In Case You Were Wondering

I quickly decided to resume writing the blog, but realize some background info would help new readers figure out how I got to here. Not sure why I thought I could stop commenting on things in a semi-public way, since there is still plenty to comment on. I mainly wanted to extend the relief I felt as I got out from under the market atmosphere and into the Fair one, which is close but so different. There I am allowed to still be the person I have been for this whole time. Somehow at market there is a personality operating that is called me, but is a construction of people who want to see me dead and gone if I'm not going to serve their purposes.

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. It was overwhelming.

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 those two correctly identified the lack of professional skills in the GM, the Board members basing their unethical actions 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. Targeted harassment was setting people up to get kicked out because she couldn't control them. We don't even know how many people were encouraged to leave for various reasons...it's largely secret.

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 struggle with that, of course. However, I know I was doing my best.

I confronted the narcissist about the manipulation as a control tactic. She was proud of her skills to "work on people" and get them to eventually appear to agree with her. She was quietly putting away all of the past lessons carried forward by our natural leaders and saying that everything from the past was "lost" as she made  no effort to learn about the membership-driven culture that had served us well for fifty years. Her plan was to change everything to fit her needs and to cover up her lack of professional management skills as well as make sure her family had access to all of the resources our system of honesty and trust failed to protect. We knew we had vulnerabilities, but we had not employed anyone before who would proceed to exploit them. 

Tactics I witnessed and experienced included lying, framing false narratives to change perceptions, blocking people from volunteering who didn't serve her purposes, ignoring policies and pretending they didn't exist, and above all, forcing people to do the tasks that were in her job description by learned helplessness, hiding things, and exploiting volunteers who did have skills. I was doing a great many staff tasks myself as we were in a transition but she assumed that I would continue to do that indefinitely at the same time as she was cutting me out of my oversight and participation roles in several ways. She didn't want anyone in the room who was willing to contradict her on anything or object to changes she was making and strategizing to make. She only wanted to work with people she could control or dominate. Playing the victim is so common all of the staff now does it as a response to everything difficult. All of our wages are substandard and all of our members are mean...oh wait, that has been revised: only three members are mean. Our wage levels are great for jobs that are service jobs in a nonprofit. Our gold-level health insurance, paid at 100%, is far more than nearly all companies pay these days, and we have other benefits. We've always worked as a team, members, staff and volunteers, in mutual cooperation and valuation of each other, until the false narrative that people are mean to staff and don't appreciate them, and no one cares enough to volunteer. Why does no one question these lies?

Now a few years later we see all of our fees increased, no financial accountability, and a structure of enablers who won't ask questions, won't examine their assumptions, and have completely accepted the false narratives. While three people who were doing their jobs could hold down the operational tasks, we now need five to cover what is the same amount of work. The false narrative is that we have more members than we ever have, but in the 90s we had over 800 members, so the 500 we have now should not be unmanageable. People repeat this false story to justify how stressful it is for staff to do their work. 

The reality of current volunteering is that she has to keep recruiting new people as people melt away when they are not welcomed, trained, or their time is not used efficiently and their contributions honored. We've gone through four Treasurers as she has refused to allow any of them to do their jobs, instead insisting that they have to agree with what she wants. No one wants to be Secretary when the Board is untrained and dysfunctional, so the public record has not been well-kept and all of the oversight functions of the officer position have been stripped out. We can't get volunteers to do the most basic of tasks, but no one really wants to connect that lack of energy with the treatment people have objected to before they left. 

We barely have a membership nonprofit, a mutual-benefit corporation, anymore. Member rights only exist if the members are in favor with the power structure or too tough to dislodge. She keeps working longterm strategies to manipulate people into reacting to her little torture techniques and then when they do react, she has grounds to remove their membership or sanction them into jeopardy of losing their membership. She uses the charm offensive to put people in place to carry out her plans. Creating drama is the method for putting the false narratives into action. 

