The Short Week

One day off in a week is definitely not enough...and a couple of partial days is not the same thing. But this is a season of overwork and I know there are a lot of other people experiencing the pressure of that. I am lucky in that my efforts generally do pay off, within the limits of things I can't control. I don't celebrate Thanksgiving Day in a traditional way but I'll try to make it through the 3-day market with as much patience and compassion as I can gather up. I do have plenty of gratitude. I enjoyed giving to all five nonprofits lined up in front of the Evergreen Hall...I'm glad they were there. I'm looking forward to extending more support. Plus The Kareng Fund got some promotional materials! We're trying to transition to being The Caring Fund, just a tiny change, so we got stickers and QR codes and flyers thanks to the generosity of  DeLenn who got them designed and made for us within our quirky consensus process. A big thanks to her and to everyone who supports the Fund. 

I can control most of what is happening to me, but as I age I certainly realize that is just a decreasing list and grace will always be required. Reflections of myself in the public interface of retail craft selling are usually quite gratifying, restoring, and pleasurable, which is why I keep doing it after 50 years I suppose.

It's kind of a funky life. Many of us at market are healing our various traumas, working to stay afloat, and doing our best to maintain some safety and a glimpse of prosperity and fun. We reaffirm every week with that little song Raven and Yana gifted us. We genuinely want prosperity and fun for everyone.

But it gets harder and harder as the trust and collaboration fade from our culture. We are used to making all of our decisions and facing our challenges through group process...seeking a consensus about how to move forward, being as inclusive as possible, trying to speak for and protect those who need it the most. We're struggling to keep that as our set of values as real compassion and sensible business practices fade from our lives to be replaced with a power structure that admits that their strategy is to make us pay for everything it is possible to charge us for, to maintain a top-heavy structure that is abandoning those of us who can't keep up. 

Fortunately we have each other. This week I had some intense back pain on Sunday and tried to be stoic but ended up telling a few people as I tried to manage it. One person gave me an ice pack, another a lidocaine patch, and quite a few had gentle advice that I reluctantly followed. By mid-afternoon I could sit again, had a handle on what it was (SI joint and not a slipped disk, pretty sure) and the ibuprofen worked enough to get me painlessly through the load-out, so I could do it without help and just within the two-hour framework that I have to stretch right to the limit. Because we no longer have any storage, without paying an extra $50 a week for it (!) I have to go home to get my tubs before I can pack things up, and it rained between 4:00 and 7:00 which made it a little harder. But I was able to eliminate half the lifting by packing into my tubs right on my cart without blocking the aisle and that made the difference. I did as little as possible to use my back and it was fine yesterday, so if I am careful I think I will be okay to load it all back in tomorrow. Lowering the stress level is a big part of the management of the whole holiday retail experience.

Sales were down for me, but I had some great customers so I think I can weather a drop in income. We are getting almost zero promotions. No ad in the big fat Emerald Holiday Gift Guide, which hurts, only the flawed Weekly centerfold on the 13th, and not a lot of FB presence. I'm hoping there was more elsewhere, but there is also a lot of consumer reluctance to spend money on top of our admin priorities which don't seem skewed to member support.

We're getting a lot of admonitions to support staff (um, they make way more than we do in most cases) and the false narrative that we are mean members caused the board to send a broadcast email to tell us to be nice to each other, which just gives us the message that they don't see the longstanding community of very nice, very supportive members as we are. We check on each other, we offer lots of help, we are in it together. 

I had a nightmare-like dream with people weeping about market being bankrupt and destroyed, and I confronted some of the people to ask what they thought was happening. What were the problems? Overspending and some people don't like other people? Nothing new, I said. Over 50 years I had seen it all before, and I knew we were not going to fail from that. I said we would just recreate the market if needed, which worked for the FSP folks...persistence and a refusal to go away. There was a big empty house that we could use as an art center. Houses usually represent relationships in my dreams, so there was a big empty space for relationships and a lot of different rooms for them to thrive in. I had an answer for every concern. I was met with quite a bit of silence in the dream, from people who didn't agree, didn't understand me, or didn't believe me. I wasn't bothered by it. I knew what I was speaking from, which was the core of my being. This is my 50th season, a full lifetime. I know us.

A lot of what I've had to do this season is work to recapture my joy. It's obvious that some people don't like my style, my writing, my willingness to communicate with a lot of words, and some of that is the change in the culture. People don't like long emails or letters, want things to be simple, and on the market days, people do not feel safe with each other. If you disagree with the "we must support staff at all costs" cult, you will be reported and face some kind of retaliation. Punishments are built into policies that were never necessary when we were a real community. The honor system had value, and the point system was sacred. Now the model is more authoritarian, and it doesn't work very well to maintain a membership that feels it has rights. I fear the loss of our mutual benefit membership structure altogether. 

