I figured out a more neutral, less emotionally charged way to present what I am seeing within membership organizations.
We've fallen into a domination/control model instead of retaining the skills we need to work within the model we were founded on. We are a collection of equal members gathered to join in an activity of mutual benefit. We are literally described as a mutual-benefit corporation.
The idea is to be non-competitive in getting our many needs met as we join in commerce and an event to advance our livelihoods. We work together as volunteers, and we hire staff to do the additional work that takes more skills and time than we have available as volunteers. We are all running our own businesses and our ability to thrive depends on us, as well as the system we have designed over decades of work to meet our needs in the complex environment of a downtown public space.
Economic conditions have stressed volunteers who have less time and motivation to do the problem-solving necessary to keep us going. The evolution in the processes of hiring and managing staff has become much more difficult for us, who are not supposed to have employees to manage in our individual businesses, so we rarely have the expertise to make excellent hiring decisions.
In times when we felt we had good management, we allowed staff to have more powers and duties to cover all the challenges. In recent years we failed to have thorough training and guidance built into our system. As recently as Kirsten, we spent hours with her introducing her to our systems, what underlies them, and passing on the collected wisdom of all the things we have learned by hard-won experience.
Since she left, we have had essentially no training and onboarding of staff. We designed a thorough program for it but then hired someone who refused it, and things went quickly downhill.
So one solution to our current problems is a redesigned hiring and onboarding program to make sure our next management team is trained and meets the expectations of the membership for how they, we, want to be assisted by our staff. Currently expectations are regularly not met because in large part, they have not been communicated. When they are, it is usually past the time when it is not out of frustration and distress. No one is succeeding in staying out ahead of crisis. I tried hard but was working half time or more for Market for free and unable to keep up with it or anything else. I had to pull my support but now I can't bear to be in the room where solutions are discussed. I didn't feel listened to, either, due to an ongoing atmosphere of "that was how things used to be but now they are like this." There was no clear way to express disagreement in the intolerant atmosphere of enforced unity propped up by sharing of only selected information. Even the Board and officers were not being fully informed.
We need excellent communication skills and information sharing in our model. Members get anxious about their spaces, points, and so many aspects of their participation. All during the design and engagement process for the Park Blocks it was my role to send frequent emails and notifications to members to make sure they knew about and felt invited to communicate their needs and concerns. I also took on the role of making sure the City and architect teams understood our needs and ways of operating so they could avoid doing the things that would hurt us. Our team worked really hard to be the conduit for informed decision-making and we were successful. Working with the city can be complex for both us and for them. Obviously it is vitally important. I had to fight for that role, though. The manager at the time wanted to do it all herself and resented me stepping up, but the results of an engaged membership were positive.
We're going to need that again if we go forward with any of the redesign plan. There's a lot of member anxiety right now about the repairs, which we have known about since last winter and are still not communicating well to our members.There is in fact no member admin right now on the members page. I removed myself from that position, which I have served in since the page was first created, when I noticed that there were four staff admins and an increasing number of staff posts and interventions such as deletions. The intention was to have a place where members could engage with each other. I didn't feel comfortable with my role there, and felt I had been left out of any admin discussion. It is not now a members' space.
Pulling my support has not been easy and personally I just can't put myself into an atmosphere of coercion and control. I'm not going to engage in another hiring practice, evaluation procedure, or rebuilding process until there is no more manipulation, selective communication, or misleading information-sharing. I have decided to just come and sell as long as I can and hope that other members come forward to take on the current and future challenges. Nobody wanted to listen to me in the last couple of crises and I'm not going to keep trying in rooms where I am marginalized. People need to step up to educate themselves on best practices, membership organizations, and productive problem-solving. Members know what feels right and will begin to speak up more when they feel safe and have complete information. Right now they have retreated into their own lives and are trusting that the current leaders will do the work needed to keep the organization right side up. I hope these leaders will do the work they need to do.
For that we need strong and dedicated volunteers who will take on the task of making sure we have a robust program for staffing ourselves, or we need to find a paid or unpaid organization to mentor volunteers until that is in place. That would take a deep look at our job descriptions, hiring practices, evaluation systems, and Board responsibilities. We cannot depend on a few people to bring that forward at this point. It isn't completely lost, but those people who could do it are either gone from the membership or discouraged from the needed work. They do still exist within the membership, but at present are not willing to engage in this work for various reasons.
We can't continue in this punitive, controlling atmosphere where communications are poor, members are seen as troublesome children who have to be managed and dismissed, and decisions are made in a top-down, secretive manner. While it may not have been the intention to get to this place, we are there and many members are distressed about it.
Many other members are new and don't know that we have traditionally had much better ways of governing ourselves. We generally don't punish people or drive them away, we find ways to operate with their equality in mind. No one gets to define all of the conditions of how we operate. This is something that we do together, evolving when needed and always attempting to research and operate with the most effective techniques currently available.
What used to be called consensus-seeking is now called participatory democracy and we are generally not doing well at maintaining it. Rather than rewriting documents and rules to be more punitive and allow for management control of members, we need to do the thinking to figure out how we motivate our members to cooperate and work for that mutual benefit, without the use and language of "consequences" and a fast system of member "termination."
It should almost never be necessary to separate a member from their voluntary, chosen membership in our organization. If they have issues with policies, let's address those in a non-dramatic fashion. If they have problems with how they are being managed, let's address those from a system view...what is it about our current system that isn't working? We can then work out ways to improve things through discussion, changes in practices and procedures, and reaffirmation of our goals and systems.
And when we have to retrain or change personnel, we can do that without using control and domination tactics and games to do our best for our organization. It will take time. If we don't have volunteer time to address it, we will have to purchase the time of professionals. Whichever way we do it, we can't just pretend everything is fine.
I have seen this distress enough times to know how it will play out. Let's limit the damage by taking a rational, practical way to figure it out and fix it. What happens if things aren't managed well is that we lose members and income, and then usually make new attempts to restore that which can result in further losses. For instance if we have another fee increase now to pay for what is seen as inadequate management skills, we will lose more members and make less money. Members pay the bills. We need all members to be engaged positively in the life of the organization. When they don't want to be, it is essential to find out why and fix it.