Hardly anyone has the pattern recognition skills to see the simple repetition of the abusive tactics and carry those memories long enough to believe me or others who have figured it out, so there is a framework of denial over it all and everything looks fine on the surface. Lies are told about why former employees left, and repeated. The official version of a lot of occurrences is repeated using the same phrases until it becomes the history everyone is encouraged to believe. People unknowingly repeat these phrases as if they were true. Anyone who tells the truth is berated for being negative or complaining or whining. 

It's pretty easy to frame every member who has been involved for a long time as "from the past", out of touch with the current realities and sometimes mentally ill or ditzy or just too old to have a sharp observation or intact viewpoint of some better way to do what we're doing. New is not better. New is just new.  

It's impossible to refute every lie or misrepresentation and the Board is captured. Most people do not even know when they are being manipulated or lied to. I used to ask things like "Why would you want a manager who fights with the members?" but I rarely bother to try to enlighten anyone now. Saturdays are generally just as lovely as they have always been as market rolls along doing what it has done well for decades and most people are fine with just enjoying that and not rocking the boat. 

I could go on, but this in itself is tiring and people aren't seeing a way out. There is only one way out, and that is to hire a real manager who will work to elevate us, strengthen our organization, empower our volunteers in real ways, and act ethically and honestly on our behalf. Someday we are going to look back at this time and wonder just how it happened...and history doesn't lie. 

I hope I'm here to enjoy that renaissance. 

 

Staying Silent is Just Not in My Nature

Well, my desire to retreat and stop commenting on market life didn't last long. After fifteen years or so the Sunday morning essays still call to me to exercise my fingers while I still can.

Feet, not so much. I keep failing to master the right combination of socks and shoes and padding to allow me to stand and walk all day, so I limp and look like the old woman I am. I do firmly believe that standing is good for my sales, as the hats and I are at the right level for the satisfying interactions customers expect and find easy to navigate. A lot of my sales are quick ones as I let people browse without necessarily interacting with me. Making people comfortable to shop from us intimidating artists is a big part of success. While many of us are uncomfortable with selling, and in our "sales personas" all day, we have to make it easy for people to buy things if they are going to do their parts.

There are a lot of tiny factors in play. I like studying traffic patterns as they change in response to weather, other booths, the streets, the crowds, and our infrastructure, and after so many years I have a lot of observations. I will only rarely make suggestions to other members but there are things people can do to enhance sales for others...eliminate side walls for greater visibility, pull back from the pathway in tight spots, arrange their "hot spots" to highlight their best products, and so on. It's not simple but experimenting with it can be fun. Good signs help...of course showing your personality for that connection (as the new Assistant Manager reminded us in the newsletter) is essential. People who can't do what you do want to know more about how you do it, so they can get closer to being who and what you are that attracts them. With a market as intimate as ours, it is all about connections.

And we have so many of them, all day, something that is different every week and really feeds my soul after a week in mostly solitude. Summer is here for me at last and I have a lot of summer projects in the garden and on the house that I want to get on with. Once Lane County Fair is over and my neighborhood gets quiet again, I will continue with trying to lessen my yardwork in various ways as I get less able to do it. I get hand cramps now after just a few hours of pruning and my feet are a problem every day. I don't want to talk about my neck. I remembered that the surgeon I consulted said that there are many people walking around with what I have who don't even know it, so I want to go back to being one of them and not think about it. But of course the body lets you know what you have to do next, so this is just a brief attempt to have a summer on my own terms. I know it can't last. The sun is already moving south on my horizon. 

I haven't met the new AM, by the way. I am on full no-contact with staff and have told them not to use me in promotions, due to the bullying I have received and their non-existent attempts to stop doing it. I assume he got the memo as he has not even looked at me as he passes by. I don't know what I would say to him. Don't believe what you hear? I hope you are able to find the real community that does exist here despite attempts to destroy it with targeted bullying of those of us who carry it the strongest? There's a lot I could say but he needs to have his own experience. 

During the last, intense week of work right before OCF, I apparently received a Notice of Concern about my hats. I got an email from a former Board member with some vague information, as we are not allowed to see the Notices and they are anonymous. It took a lot of inquiries from me to the Standards Co-Chair to get the real information. What I first heard was that I sold a hat that said NO on it (I have no such hat, though I used to have one that said YES) and gradually it was revealed that the rewritten text standard said my hats with one word in a "recognizable font" were out of compliance with the standard.

