and live sustainably and recycle and care. People are forced by time and economics to limit what they can give, and find a balance so they don't get depleted. This has been on the forefront for people in my political universe as we try to fight dismantling social progress and hold onto our sanity and sense of hope. I have found places in my life where I can be effective and lots where I cannot do enough, or anything sometimes. But working as a volunteer Scribe and committee member for OCF has been a place where I can see the direct results of my diligence.

Our committee has not been the best at productive meetings and it has taken years for us to feel powerful in making decisions and doing work that is helpful. I've only been doing it for a small portion of the decades of the Craft Committee, but I brought my skills in good faith and offered them. Working in the future has not been something within our grasp, generally, as we mostly applied what bandaids we could and tried to carefully take apart the issues and find the parts we could work on. We listened to other crafters and tried to provide helpful suggestions on navigating the structure and policies. Decades of policy-making has resulted in some gaps and stumbling blocks in process, not that this is anyone's fault, but taking policy apart and looking at each word has been effective, so a group of us met for several years now and did that with craft policy. We were tasked with compiling it in one place and we did that, which for me was actually rather joyful as I adore organizing and writing clear sentences, which I did with the help of others who care about that. While this is a task that will never be finished, we got to a place where we had something tangible, some tools, which we were able to give to the larger organization for the benefit of the 1000 artisans, the many coordinators, all the crew people, and the wonderful staff and Board, and the future.

It was a gratifying moment and we had a large group last night to witness it. We had representatives of maybe five crews, some of their coordinators, three Board members, one candidate, at least nine artisans, and some of these were the same people. We represented as broad a swath of those interested in craft issues as you can cram into a meeting room. We took our Duty of Care seriously and we worked to identify our concerns, our possible solutions, the exact sticking points, and with transparent process as a goal, we worked to suggest some small changes that will ease some larger concerns. It was a small step in a tiny segment of a big effort to keep that peach alive.

There was a lot on our agenda and we addressed most of it. We were honest and could laugh and see both the big pictures, the realities, and the small details, holding it all in mind and all united in the same goal of making incremental progress toward equality for all members and Fairness. Any conversation you have about OCF will include this goal. This is why people serve the OCF.

We each have our own Fair. That means there are thousands of them, many thousands, and all are cherished and held dear. We all are challenged by giving validity to the many thousands that differ significantly from our own. Your needs are not necessarily my immediacy, and my concerns are not necessarily on your radar. What discourages me about the organization is the limited view of service to it that some people seem to hold.

I will say that invariably, once they get involved at the end of the table that works on policy, process, and consensus-building, their smaller interests tend to fall away into the greater goal of making things Fair. Mostly people who come into service with a limited agenda get the education they need, if they are open to it. It has been a struggle to get boothpeople into the policy-making system, to even get some of us to see how we can be useful or heard. Board members like Sue Theolass and Lucy Kingsley and Justin Honea have worked really hard to listen to others, to ask questions, and to find out what is really different about the crafter experience, the food artisan experience, and the experience of the person who works mostly pre-Fair and maybe doesn't even see the boothpeople in their true light. They've worked to bring out not what is different, but what is the same, and how we all work for each other for our mutual goal symbolized by the round, juicy peach. There has to be enough abundance for all. There has to be a balance between order and spontaneity and everyone's Fair has to be the work of everyone together. There isn't a better way to do it, and it will never be easy.

That old us vs. them is a bugaboo that will always be part of human experience but building consensus means we work through that. One of my dreams is to never hear it again. We find our common ground, we hear about what other people feel, we take our problems apart and we work through the details with our good faith and our dedication and we take our small steps toward better functioning. We bring our skills, whatever they are, and we give them.

