Running a Business

 People may not be aware that in the 80s and 90s I was running a solid large-ish business with my ex selling t-shirts all over the US, spurred by the Fish Tie T-shirt of 1985. It was wild. At one point we grossed a quarter-million in sales (in one year!) with multiple sales reps, employees, and all of the challenges. I had to learn how to be a professional manager, in all of the aspects, while I was also designing and printing my own things for market and Fair, carefully maintaining my craft business within the bigger one. I was in my thirties and forties and had the energy to do all that, and it took all the energy I had. 

I thought I successfully separated our business from my lack of expereince, but there was a lot of pressure and I made a good number of mistakes, ruined our Alaska business with my ignorance of how things worked, and struggled to learn how to have good relationships that included being a boss and then, being a parent. It eventually collapsed down to a one-person business again, and I paid off the debts and crammed the equipment into my house (the ex vacated and went on to his next phases) where it moved back and forth as I remodeled the bigger house over the span of 15 years, beginning in 1995. Sales at market tanked for me so I stopped doing Saturdays for awhile, got some jobs at 4J and had kind of a different expanded life as a single parent. It included a lot of therapy, some Re-Evaluation Counseling, (that's co-counseling using the teachings of Marshall Rosenburg,) and I studied Non-Violent or Compassionate Communication as well. I tried hard to fix what wasn't working in my life and with my work.

I really needed to learn how to love and advocate for myself and others and work out the damage from my childhood, which of course is a lifetime pursuit, and like the house remodel, is never really finished. Like the baseboards never installed and the things that now need to be rebuilt and repaired on my two houses, there is always maintenance and repair to do to my social skills and professional skills. I'm still educating myself on better ways to treat people and work with groups and be a good human. It's not something you finish and can rest about, as things keep changing. 

In my 51 years with the market, I worked with almost all the managers we had, about 20 of them. Gradually as we learned, we developed a set of professional policies and operations procedures to guide our members and our staff in doing justice to what was created for us to maintain and bring forward. It took a lot of us learning a lot of things and generally we did pretty well. During the years of Bill and Beth we built something very solid, predictable, fair and just, and profitable. Kim Still gave us a professional, excellent presentation and we advanced and thrived. 

And then we slipped a bit, but hired Kirsten and again had a professional manager who could supervise and motivate staff and members to act in professional ways with each other and the outside world, and the City, our landlord and the entity that allows us to be downtown. We went through two years of negotiation about the Park Blocks, while we learned in depth how the city works, how their staff has to function under the laws and restrictions of public service, and we held our own. The year 2019 was a stunning success for us, as we got recognition, support, and outlined our future. 

And then Kirsten found a better job, and we again stumbled, beset with the challenges of the pandemic, which she got us halfway through, leaving in summer 2021. The staff she left behind tried, but some of the core volunteers were retired and the hiring situation at that time was poor. They needed their leader. 

We ended up here, having done a series of bad hires that completely buried our efforts of the past and changed radically the ways we operate.

We members are business owners, independent, joining together for mutual benefit to create selling opportunities within the structure of the market. We expect to be treated with respect and allowed to grow professionally and operate ethically and in peace and justice every week. We used to be able to trust that our money was well-protected, spent sensibly and carefully, and all of what staff and members needed was going to be handled in a professional, respectful way so that we would not be in legal or physical distress while doing our selling together.

Not hiring a professionally skilled manager has had profound effects that are now our new normal, and it is distressing every week for those of us who have seen and experienced better. The amount of dysfunction and unprofessional behaviors has been severe. Communication is worse than poor, it is often toxic if it even gets done at all. Control tactics like triangulation, gatekeeping, manipulation and false narratives are used to keep us off kilter, threatened with punishment and confused about how to maintain our safety and profitability. Volunteers walked away in frustration, our institutional memory was intentionally destroyed, our board captured, and our elders sent away to the ice floes.

I know you think I am exaggerating but really, go look at the 2019 archives I put together in the hope that the Board would review them and get a taste of how good we can be under real management. They are in the office. There is a world of difference between that and what we have now.

We have always been and will always be limited by having untrained and unsupported volunteers in charge of things that require training, support and commitment to high levels of values and actions, but we have a program for training volunteers, never implemented by staff. We had onboarding procedures and plenty of staff training in place, we had work plans and data analysis and all of the skills to operate without hiring a lot of outside professionals or consulting lawyers. 

We had functional committees that knew their history and knew how to keep doing what was working well. Mary had put together a manual of exactly how Holiday Market needed to be done to work within the budget so costs could be kept affordable for our members. Fee raises were infrequent and minimal so no one would feel priced out or have to come and not make money. Promotions were effective and looked great, bringing forward our past while also celebrating what was new and the whole range of who we are at our best. Please, if you are in the power structure or dream about a better market, go into the office and look at 2019. Read some minutes and Board packets and see how things were handled. It was never perfect (I don't believe in perfection, actually) but wow, it was so good.

We cannot continue in the mode we find ourselves in. The power structure leads the way and when they are going off the path into the weeds or using poor management techniques or toxic behaviors, it becomes the way of the market and we all suffer that loss of mutual respect, the expectation of peace and justice, and fair treatment all around. I have literally, in all my 51 years, never seen it this bad. And I have seen it very bad.

If you are one of the current volunteers, you have my sympathy and I acknowledge that you are trying and intend to be doing your best. However, you need modeling, support, and leadership to do that, and you are getting misled and mismanaged. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings and you want to kick out at me but I am just the messenger from the full picture that you perhaps cannot see. 

We need professional, direct communication to fix this. We need an atmosphere where questions can be asked, honest answers given, and no hidden agendas, diabolical secret schemes and hateful targeting is being done. No defensiveness, no blaming others, no pretending to listen and stonewalling reforms can be tolerated. No manipulative techniques are acceptable. Would you accept this from your bank, your doctor, your corner store or in your family? Do you work in a job where you would accept unprofessional treatment? 

