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.