It's service. It is actually not about what you need or want, except that you get to throw that into the mix. If there is a way to get what you need and want, you may find a path in that direction, but rarely do you get to have it without the consensus. We are not top-down, and may we never be. Ours is the greater challenge of working for the common good, and we in our community are so damn lucky that we get our little universe to do that kind of work. I cannot imagine how I would be able to tolerate the present greater world without the comfort of my smaller universe where I can see results from my work. Our endless well of need at OCF does not compare to the one we all must live with. Ours has a bottom, and we're nowhere near it. We have resources, we have incredibly dedicated individuals, and we have a complex, deeply developed legacy of problem-solving skills. It is alive in us, and we have the huge gift of our children, who have been paying attention, who have been nurtured, and who are always stepping up to pitch in and help with their energy and joy. We have people of every age, all the ages. There's no division there.

It's election time for OCF. You must vote. If you get the benefit of Fair, you have to accept part of the responsibility. And as you know, you must be an informed voter. Watch the candidate forum, please. Ask yourself about the skills these people bring, and how interested they are in serving all of us in our goal for equality and Fairness. Do they get the true meaning of volunteering, that you do it as its own reward, no matter the cost? Do they bring a narrow agenda, or are they looking at all of the concerns of all of the Fair? Will they serve me, or only you? Are they open to learning? Can they handle the humble role of participatory democracy, of the kind of self-effacing leadership we need?

I like many of the Board-level volunteers. I hear many of them understanding the Duty of Care, the real leadership role they play. I was at first dismayed by the candidates forum, but gradually came around to the realization that willingness to be open to learning was going to help me decide. I know Lucy and Justin have what it takes. I heard Diane Albino indicate that she has heard our desire to be thought of as artisans, not vendors. We do not vend...it is way more complex than that, our Right Livelihood and our lifetime investment in Fair. She has been open to listening.

Two candidates came to the Craft universe to find out about us. George Braddock is a boothperson, and I know people fear he is a one-issue person but that is a groundless fear. Watch him speak, look at his skill level. He has said so many wise things during this controversy that show his openness, his willingness to make personal sacrifice for the greater good, and his huge understanding of service. His whole life has been an unselfish dedication to help those who need help. He has supported dozens of artists and craftspeople, helped empower thousands of differently-abled folks. He suffers misjudgement with grace. I sincerely hope he is elected so we can move along in the process of healing the damage of the past year, and so he can continue to give to the organization with his huge heart and deep soul. Please vote for him.

I will give a loud shoutout to candidate Laurel Georger. She came last night and she did not campaign. She took zero time for herself, but spent the meeting taking notes, listening hard to all of the complicated issues we were navigating, and she adopted throughout a respectful attitude of learning. She didn't interrupt to ask questions, but I expect she will when there is time. She understood that we had a packed agenda and no time to bring anyone up to speed. She knew the importance of what we were doing. I hadn't met her before but I know she is about the age of my son and their friend groups intersect, so I had some expectations of her...I figured she was smart, maybe kind of nerdy (which is a great quality in service) and after the meeting I threw her the logical question, "Why should I vote for you?"

She gave a great answer. She said she has been going to Board meetings, to Path Planning, and she came to learn more about Craft Committee and what we do. She talked about her service and her openness to learning. There it was, and she didn't sound political. There was nothing about power. There was nothing about needs. She said she had time to give and the desire to work hard. That's what I want. She got my vote.

You make your own choices when you vote. You have your own reasons, and you get to follow them through. Just please know that it does matter who you choose, and how you evaluate them. Take it seriously. My actual future depends on OCF, and maybe yours does too. For so many reasons, we need the peach, we need each other, and we need the hope that together we will continue to identify and meet the needs of our community, our place in the state (political and geographical), and our role and tasks in the universe. We want this opportunity to live right and work with people we value.

It's a little thing, this vote, this event, this bit of stuff we do. Yet, it is our metaphor, it is what feeds us. We want it juicy. We want a healthy tree with lots of branches and fruit for everyone. We want to be in it and of it and taste it and savor it. Our little lives are the best we've got, our wealth, so let's turn our pockets inside out and share our gifts and tokens and never stop sharing.

I am so grateful for it, for these people I get to work with and witness. A huge thanks! I will now mail my ballot in. Forgive me for missing the meeting after my 14-hour day at Market. I do what I can. Do what you can as well. You don't do it for yourself, but sometimes you will feel the benefits.