Every member should be asking themselves these hard questions and some of you should be seeing that this is the time you need to step up, run for the Board, and get us back on a professional track before our savings are gone, our members have left, and our halls and blocks are emptied. Our market is not invincible, in fact, it might be a lot easier to destroy than I ever would have believed. 

Read some books, take some classes, get some counseling if you don't know how to be professional in your professional life. And, when you are dealing with someone like me, or the many others of us who have gotten that training and education, give us the respect we deserve in the organization we built. 

I resigned from leadership for ethical reasons, but I am still a member and I still have those ethics and the benefit of our history and how hard it was to learn the hard lessons. Now it is your time to carry forward what we have all learned together about how this works. It's not a mystery. All of the history is available (just ask me) and all of the education you might want is out there, easy to get now with the internet, business development classes at LCC and UO, and support from everywhere to do better. 

Let's do better.  

You Can't Ruin Saturdays

 After a half century of studying the intersection of life at 8th and Oak, I can easily make this observation. I even remember a day when it rained 5 inches in 1981 (I think, as it was a very wet year that almost buried us) and there were 9 of us there underneath the overhang on the Butterfly wondering how we were going to pack our things up and get home. Apparently none of us watched the weather reports. And we must have been rather desperate for some income to unpack, if we even did. But we had each other and a bucket of laughs.

Booth fees back then were $3.50 and I remember a zero day when it was painful to pay that. Zero days still happen, but the payment is now $25 which generally becomes debt that can mount to make you ineligible to sell pretty quickly, even if you want to come back after that humbling day. Often you did nothing wrong to fail to sell anything. I don't know anyone who has never had a bad sales day and couldn't explain it. There is luck involved, weather of course, and some kinds of magic it is best not to examine too closely, but just allow to happen. Don't get in the way of the magic.

Early in my crafts career I recognized that money flows and the more you can trust that and relax, the more easily it can flow to you. I sometimes will go out and spend $20 just to get things going. The recipient might buy a cup of coffee or something else and that seller might buy another thing, or at least I have generated a small amount of goodwill to add to the cosmic quotient. This does not always require your cash, maybe just your attention, or the good mood your sales persona donned as you unloaded your booth that morning. I'm not saying it is easy, but I am nearly always smiling the whole day on the Park Blocks, as I am easily amused and people are so weird and mostly lovely.

We still have each other. That is our greatest strength, our ability to uplift the rest of our community in all of the ways we do it. Everything can be enjoyable, watching your neighbors make sales, hearing their little stories, or the times when the sun finally emerges from the fog and overcast of a day like yesterday. It got glorious and we gathered in the sunny spots and turned up our faces.

This will sound odd but yesterday I noticed the giant tree on the corner of the FSP as if for the first time. Yes, I am keeping an eye on my cognition as you would think I would have noticed it many times, and I have, but it is starting to turn colors and the sky was a lovely blue. There is one maple on the Oak Street perimeter of  the East Block that is usually the first to go red and will at some point carpet the sidewalks if we are lucky enough to see that before rains turn it all brown. It is going red.

When the City remodel plans came along, one of my special jobs was to advocate for some of the trees that were in line to be removed, including the giant magnolia on the West Block, near 8th, and others, some of which were indeed removed for "reasons," sometimes sadly because they were annoying for the boothholders and I expect the park maintenance crews. I am sure that before too long the excellent Honey Locust  that often blooms in slime green on the Slug Queen Coronation, and the American Elm on the East Block will have to go, if they are still there. I will have to check. It is harder to see what is gone unless you have treasured it while you did have it.

And there is my metaphor for this week. People in my cohort who have sold over the decades can see what is gone from our market, without getting distracted by the lovely improved farmers side. There was a particularly beautiful Elm on their site too, near the corner, too near the corner when the street went two-way. Turns out not everyone loves trees as much as they pretend to, because cars are dangerous. 

I'm not talking about physical infrastructure being lost, as little happened on the two southern blocks that was highly noticeable when the money was allocated to the northwest block to get something completed there. We got a few things, but kept the walls and most of the trees, and the fountain at least temporarily. We lost the coverings, which are still missed. But mostly, it wasn't physical changes for the last four years.

Now, if you could only see it, you would know that the members have lost our umbrella of rights and member participation that got us to here. Our committees have been stripped of independence and power unless they serve the diabolical aims of the narcissist, and we have a new category of offender, The Danger to the Market. This is any member that the narcissist can't dominate and control to her satisfaction, or use her more subtle techniques upon. Yes this is subjective, and the methods are there to be seen, but fly under the radar. That six month Code of Conduct revision is important in the erosion. So many things are deemed confidential and done in closed meetings that you will never find out the "evidence" or process, even if you ask and find one of the many people who don't actually know what confidentiality involves. Transparency is when you do things where other people can hear them, in open meetings, with the participants, who are told they will be discussed. We used to have even the most difficult conversations in open meetings, with the participants there to speak for themselves. That is gone.

First the false narratives are spread. I, of course, am old and ditzy and not to be believed, as I hate the market and this blog is just complaining and negativity. Many of us are old and ditzy. And yet in our other community roles, highly respected and not ditzy. Sure, quirky, but that quirk is the highly-sought-after-by-the-whole-region quality that brings people downtown on any given week. Ask anyone trying to promote anything in our town. 

A number of members have learned that something was said about them that caused them to lose their credibility, often a recounting of their words or behaviors that looked like some kind of mental illness...and then they are gently pushed out into retirement, or worked against until they are more violently removed. It hasn't always worked, but it has always been secretive. I was told I was an "egregious failure" for my decades of volunteering as an officer, in a post where there was a lot of manipulation of the truth after the manager was fired. You can't check on that, because history is buried by gatekeeping or revised by a barely true recounting by some "historian" who has been seduced into a web of false narratives. A public record exists, but you can't find it. 

One man has been accused of brandishing a gun that could have been used to shoot a crying baby! He denies it and no baby was actually involved...turns out we have a number of members who are licensed to carry. I mean, I don't really like the thought, but we are pretty vulnerable down there protected mainly by truth and magic. But he was accused and tried by the power of a lie and that is now in the public record without an opportunity to deny it. 

