The Annual Meeting

I made myself laugh yesterday when I realized that the State of the Market address had to be written by Chat GPT. It bears little resemblance to our collective reality. The whole meeting was a glossy and fluffy overlay on what actually has happened in the last year and where we are now. If you know, you knew...if you don't, everything is fine. Glossy and fluffy shiny fine. 

About 50 people attended, but no attendance sheet went around, and no minutes were kept as far as I know. There wasn't an electronic version of the packet, or anyway I didn't get one. The Board Chair rewrote his report to add taking responsibility and apologizing again for the "dark chaos" as they are spinning the attempted legal corrections suggested at the beginning of last year for the things they were doing or not doing like not posting the meeting dates, gatekeeping the info members were getting, and the technical errors that pointed out the inability of the organization to keep track of itself. They drove out their scapegoats and congratulated themselves for how hard they worked. They do seem to be uniting into a real Board, working together, which is hopeful, but that glosses over the fact that no one who disagrees with things is welcome in the room. There is only "One Right Way," which incidentally is a feature of WSC. Check those fifteen characteristics lists and you will see a few things that tell you we are not being a progressive, open organization. Maybe we'll get back there someday. 

There was a blank page in place of a financial report. One exists, but even the 50 dedicated and interested members at the legally required Annual Meeting were not to be trusted with a financial report. My memory tells me that although the Chair's written report mentions last year's deficit, his oral report didn't, but I don't have a copy of the revisions. The Budget Committee Chair would have been happy to give a full report, but he was not permitted to prepare one. He gave a few veiled bullet points but as they were not written down I can't tell you what they were. The one I remember was a repeat of the concept that we need someone in the paid staff who can do the financial management, currently being done by volunteers, or not being done at all. We need an audit. We are being blocked from knowing how we are doing, which is the biggest, loudest Red Flag possible. 

And anecdotally, we members are struggling. I have not talked to one person who is doing better at HM than last year. I'm at about 2/3 of last year's sales, though there are lots of factors no doubt. I'm cutting my own spending in response, of course, and I usually try to spread a lot of cash around the market. It's not easy to manage 3 months of no sales over the winter. Selling in March at the Farmers is not possible for me and I don't sell online. Promises of riches from the new website are ludicrous. 

 I'm not going to bother going through the misleading reports. I still hold that volunteers are doing their best to participate in responsible group process and I am hesitant to fault any of them. I know exactly how hard it is to steer the big ship of Market. I know more than I want to know about it. I wish I could never think about it again.

But we have challenges that must be addressed. The farmers will be closing at 2:00 next season, so we have two hours of irrelevance if we don't program it well to keep the event going. Just having good bands won't help either. We need a lot of changes to our presentation and a huge shift in how we spend our money. All indications are that we are in a decline of income, headed straight to another loss year, and a pattern of doing little or nothing to change. 

This is not the fault of the membership. Another fee increase (no one seems to know what it will be, exactly, which suggests that there could be more than one) on top of our struggles to stay afloat will jettison some of us and harassment and distrust will drive away some others. 

Community building is hard...community destruction is easy. Just lie, manipulate, award your friends and kick out your "enemies." If someone questions things, love bomb them back into the cult, grant them some special favors, and take them out for "the three hour lunch" indoctrination. If that fails, destroy their credibility, keep them from getting real information, and sail around them using their suggestions as if you thought of them yourself. 

Call them a complainer spewing negativity. Works great.