Getting the joy back means working to lessen the fears, but of course as a traumatized person I have some inability to make that happen sufficiently without the conduit of information I have previously had. I have no faith I am getting the information through the archiving. I guess a new Handbook was written, which I have not seen yet and isn't posted online, so it's possible some policies have changed that I don't even know about. Glad I am not in a position of direct accountability for them. Communication with the members is a key failing of this power structure...they just aren't prioritizing it for all of the necessary things. The priority is a high degree of control from the top, and punishment for those who won't comply with it.

The Annual Meeting is on the calendar for the wrong day, and nothing has been in the newsletter about it. It's on the loading schedule, so if you know where to look you know when it is, but you had to make an effort to get a schedule because not all the individually handed out packets got to the people. If you didn't attend market and ask for your packet, you missed out. I had reservations about the load-in process, and since I don't drive a car it didn't really apply to me, but there was a lot of confusion and some hardship around it, which fortunately was alleviated by the extra load-in day on Thursday, but you were supposed to get special permission to come that day, and again, people weren't told about it. The changes were made to fix a situation that didn't need fixing, that paradigm where the person creates a problem so they can get a lot of praise for solving it. Load-in happened much as it has traditionally happened, but a lot of people had a lot of anxiety about it. Anxiety is probably our number-one problem regarding Holiday Market in particular, and any given Saturday. What we do in a day is not easy.

The website, predictably, is not yet fully functional. I know one person who is not in it, so people who inquire where she is in the new map are told she is not there (and she is right next to the info booth!). She hasn't gotten her points or the promotion she is paying for. And the costs went up a lot! Generally people like the new map, and the addition of the Atrium, but people got moved without getting to choose spaces in point order as we had always done before. We're moving to a model of assigned spaces like the farmers use, and that will not be a good transition for us if we go farther in that direction. 

People might not remember we threw $10,000 at the website in 2018-2019 and it wasn't sufficient for the things we went through in 2021...it took some skills to book Holiday Market when we got back inside and we barely managed. Now we seem not to have anyone on staff who can do anything on the internet, so not only did we spend another ten grand from our savings, we had to supplement it by hiring the designer at an hourly wage to keep working. I'm sure he is a good person and he's been helpful to me, but the way we spend money is terrifying. Paying a few people by stripping out promotions for all of us is painful. A few people getting top wages and benefits while most of us are below poverty level has a lot of us really scared for basic survival. If sales drop significantly at HM, there are members who may not make it through the winter. The idea that they will get sales from the artisan directory is ludicrous. Hardly anyone is even putting up their profile details, because you can't do it from a phone and few people still have other devices like laptops. Helping each one of hundreds of members individually is not something we can afford at all.

Stripping out the savings of decades for short term goals is not financially sound practice and again, we are going to pay for failing to hire professionals in our staff. I know people are afraid to speak up about it and no one is stepping up to do the hard task of addressing it, but it may solve itself by bankruptcy at some point. I didn't enjoy having a nightmare about it, and I enjoy the constant reality of it even less.

For myself, setting the boundaries of not being in a position of service and responsibility for it has been life-affirming, but my level of caring has not diminished so it's pretty much a new set of problems. How do I fix what I can see but not work on? How do I have faith in people who dislike me for having different opinions and probably the highest level of historical knowledge of any of our community? I offered the Board the 2019 archives but haven't heard from anyone who looked at them, so just offering the history didn't work. I know my writing is seen as a threat and therefore my concerns and possible solutions are dismissed, as they were before I resigned.

One person did ask me a specific question, regarding the role of Standards Committee historically and in relation to the role of Food Court Committee. It's pretty complex really, and changed over time in complicated ways, but the overall answer is the culture of consensus-seeking and setting aside self-interest. Group process. We sat at that intentionally round table and worked out solutions for the most people possible, involving as many stakeholders as we could, and moved carefully and slowly when changes were made. It was clear that only the Board could make policy, and they made sure to get a lot of different viewpoints before taking any actions. That looked like resistance to change, but it was really careful shepherding of what we had built so we wouldn't lose any of our basic values or make any major mistakes we couldn't fix. 

If a jewelry issue came up, sometimes all the jewelers were asked to attend a meeting. Taste tests for new food booths were done in a full committee. Standards were changed only after months of discussion.  

But now it's all move fast and break things. I fear for us. More than at any time in our history we need to be the safe place for a lot of vulnerable people. Maybe we're going to end up with two blocks of the FSP and only one block of Saturday Market. Might not be the worst thing to have to recreate a people-centered market. It would be a lot cheaper, but that would not be a history I would want to document.