These false narratives are impossible to counter, are often put in writing, in the public record even, and with lies about character, if you protest, you look guilty. This is a common and transparent narcissist technique, rarely uncovered. Go read the transcript of that KLCC interview last December. You'll find out a lot of things that are patently untrue, or at minimum, reputation-destroying.

Our reputation in the community is solid about Saturdays being fun. Quirk increases in times of trouble, as people get confused and frightened. Why not be crazy, if they are already saying you are? Why not throw caution to the afternoon breeze? However, most of the targets are serious artisans who just want to make their living as they have been accustomed to do in the market we built together.

I am well aware that people do not want to believe or see these patterns destroying our organization and our community. Our membership is divided in two, for and against, though we are all pretty practiced at selling next to each other all day and avoiding the hard conversations and snarky remarks that come to mind. You wouldn't know from the outside how many people used to be friends and will never be again. You might not know who the targets are, who the enablers are, and who the main actors are. If you don't know much about narcissists, and have been turning off national politics out of your distress, you certainly don't want to believe that what is happening to us is similar. As in the national discourse, people don't feel safe talking about it. People shut down and tire of it all long before they get to the idea of helping to fix it. If you are not a target of a bully, you probably only see the charm they turn your way, and remember the time they pretended to be interested in you while gathering supply for their drama addiction. You have missed the thousand cuts some of us have felt deeply and continue to suffer. She did something nice for you and you failed to see it as favoritism, that was not available to the rest of us. You were just grateful that the rules were bent for you.     

But these false impressions do go out and are repeated and believed by the people who want to believe we have a charming manager who is doing her job, who don't think about whether or not lying and kicking out members and manipulating our community is in her job description. They don't notice if a few people leave or are forced out or stop being able to afford the sweeping fee increases. They won't notice if I am not at the first and last HM weekends this year...except the few who will decide I have finally died. Hey, I'm still healthy enough to last another few years anyway, though they might manage to throw out my craft, as it is also a Danger to Market apparently. 

Has anyone except media professionals noticed our promotions are crap? Yes, they have. An ad on the inside cover of Mom magazine is worth checking out, as a very sad photo of a lone musician turns out to be the narcissist's husband, who is apparently handy as the Fill-in-Guy, so when there is a gap in the entertainment schedule we get to further fund her family with our fees. Most of the posts of individual craft booths on social media fail to include the artisan's name, website link, or even their business name, which is a sad insult to the member who has worked so hard. I told them a few years ago not to promote me, so the guy with the camera doesn't even look at me for one of his dark photos. We are currently paying two people to do our promotions...you can judge for yourself if the rainbow is enuf.

It's a powerful rainbow, but it's cold and nasty under it, and it takes a lot of effort to prevail in any kind of unity and faith that we will survive this punishment era as a community of artists. We might get some of it back, if we get a new, dynamic staff that has imagination and skill and can craft a decent sentence and take an attractive photo. We need people who can carry the heart of empathy (not the performative kind of a drama addict) and keep in mind the values of equality, equity, fairness and justice that our organization was founded to put forth into the world. We can't survive the lies, the favoritism, nepotism, and greed that we are experiencing. We can't thrive in a fake reality that is shiny and like a Saturday looks from the outside. We live in the inside, where it used to be safe and warm.

 

Riding home, I got soaked, and grinned.

 Despite getting soaked on the way home (that 5:00 rain prediction was accurate...) I had a super day yesterday. We enjoyed a late summer fairly regular market day with very low member attendance. There were a lot of competing events, from Bush Barn, Boise and Shrewsbury fairs to the Springfield Block Party, so many people were off making money elsewhere, but lots of us dependable members were doing our traditional part to get through the "shoulder season" to the time when the students come back.

I really miss the tracking and analysis that used to be a regular part of our management. We knew what was happening and what was likely to happen. No one was playing innocent about what was going on, no one was blocked from getting the information they wanted and needed. In the archives I read a report from Beth saying (paraphrasing here) something about paring 4% off site costs and 3.5% off office costs. This attitude of constantly refining how the org was being managed so the members would be paying the most fair fees possible and nothing would be wasted was the rule of our past managers. We had the weekly census, lots of reports with graphs and trends in our financial analysis every month and certainly at the Annual Meeting. It is the members' right to know as much as possible about how their money is being spent. I remember when crossing the $1000 threshold in the highest HM fees was avoided for years as we knew it would be a hard crossing for all of us. And this year the fees are astronomical, with no data or analysis done to justify that. I know some on the Budget Committee tried to give us data. 

Beth came to it naturally though she was mentored by Bill for the first part of her employment to make sure everything was brought forward from our institutional knowledge, and whatever skills she needed to work on were identified and strengthened. Any good manager welcomes the opportunity to get feedback and training to do their job better...but we have experienced an arrogance in our recent past that there is nothing to be learned from longterm members, past managers, or anyone. It would be shocking to any Board that their suggestions for improvement were met with defensiveness and threats and stonewalling but we are not under that type of Board now. We can hope for the future. 

I had a lot of conversations yesterday about what has happened to our "middle class" as was posted in the newsletter as a question that has no answer. All of the people I talked with knew the answer. It is obvious what is going on with our membership and anyone observing the selling day and season can clearly identify it. We have a large number of sensible, tough business managers within our membership. You have to learn how to be that if you are going to be successful in a microbusiness such as ours in an economy such as this. 

It takes a large range of skills and we are all there to help each other thrive. That is why we come on marginal weather days...to make a market. We come for each other, we bring extra plastic, we do our little things to help when help is needed (and often when it is not, as we are an independent lot used to depending on ourselves.) Most of us are pretty careful about our advice-giving tendencies as most of us don't really enjoy getting advice. We like learning from experience. There are so many commonalities about the conversations I have with members and farmers throughout the day. 