I was there long ago when the text standard was invented, and it was aimed toward a person who wanted to sell t-shirts she was not printing, with the intention of getting her to do a little more work on her products to make them handmade. I believe it just said they needed to be individually approved like painted objects were...by the full committee or something. I will have to go back and find it. They wanted her to use some art or image that looked like more than a line of type. 

Always in the past when standards were going to be changed, people doing that craft were invited in to consult to work together to make the best standard that worked for the most artisans involved. Anyone who was left out or had a non-compliant product when the work was done was accommodated somehow. That is how four of us got exceptions to the hat standard...we were already making art on commercial hats, so we were given exceptions for the life of our membership. Two of us still have those. All of the hats I was making were approved at that time, and the assumption was that I could continue to do my art as I intended it, though going forward I attempted to put more work into every hat so that it would look more hand-crafted, in the artisan spirit I have lived within for 51 seasons now.

So this Notice, as gradually explained to and interpreted by and to me, was referring to hats that had one word, in a font that was recognizable. I had already written a full explanation of my art-making process and my hat-printing process, as a quick defense as I assumed Standards would be meeting soon after Fair and I wanted to take care of it so I could not have to worry about it during the time I make like half of my yearly income. I do a lot of pre-Fair custom printing and I was not finished with that, not packed up for Fair, and not finished with my own inventory production for it, but I spent an evening jumping through what I thought would be the hoops necessary to avoid a Notice to Appear, which is the next step in the Standards process according to the guidelines. I looked all of this up on the website, as well, as no instructions came from the Committee on how to navigate the situation. I sent that letter to the Co-Chair and found out that she didn't even know about the NoC, or the four Notices rule either, (an easy way for you to get kicked out by getting only four anonymous Notices about anything) which is something I have been concerned about since we entered the Consequences and Punishment Era with this admin.

I spent a whole evening on this when I needed to be working, before I realized what it was really about. I have exactly five hats with one word on them. Two, Eugene and Oregon, are in a hand-lettered style I drew myself, so those two meet the standard. Two others, Geezer and Curmudgeon, are my first two hats, so decades old now, and that lettering was from my stash of 80's press-on letters that you cut out with an exacto knife, press onto a clear carrier, and make a screen from for printing. That's a lot of handwork to make art. There is one, Imagine, that is in a currently recognizable font that I probably did print out from a computer to make into a screen. It used to have an ellipse but I took that off.  As I mentioned,  I don't make a hat that says NO though I want to now.

My main point in explaining my process is that I thought maybe there was someone who didn't know how old-school screenprinting works, which as I do it, as I have for 40 years or so, is a fully hand-done process. I always try to assume the best about volunteers and I know there are a lot of new people on Standards who might think it is their job to scan the market and make sure everything sold should be sold...and getting all of the little guidelines to be consistent over the variety of products has always been a discussion that is worth having. I sat at the table taking minutes for many years and I appreciate the work of the committee and the many difficult discussions they have, working for all of us. As I've said many times, I support volunteers and try to understand their work and support it as well. So I thought telling them about me and my process might be helpful in a greater sense. They might not know that each and every member who gets a Notice takes it very personally. It's highly significant to have the approval of your peers and feel a part of the common efforts for the success of all of us together. It stops people in their tracks to get called up on Standards and I've sat on that side of the table too. 

 My process is as hand-done as it comes. I print on the hat with a little squeegee, and it is hard to do. I waste a lot of hats that come out crooked, off-center, or messed up when I print over that seam in the center. I have to retouch almost all of them with a tiny pen or markers. My crooked hands could show you just how much hand-work I do. Screenprinting is making an original print every time. If there is someone who needs that education, I am happy to provide it, but after the initial parts of this process played out, my main question was, why do this? Why examine and sanction products of someone who has sold for 51 years at your market and has always participated in the most helpful, supportive ways possible? What has changed?