I discovered the guy selling caponata (go try it...Il Capo Foods at the farmers') had ties to two of our food booths from his childhood and we shared a very fun story. I had made some special edition t-shirts for Nice Rice and Fresh Squeeze, a complex 6-color print that remains one of the most complex designs I did during that period. When I drew the lettering I did it one letter at a time as some repeated, like the four EEEEs and then put the words together, and in one of my favorite Freudian mistakes I left the U our of Squeeze. I printed and signed the 50 premium shirts and no one noticed anything until this young person, who was just learning to read, asked his parents what Sqeeze meant. He was the kid. We both had vivid memories of it. Here's a photo of the revised edition:

I redid the art and screens and made 50 more for free, chagrined for many years at how working without enough care was something that could so easily happen, and I didn't do anything like that until a shirt I made years later that was supposed to read JUSTICE at the top read JUST ICE due to a bit of badly done spacing. Again I redid it for free with a bit less waste, but that is what you do when you own a mistake and try again at doing your best a little bit better. It is humbling but after a lifetime of making art on commission I know I have not always done as well as someone who actually studied art and wasn't self-taught by doing it over time. I've always had that knowledge that I am not perfect and it has not been one of my goals to pretend to be perfect. I don't even believe in the concept.

It is instead a way of appreciating life to say something was perfect. It is gratitude. It is often how we feel at the end of a market day, or even the beginning when all of our hopes and expectations are high and the air is fresh and expectant too. I love both ends of market when we work alongside each other putting it up and taking it down. I am often filled with a sense of some kind of perfection, something close but human.

Yesterday I tried hard to channel something I learned about Raven, who sold in my space for a couple of decades before he retired. He made shakers and was a kind of shaman to people who knew him, and a kind of spiritual companion to me as he patiently helped me download and analyze my experiences and make sense of my life every week. I've been lucky to have quite a few of those companions at market and at my other jobs and life places, always reminding me that I am not doing anything alone even though I try to pretend I am the only one responsible for what is happening in my life. 

He would set an intention in the morning for the whole market (you can hear it in the little song he and his wife Yana wrote and performed): Prosperity and Fun for Everyone. Magic. He would shake those shakers all day long, keeping that rhythm going for the universe to hear, along with the fountain and drum circle and strains of music from the stage and buskers and conversations randomly overheard and everything that swirled around us for all of us to absorb. I failed to fully appreciate the magnitude of this gift of his presence, probably. I may have written about it in the earlier blog posts, may have captured our joy and appreciation to some degree. Probably did, as well as embodied it, because on some days like yesterday, I feel loved and have beams of it coming from my space to everyone around me, spilling off me as I walk around and spread my money to others. I bought a lot of things yesterday and enjoyed spending every dollar. 

It's not that rare to have those moments in the center of town. It's so fun to mark them with other people who notice them too. There are thousands of little moments and little expressions of love we share with each other every week. No two weeks are the same.

It is so painful to see this dimmed for those of us targeted for hardship by the narcissist. It has become so hard. People are missing who should be sharing in it. It is not the way we built it to be, and we need it back.

Someone told me they thought humanity had six months before we are destroyed by forces we cannot control, My thought was, inside the grief that I could almost believe it, what will I do with my wild and precious six months?

It is an impossibility to imagine or manage that thought, which if I were truly conscious would have always been my orientation to life...I could have six minutes, six days, possibly six years. I'm pretty fit still, so more than six seconds. But I do not know that, and none of us do. What we get is the chance to be present now, the next now, and the one after that, if we can. Then maybe a different kind of present.

And in the meantime, let's sell our little doo dads and our fine art and our self expression with as much meaningful content, spiritual embodiment, generosity and care as we can extend. Let's be together and let's get these forces of selfish greed and malevolence out of our community. They just can't have our joy. I'm gonna keep shaking that shaker on that corner as long as I can. I want you there with me. 

We are aiming for the heart. 

No Rest for People Who Pay Attention

I wish I could get back the nights I have spent not sleeping because of worrying about the market. Over 51 years, they are countless. 

It is now two years since I have attended a Board meeting. I separated myself from it as I felt like the only person in the room doing any work, and I was not only providing a clear and comprehensive public record, but keeping up all of the checks and balances needed to guide a largely uninformed and unskilled group of people who were veering off into the unethical due to terrible leadership.

I had resisted being pushed out, stubbornly, since I knew my service was holding the market together, and as the Board progressed into blithely terminating two memberships of food booth owners because they correctly identified the lack of professional skills in the GM, their evidence based solely on her gaslighting and the collusion of a couple of her sycophants, I had to step away rather than be accountable for that. I was telling myself to get out of leadership for months, in great distress, as I was discovering how manipulated and controlled I was, along with all of the members. 

One of the hardest things in extracting oneself from a toxic and predatory situation is that you have already been complicit in many ways that you will be unpacking for months or years as you try to forgive yourself for not stopping it somehow. I still go through that. I had to say repeatedly "I'm not fixing it this time," as people kept looking to me to correct the ways we were straying from our normal into the psychopathic and authoritarian. It wasn't something one person could fix although somehow people still seem to be looking for a hero. 

It has devolved, of course. Some of the ways are ludicrous, some predictable, some so egregious that it is a wonder we still are operating. Obfuscation and outright lying are the norm, and the gatekeeping of information is thorough. You used to be able to at least keep up by reading committee and board minutes, but that was one of the first things that had to be destroyed and it was. Reports and minutes just don't contain the info about what was done, the transparency of the process and the steps that were taken to be fair and egalitarian. Committees are controlled and turned into tools to change policy so that the admin has much more power than is good for members. 

And members are mostly scrambling to make enough money to survive this economic disaster time, which has affected almost everyone except those who keep getting paid no matter what the membership is experiencing. The disconnect is dismaying and although I understand it, it's depressing to know that no one wants to tell the truth or get into the line of fire, since we see what happens.

Things are done in the dark that wouldn't stand the light of day. It seems that hats and my hats in particular were discussed at length for the last many months at the Standards Committee, but I was not notified. It has always been the practice that no one's business is discussed without their knowledge and notification, in a committee or at the Board level. Now it is common practice, and the minutes leave out the details and decision-making process so not even the committee members know what is happening. 

Members of the Standards Committee and others are asking me what process resulted in this new hat standard, and I have no idea. No one told me my (and the one other member) exception was being dissolved despite it saying right in the handbook that it was for the life of our continuous membership. I don't know if the Committee even knew they were doing that. I don't know anything about it. All of a sudden an important guideline was thrown out and there was no member input and no notification. I was distracted by a Notice of Concern that not even the Committee Chairs got to see, much less the committee members. 

It turns out that NoCs are no longer shared with the committee, but are summarized, however inaccurately that may be, or shelved if the GM doesn't want to forward them to the committee. This was never the practice in any of the past decades, that they were treated confidentially. They were generally printed with the minutes, if relevant to a number of members, and the discussion about them was shared in the minutes long before Board recommendations were made. And recommendations came from the committee meeting, not from the Chairs or any one person, with time built in so any stakeholders who would be affected were notified and consulted.

I saw with the proposed weapons policy that a member who makes knives was not made aware of the process, even though it would have greatly affected him, though he trusted he would be. I don't know if the policy was passed. 

I see with this new hat guideline that it was aimed at baseball caps but now broadly covers any and all hats sold by our members. It sounds simple, but a 50% assessment of member contribution is so loosely defined (it's not defined,) subjective, and open to interpretation that it may not be useful at all, and certainly can't be fairly applied to all the affected members.

What is worse, is that this now applies, apparently, to all products, even those that have been sold for decades. This is not how guideline changes were ever handled. It isn't right to change the rules, move the goalposts so to speak, and outlaw products that were already approved. So by rights, the two of us who had these lifetime exceptions should still be holding them and not be subject to this 50% assessment. Maybe that is why I haven't been notified. Maybe nothing has changed for me.

But this NoC that is not being transparently handled seems to give the lie to that. Why does anyone have the power to do this? 

The answer is simply because someone has taken power and is using the committees, board, and policy process as a weapon against members who are disagreeing with things and being vocal about it. 

The committee members don't know their process has been subtly changed and their powers have been dissolved. Most of them are new and a concerted effort has been made to drive anyone out who asks questions (two members that we know about have been either terminated or given an impossible process and walked away from the market, and there may have been more,) or brings up the past ways of doing things. 

This can't be comfortable for committee members, and many of them must be getting the inner signals that the process isn't fair. What can they do? 

Identifying a restored process for dealing with NoCs is one step. They are not confidential. Past managers have put them in the board packets, along with their explanations of actions taken, and certainly committee members should see the actual complaints before engaging in discussions of them. And the person targeted needs to see the complaint as well. While the complainant can be anonymous, that does not mean the complaint can be secret. Any member complained about has a right to see the charges. This is basic due process. We can't not have due process at the market. 

The fact that it appears that a guideline change was brought about in secret from this secret complaint should bother everyone. The pattern is evident. The weapons policy was brought up by an accusation that was never examined for truth...someone can say anything and there is not a process to verify it. This complaint about my hats apparently said I made a hat that said "No." That is false. 

I will repeat that I have no problem that more hats will be accepted into the market. I will be friends with those members just as I am friends with other members who make tote bags. We can talk shop. We can share resources. That is always how we have faced what other orgs might see as competition. We don't compete. We all have our own equal chance to make a success of ourselves. We are all happy to share the successes of each other.  

We need to hold tight to our values of fairness, transparency, and honesty in our community. It needs to be real. The current narrative is that the GM "has changed" and "has learned" and I will remind you that you can't change basic personality characteristics, though you can surely lie about it. There are so many false narratives it has become ponderous to keep up with them, and many decisions are based on them.

Let's demand honesty. We deserve it. How many other members are losing sleep and feeling isolated and not seen? I know it isn't just me.  

Joy was the main thing

 Lots of drama at market yesterday. Something we didn't hear about is that the Board cancelled November Park Blocks markets starting next year. It's two until 2031 when it will be three. It's a significant loss of selling days for members and will likely result in more competing events to attract our newly homeless members who just want to sell every week. None of my page of reasons not to do it were apparently compelling for the decision-makers. It does not serve the members.

But that was lost in the dismay of people with scented products, whose reactions ranged from staying home to plans to actually collect data, which would have been a good move before the decisions were made. As that is a health issue especially at Holiday Market, it's hard to support not making changes, but there are a lot of people potentially affected, including food booths, plant sellers, tea sampling, and many things that cause issues with the air that we commonly breathe. It's opening up things that could have significant expenses attached. 

And several people wondered if I will be able to still sell my hats. I don't have an answer for that. The online guideline still reads:  Commercial straw or felt hats, (or any commercially made hat,) either decorated or undecorated, may not be sold. All hat vendors offering work in contravention of this standard at the time of its implementation are allowed to continue selling them for the duration of their continuous membership. 

This is in a handbook labeled 2024. I have not seen the wording of what was passed by the Board or recommended by the Standards Committee, so will have to wait for the online handbook to be changed or the minutes to be provided next month. It wasn't in the Standards minutes that this was even a plan. I was not notified and don't know if anyone else who sells hats was...I received a letter from the Standards Co-Chair about my issue in particular that began in July, but nothing was mentioned about this wholesale change. Perhaps I was meant to be distracted, or it is just the poor communication and transparency we are supposed to be used to by now.

I don't fault the committee, who are hard-working volunteers whom I support. I'm sad for them that they don't probably know the history of this issue or what will potentially appear in our market that they will have to deal with. I am not worried about competition. I have never approached craft-selling with competitiveness and won't start now. We all just do our best in our niche we carve out and hope everyone else finds success as well. Competition is really not part of our makeup, generally. We just want to explore our artforms and sell what we make. It's pretty simple. 