Well, it's obvious. The mutually supportive, all for all culture we created and nurtured is being changed by people who are competitive, possibly mean, and have some notion about what their jobs are that seems counter to the big picture of our mutual survival in the world where there are booths on every corner every day and a whole internet of handmade things fully available all the time. We as a market are not assured we can continue with all the outer conditions we have no control over. So to shift to some kind of internal controls that are punitive and exclusive and after some type of "purity" that doesn't exist is a huge mistake. We are both an entry level market and a place where masters of their craft can sell until they are able to retire or have to. We are so lucky to have both of these levels of craft and everything in between. Our attraction to the greater community is huge but still needs to be nurtured and protected and enhanced, as the public can be fickle and doesn't need us as much as we need them.

Everything that is done that restricts us internally and drives people away is adding up to our eventual failure, as we can lose it all faster than you think. Operating at a deficit for years on end (something we have not done since the 80s when we figured that out) is killing us and the high fees as a solution are resulting in many members skipping more and more markets and trying to just pick the profitable ones. Nobody is studying the factors which make them profitable, though, (the job of good managers who track trends, what is happening around town, and target promotions to those factors) and nobody is trying very hard to do anything to promote more sales for us as individual members, so we can afford these egregious fee increases. I know what good management looks like. Just look at the 2019 archives and you will also see it.

I myself am only doing four HM weekends this year, for the first time in my history. That bill for the whole show was just too high. Skipping the first was something increasingly common, and I decided to skip the last block as well. I sell well on those two days, but the sour taste of being bullied on the last day, and being told by staff I deserved it, makes me want to finish my season without that ending moment that we all used to share happily. No one ever apologized for that incident or even acted like it was significant, but to be bullied by the staff whose salaries I pay was just too much for me. To take that home for Christmas and sit with it all winter had a profound effect that just cost the market $500 I would have paid if it hadn't happened. No one deserves to be bullied. 

I love the market with my whole heart, but I do not support bullying and this targeted harassment and punishment of members. Members have rights. Membership is voluntary. I do not support restricting selling rights or terminating members unless there is some serious lawbreaking from them. I see our community at a crisis point, maybe a breaking point, and I will not stay silent and watch it happen without expressing my opinion. Here. It is what I can do. 

Now that I have your attention...

 I took a break from posting here to write in some other places as things for me at the market just continue to get worse. It's astonishing to me that after giving and giving for 51 years, my experience and expertise is a target for destruction by a very few individuals who are willing to treat my productive life as something they can and will destroy as a game.

Harsh reality that a lot of people would like to dismiss and blame the victim for bringing it up. Refusal to recognize the patterns of a toxic narcissist doesn't prevent the damage and so much has been lost that most people don't even believe it was different not very long ago. It's tragic that so many members do not even know what good management and promotions would look like. I implore you to go look at the 2019 archives if you want to see some ways that the market could be thriving instead of fracturing itself with constant loss. They're in the office and you can see just what professional management frees up and makes whole without the need for coercion and silencing dissent. 

For new readers, maybe come speak with me in person going forward, as I'm tired to my core of experiencing these patterns and being tossed about as if I were a toy. Refusing to engage is bringing me the needed strength to weather this era and we'll see how my future unfolds. 

The moment I drove onto the OCF site I started smiling and didn't stop for over a week. I was seen there, as my real self, the person who gives and supports and brings skills and knowledge that are needed and appreciated. I had so many wonderful interactions and reaffirmed that my life is awesome and I am so content and strongly aging and ready for all the challenges. I did something new and gave 10% to the JHVF to suppport the five nonprofits that will be funded, including the Kareng Fund, whose Board I sit on as Secretary. It made me happy to share that much, and know that it will be effective for a large number of recipients. True community comes when we work together and honor each other, working for the best we can imagine and do. That is how I used to feel about the market before it was captured by the current predators. 

Still digging out from the dusty stuff and organizing things I dropped to be ready for the week in the woods. It was worth the work. I do hope to slow down and enjoy the waning summer a lot more in the next months. 

Sorry to the loyal readers who want to see things revealed here. Maybe I'll mount up again at some point. You can still carry on with your own observations and efforts to protect and restore what the community has built and still treasures. Some of it cannot be destroyed.