But many of the Standards guidelines were crafted to prevent unfair competition, with handcrafted products which, as they are harder to make, need protection in the marketplace from commercially made items. There have always been gray areas that create inequities, and now there are more...it is rare that someone prints their own t-shirts, for instance. Digital printing has taken over that market, and you can see direct print done by computers on lots of items that were formerly handmade...tote bags, for instance. All of the stickers and patches and things that are ordered and put out for sale with only the work of the designer have replaced the hand-printed bumper stickers, etc. of the past. So one can assume that a digitally printed patch could be sewn onto a commercial hat, or that could even be ordered already complete, or commercially embroidered hats could be put out on the shelf, or even worse, commercially made fleece, knitted, crocheted, dyed bucket hats, or straw or felt hats will appear now, with a vague 50% contribution line drawn.

It's not going to be easy for the Committee to judge. Is design enough to meet that subjective 50%? When you look at a hat and I look at a hat, we will likely not agree on what that means. It can't just be the outward appearance of the item. When I look at my hats, I see the art preparation, the screen-making, the printing of one hat at a time, by hand, by me, with a little squeegee, and the retouching with tiny pens, brushes and markers that I have to do to get the finished version to look as close to perfect as possible. It is extremely rare that a hat I print is ready to sell without the re-touching process. I do a ton of handwork on my hat. But if you don't know this, you might think my rather simple design does not look like 50% of the finished item. 

I'm going to probably have to deal with this repeatedly going forward, as the committee does not seem to have knowledge about the process of printmaking, which is an ancient and old-school art form. The fact that is it being replace by digital printing is nice for the artisan perhaps but it is bad for the hand-crafted marketplace. It is of course not just hats but a lot of items, so we get to the gnarly "Consistency of Standards" world where opening one door leads to a hallway of others. We have had over 40 years of Standards Committee efforts to regulate these things and manage the protection of the hand-crafting artisan, so throwing out the history and starting now is going to be quite a hardship for people producing traditional crafts, not just prints but so many other types of craft items. 

Standards Committee already works very hard and this will being a lot more anxious people to their meetings, so I don't plan to make their job harder if I can help it. But I am ready to educate them about hand-printing if they want that. Changing technology does not demand changing standards. I sat at that table for many years, decades even, trying to help them articulate these issues and communication and transparency were essential. Surprising and shocking members with new limits does not go well. We would always make an effort to call in all of the affected stakeholders before crafting solutions, even when it was 100 jewelers to converse about charms. No, it was not easy. And when it was hats, four of us were inadvertently left out, thus the exceptions. This time pretty much everyone was left out, unless it was just me. 

New is not better. New is just new. Better is when people are more encouraged to thrive, more easily navigate the rules, and are allowed to be honest and ethical in what they do. As a community, we are wedded to honesty and ethics...it comes with the hand-crafting territory. Talk to any of us about it and you might be surprised how it plays out in every workshop where the production choices are made.

So you will hear more about this as the work of the Board is revealed, whatever it was. I hope the minutes are comprehensive and we aren't given false narratives about this too. 

I still have not had the inner courage to really examine the Code of Conduct revisions, which were also passed with a lot of secretive process, though I trust that since it took six months, a lot of diligence was applied. I don't necessarily trust the motive and what lies between the lines. Take a look at it yourself and see what you think might happen if you make a mistake or become the target of harassment. I will study it, when I have time, and see what I think might be some pitfalls. 

Policy is a living thing and always needs adjustment, and the makers of it need to be their best selves when they craft it, just like the artisans in our workshops. Ethics and good will and honesty are so important in our community. I wish I felt confident that we had that in place in all of our leaders. 

I remember what the mother of one of my friends wrote in my autograph book when I was five, something I have reread countless times and thought about deeply. She wrote "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. "

I told some convenient lies when I was little, to protect myself from my siblings and parents and find my way in a world of deprivation and bullying. Sometimes I was the bully, often the one crying. The dissonance was high as I learned about lies of omission, lies of commission, and all the sins and layers of sins taught in the Catholic Church. At some point, probably in my late teens, I decided honesty was the only way to go forward in life, though it was never easy to practice and is always hard to find in others. But I am committed to honesty. As a non-fiction writer, there is no other way.

There was also so much joy yesterday! One friend showed my photos of a cave system he and his fellow archeologists discovered, another told me about her potential new job, many others about their travels. One through-hiker bought hats for her support team...I assume she was taking a break from the Pacific Crest Trail before her final push. I imagine those hats in her cache near the final takeout. I'm excited for her. I'm excited for the printmaker who got to print and give away woodcuts at the Fiesta Cultural Friday night (he looked tired.) The City supported his costs so the prints could be given away as they dried. Must have been so fun. I've enjoyed him going from screenprinting to other more complex print techniques as his passion flows, something I always thought I would do but have probably run out of time for. He won't always be at market as he gets into shows where fine art is easier to sell. We lose many artists as they develop skills that take them into bigger circles and more success. 

For some reason, probably the hours of service I put in as a volunteer in the last two decades, I stuck with what I was already good at. I started teaching myself to make prints in the 1980s. I still do most things the same, hands-on way I did then. I don't use a computer much at all, certainly not for design, and I'm not going to start now. It's a trip of discovery to be getting near the end of my productive life. What will I do when I have to empty out my shop to install some kind of caretaker? Maybe go back to making things out of paper, painting silk, or something in Jell-O? 

Maybe I'll just keep writing things. I love it and it's important. There will never be enough truth-telling to replace Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem and those others we are now losing. Fortunately, they wrote things down!  

Summer's Almost Over

 I love August, when I put the biz on the backseat and drive my DIY life around my yard. I had a new roof put on finally, to replace the one I put on in 1996, successfully resisting the urge to do this one too. I know I can't do heavy work like that, but it's so hard to give up what makes me happy. I am a worker. 

Of course any time you touch a part of an old house you start a chain of repairs that present themselves gently and remind you they have needed to be done for awhile. I've always had rodents in the attic and it turns out there was a place they had just chewed up the plywood that was water damaged and were waltzing past my steel wool stuffing, which did give me some temporary relief last winter. So I got some new plywood and it needed to be painted at the gable...which I cannot reach from my light extension ladder that isn't sturdy enough to work on when fully extended. So I borrowed my neighbors gigantic heavy ladder despite knowing it was too heavy for me to move myself. I fixed all the things about the north gable I'd set aside and then had to paint the north side again, which has made the front of the house look shabby but that's going to have to wait for next summer when I will have to get the porch repaired and front steps rebuilt from other water damage, something I was going to do this year. 

And then while I had the ladder I had to touch up the southern gable too because I don't want to not neaten it up after giving it a try last summer with a brush holder on a pole which made a pretty sloppy presentation. But with a house this old, (over 100) there is plenty of sloppy paint and places where water has made its way in and every summer is some  kind of painting and some kind of repair. Plus, I have the second house, not quite as old but even more funky and that rat entrance is next on the list. I'm debating the gable in the back, but being thorough while I can is always a good idea I'm happy about when it's over. And of course in the roofing some gutter brackets got broken and I had to do some of that, with the brittle plastic gutters no longer sold that I have to get up apparently before Wednesday as rain is predicted. I'll believe that when I see it. It's unlikely we will get a deluge so I'll just get whatever gutter work I can fit in. Summer's not really over when August ends although we are getting that cool weather that is the harbinger of the dreaded winter once again.

So the metaphor of the day is that the market is like an old house in when you touch something, something else usually breaks. And what it looks like is that all of these fee increases has broken the members ability to thrive. My analysis of my own sales is that on the face of it, I'm making less than the previous two years, but I raised my prices, so I'm selling a lot less, and the increase in fees is coming up huge. There's a reason we are not seeing a census now that we have plenty of staff to do the work to make one. 

I'm seeing many members who used to come every week now coming the minimum once a month, which hurts your business in every way except your weekly expenses. Your potential customers don't find you there, your new customers find someone else, and you lose your feelings of loyalty to your community and your sense of belonging and routine. For many, the fee increases on top of the gas and vehicle expenses to get to market, and the increase in every kind of materials, is just way too much to continue, and we see many fewer jewelers as they run out of previously bought silver and such, and in general, an erosion of our regular, dependable member population. The market isn't filling every space, with a new wrinkle of people moving into the 4x4s from the 8x8s so that less expensive option is running out of space. There is not an endless supply of new members and the costs for those people are extra-daunting, though they know they have to invest to get going. It's rare to be successful right away and then sustain it over time. 

Many of the more successful members have added more out of town shows where they know they will make thousands instead of hundreds and those shows are easier to get into as all events are facing the increased costs themselves, of just everything. There's a complex balance to it all which is why we always used a lot of tracking analysis like the census to see what our trends were, to collect data over years about how our members were adapting to changing conditions, which have always driven our choices. It has been shocking how little data has been applied to all of these fee increase decisions.

I was surprised to see that someone with authority has said there are only five members interested in selling in November because we have never had a November market with less than a hundred members present, in my memory. Even in monsoon conditions we have more than enough members, and all of us always made pretty good sales as the customers wanted to support us. Now we have told the community not to count on us being there and that is going to be even worse in 2027 as it looks like the market will end sometime in October if the Board vote goes the way it looks like it will. 

Members have gotten used to not bothering to express our opinions as we are dismissed anyway and for many of us, our credibility is attacked and even our most reasonable and well-put arguments are spun as complaining or self-interested. The company line is pervasive in all of the issues and the minutes are minimal when it comes to supporting arguments for any other view. Any public record of any discussion is very detailed for some opinions and deceptively thin for others. 

You can look between the lines if you know the people and have conversations with them, but the enabling of the narcissist's positions is only evident if you are paying close attention. Her favorites and the in-group are assertive and willing to defame their opponents, so most people are just not bothering to speak up. They're looking elsewhere to get their needs met. 

To follow up on the Standards Notice of Concern about my hats, the Committee sent me a letter which I found inconclusive, and didn't escalate to further sanctions, but I don't think the discussion is necessarily over. The minutes gave me no information and I never got to see the language of the concern so even if I wanted to respond to what was really said, I can't. I overexplained, which is a common defensive tactic to narcissistic harassment, but the anxiety production that was the intent worked and I was damaged. 

With the scent issue, they didn't finish handling it yet, but the desired outcome is apparent, which is less enforcement of the solutions that were put in place last time this came up. It's not that hard to see what was done there, but it's knotty so I'll stop here, though I have a lot more observations of how some people are listened to and some aren't, disregarding the structure and effort of their communications and their ability to make their points clearly. Many of us are not great communicators and that makes us easy to manipulate, sadly.

There is one ray of hope that comes with the appointment of our 5th Treasurer of this regime, as she is a retired CPA with the skills we need. We need real data, we need historical perspective, we need analysis and planning. We need to find out what members are experiencing. It is not enough to say the market is making money. We still don't know how last year finalized after the tax expense was factored in. We aren't getting the reporting we need and deserve and we again have no real idea if we're solvent and how solvent we are. This has been true now for almost the whole time since 2021. Financial accountability used to be our top priority. We can't continue like this. We work really hard for our money. Seeing it squandered is so hurtful. 

Meanwhile, members are just being told to promote ourselves in a bunch of different ways. Lots of members did make location signs, nice ones, and then the numbers were changed. Lots of members do post and tag on social media and some are not shared, or retagged. I am not promoting myself on social media, so I'm just relaying what people have told me, but social media is just one way we are supported. I'm not interested in the directory any more. I had photos up, which were tossed out in the remodel, and I put up more, but I can't access my portal anymore so whatever. Come find me in person. Meanwhile, my fees pay for promotions...for everyone. Including people in the out-group. I haven't seen any inclusive promotions in a long time. 

Now we are facing the first football game next week, at 12:30. That can just ruin our day. My strategy is to be ready to sell at 9:00 if possible as people do not know we don't open until 10. I try to find out the opposing team's colors and mascot so I can identify their fans and make them feel welcome. I don't identify as a duck and hate the yellow and green combo and all the hype, and I serve tourists so I see that I have maybe three hours of my day to make those sales. I can tell who is new to market by their reaction to my hats, so I extend myself if I can to let them know I appreciate that they took the time to come on a busy morning. I am extra friendly and interested, in my sales persona. I work it. 

I also try to give extra support to the farmers if I can, as tourists don't buy a lot of produce. Sometimes people with Oregon products do okay, as people do like to take gifts home. There will be some shopping for Christmas if the opponents don't have craft markets like ours. I definitely hope a lot of members come for the short day which might include rain I guess, as it pains me greatly to see a wimpy market with the dashed expectations of the visitors who have heard such great things about us. I really hope we can have a good day for the first weekend in September. 

I'm sad to see August end as always, so I'd better get out there and get those projects wrapped up if I can. I'm sure there are chilly rats ready to move into my shop ceiling if I don't get that highway blocked off. And I have to return that ladder, once I'm sure I'm finished with it. Something tells me it is the last time I am going to borrow it. My neighbor can't lift it either...he's even older than I am.

 

Trying to hang on

 A whole bunch of shitty things happened yesterday but I still enjoyed being me at market and living my life. Connecting with joy is what goes on there every week and it strengthens and rewards me. I got some fantastic cookies and a new kind of bread and enjoyed not having foot pain for the second week in a row! 

The Standards situation might be resolved at their meeting this week. It's so very odd to have a committee come at me for products I have sold for two or three decades. I still have not seen the actual wording of the Notice of Concern, which was anonymous or anyway hidden from me, as is our warped policy. Anyone can write one, even a member of the public, but it's worrying that someone went to the trouble. What was the intention? Were they aware how much it affects any member, even someone who has sold for 51 years, when their products are put on the line? Not to mention the committee members, who have to field the anxiety produced, who are volunteers and are already doing a hard job of trying to protect a hand-crafted market in an increasingly digitized world. 

Do they really think that a hat that says Imagine is hurting the hand-crafted ethic of the market? I don't think John Lennon would be happy about this. My hope is that once they learn about my process and how hands-on it is, how hand-done a printed hat actually is, they will realize the complaint has no merit compared to the potential destructiveness of the correction. I keep a pretty big inventory for each hat, which I offer in five different colors, so if they say I can't sell it, do I get to sell off the inventory before I stop making them? At one hat or fewer per week, it will take a season.

My significant contribution is the design, art preparation, screen preparation, and printing of the hat. That clearly outweighs the commercial item it's printed on, just as a t-shirt that is printed by the artist clearly outweighs the sewing involved in making the t-shirt. I recognize that "significant contribution" is a subjective term, but I am prepared to demonstrate and challenge anyone to come over and do what I do and we can view the results. Can they make a successful screen? It took awhile to get the precise 2 minute and 45 second exposure time right so it wouldn't be over- or under-exposed. It takes some deft brushwork to get that screen in perfect form, with the pinholes and sometimes raggedy lines filled in so the lettering looks clean and sharp. This hat has some thin lines and elegant curves that have to look right. And the printing is hard, really hard. Printing over the seam in the center almost always makes little gaps in the letters or places where there is too much ink, and the hat can be easily ruined. Sometimes I can repair it with a micropen so it looks sharp again. Sometimes it gets thrown in the giant bin of seconds I can't really get rid of. I have boxes of hats in my living room that need to be inspected, retouched, repaired and hand-colored, which I do in the evenings when I have enough energy. 

But the language I have heard so far is that "we have to follow the process" and so on. I sat at the Standards Committee meetings for a lot of years so I get that, and I understand the process. It is a group discussion and then a vote. The people at the table determine your fate as an artisan. It's not fun for anyone.

I asked Bill yesterday how he took the market from 350 members to over 800 in the first couple of years he was manager in the 90s. People don't remember those years, when a lot of members left when a manager made it hard on them. She even ejected a juggler because it was "too dangerous." Bill's answer was that he made it easier to sell. He created additional selling opportunities, such as a program on the downtown mall for selling during the week (which still survives in the Activity Zone permits, sort of.) He collaborated with the farmers and the city to enhance member experiences and helped greatly in getting the farmers more established. He brought us into financial accountability immediately after some $4500 was "lost." He hired the right people (Kim Still!) He worked with a tough Board that wasn't all that respectful and fielded so many problems with good humor and good sense. He was kind, honest, and compassionate (still is of course.) He understood the entire crafter experience and had management skills. 

Contrast that to now, when due to all of the unending fee increases, lack of good promotions, blatant favoritism and poor decision-making, many more members are doing the minimum 12 selling days to keep their reserves or taking leaves until things improve. Every member business makes the best decision for their small business health first, and then thinks about the organization they sell with. When things aren't good, or they don't find it fulfilling or enjoyable, they leave. 

I think about leaving but I have invested my whole working life in the market. I am not going to be pushed out because someone doesn't understand screenprinting or can't see the big picture. I'm not going to be driven to distraction by feeling constantly harassed and lied about to my fellow member business owners. We have always held the utmost respect for each other and how seriously we take our work. We have always built each other up, found our niche and allowed our fellow members to find theirs. We have always been a community for mutual benefit. We have always been supported by staff to do that as well as possible, until now. We are being oppressed by staff and our committees are being weaponized to exclude people who are not in the favored in-group. Targeted harassment and disordered tactics are being used to make people miserable and we are lied to about everything that is happening. We can't see any data, we can't get answers to our questions, and we are told "we can't afford an audit." Yet we can afford to be overstaffed and watch people not do their jobs. 

It's a pretty hard and grim time for us. The denial that we are in trouble is scary. Yesterday we found out that the whole inventory of the Holiday Market promotional materials will be reprinted, at our expense. The dates at the bottom are last year's. The unsupervised an untrained person did not get any support in the way of proofreading to discover they had made a serious and costly mistake that should and could have been prevented. Mistakes are forgivable, and everyone makes them. But we learn to be accountable, take responsibility, and build in systems to prevent repetition. Let us hope that proofreading becomes a regular part of publications as it used to be. No excuses or blaming others will take the place of diligence.

What fee will need to be raised to cover these increased costs, what promotion will be sacrificed? When will we get our tracking processes back, our financial accountability, our safety and future security assured? When will we find equality for members again? When will we be able to trust the information we do get?  There is only one way to fix this.