I'm finding this list *really* valuable, thank you everyone.
We haven't transitioned really, we've had paid directors/managers/mechanics (and once an assistant manager) for decades, but we did try a cooperative/communal restructuring about a decade ago and it went disastrously; months of weekly meetings and no real plan or structure came out of it. I've decided since then that unless it starts out as a small group of friends who start out mostly sharing the same ideas, cooperative design of an organization is a bad idea. If cooperative or communal government is a goal, think it's a much better idea to hash out a functional design first with paid hierarchical staff and modify it to be cooperative later, after it has proven functional. This is what I'm hoping will happen with RIBs eventually.
We've always had volunteers, but only back in the early 2000's did we have even close to enough of them to staff the space consistently. Based on the testaments of people I've met here and elsewhere from larger cities, and other shops I've visited, I think cities with really big cycling and DIY communities might be able to support community shops with enough volunteers to perform consistently to an acceptable standard. In our town my assessment has been that we just don't have enough interested people to staff a robust program.
What I'm suggesting is that whether a community shop is all-volunteer or has paid staff might be an artifact of the overall size of the city, or more specifically the size (or potential size) of the cycling community.
~cyclista Nicholas
On 2020-06-23 23:10, momoko saunders wrote:
Hi All,
I wanted to chime in on this conversation as someone who is personally opposed to making the transition from "all volunteer" to a "signal paid staff supported by volunteers" model. With the caveat that I'm eager to be challenged in this thought. I guess I should say I'm on the fence, although I lean towards keeping an all volunteer run model if it's "working".
I think the biggest/hardest thing to define is "working". Bike Farm (Bike education collective where I volunteer) has operated as all volunteer for 13 years. We have tended towards 5-6 days a week of open hours, for about 4 hours per day. The shifts are pretty well attended all year long and quite packed in summer. We have a solid Women & Trans night and started a wheelchair maintenance night this last year. We were in the process of a night for spanish speakers pre Covid, but this is on hold at the moment.
We have a large 4000 sf warehouse and generally have been able to make rent. Pre Covid, we had enough savings for 7 months of operating expenses, largely because we don't have staff. Due to Covid, we were able to do a successful, but relatively small fundraiser to cover 4 additional months of operating costs. We were however unable to attain PPP loans and many grants are built around how many employees you have.
I say all this to show that our present model is "working". Although I also see the pitfalls and how it doesn't work. Mostly, I see our all volunteer model as very difficult to hold people accountable for the behaviour in our shop. We have been endeavouring towards more equity and diversity conversations in the last year. While these conversations have been helpful and educational, I've noticed that not everyone attends and those that don't, might be some of the folks who could really use the space for healthy/helpful conversations. If it were staff, we could of course mandate it. Of course, if we had staff, it would likely only be one person so maybe that point is moot.
Still, it's hard to hold volunteers accountable, especially if the org is dependent on their free labor. Accountability around racist or sexist actions isn't the issue (for a later topic, it is of course still hard and in all reality a big issue, but not what I'm specifically referring to right now). But we have a hard time with upholding the rules of the shop, consistent pricing, sudden call outs that leave shifts unable to operate for lack of key holders, ect. Sometimes operations fall too heavily on the shoulders of a few and this often leads to burn out and the loss of solid volunteers. At the same time, I tend to see the loss of one important volunteer as opening up growth opportunities for others. So long as the volunteer leaves on good terms and it's just due to lack of energy/time and not because of harassment or bad experiences with the org.
That cycle of volunteer engagement leads to one of the main reasons I support an all volunteer model. When it's all volunteer, the skills needed to operate a business are spread out and people learn and are empowered to try out new ideas for improvements to the shop. I myself learned most of what I know about running a business through Bike Farm. I would not have learned it if I didn't have to. And I have heard from countless other volunteers about how they have learned so much more than simply how to fix a bike. They learn how to facilitate difficult conversations, read about the rules that govern non-profits, engage with wholesale ordering of parts, inventory management, scheduling people, creating systems of operations to reduce complexity, ect.
But the biggest pitfall of the all volunteer model is that these lovely opportunities are usually (although certainly not always) reserved for those with privilege. Those with the privilege to volunteer their time.
That's why, if I was ever to support a paid staff at Bike Farm, I would want the requirement that the person has a lived experience that is diverse so that we might make space for a person who would not usually have the privilege to be able to volunteer. I would also want the position to be one that is supported by volunteers who have experience in operating the business, and it would be one of teaching, not just shouldering the burden of all the stuff volunteers don't want to deal with. In a way, I think the only paid staff position I'd like to see is one of an intern.
Anyhoo, that's a long post. I would be excited to hear others thoughts. -Momoko
On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 1:54 PM Laura Brooke birenlaura@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
So timely, as always! We at Freeride Montpelier are in the process of discussing a transition from all-volunteer run to a worker-directed non-profit community bike shop. This is essentially a hybrid between a cooperative and non-profit, which is pretty much what we're hoping for as we'd like to keep our collective/cooperative-type values. Here's a resource on this idea, for anyone who is interested: https://www.theselc.org/worker_selfdirected_nonprofits
We're still in the beginning phase of this process, so this thread is really helpful to see! Some of the reasons why we're transitioning:
- We'd like to be able to serve the community more, and having some
paid staff would help with the shop being open more
- We're in need of some more processes in place (especially with COVID
and having new volunteers who may be interested in helping out at the shop)
- We've had 1-2 people volunteering and doing the bulk of the work.
They're interested in getting paid for this and the core volunteers thought that this idea (compensation) made a lot of sense, especially as sales have exponentially increased!
Best, Laura - Volunteer from Freeride
On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:54 PM Audrey Wiedemeier audrey@bikelibrary.org wrote:
Hello All,
Great thread. The Bike Library went through a rough transition about 5 years ago when we hired our first full-time staff member (and Executive Director). Many volunteer mechanics left, but in my opinion it was for the best. In the last year we have hired a 2nd staff person who serves as the Volunteer Coordinator and works 25 hrs per week. I can't tell you how much it has helped, and I am so glad we did it last Nov so that she was trained-up for Spring. We went from having aprox 30 volunteers working on various tasks 7 days a week to only staff working after covid started. We are in the process of transitioning volunteers back into the shop, and we are grateful to have them. I think we could better serve our community if we were to hire another paid staff (thank you for this thread because it's really got me thinking about bringing this up). After visiting with folks from BICAS at BIKEBIKE and hearing more about how they operate I am much more interested in the coop model vs traditional non-profit, as well as how well they are able to serve their community with their paid staff. Our volunteers are wonderful and we value them tremendously.
Peace & grease,
*Audrey Wiedemeier* (She/her/hers) Iowa City Bike Library, Director
700 S. Dubuque St, Iowa City *COVID Hours: *Tues. - Thurs. 10 AM - 5 PM; Sat. 10 - 3 PM Need something? Set up an appointment by email. Want to donate? Drop off anytime during these hours. Thank you!
BikeLibrary.org C: (515) 450-1651
On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 10:14 AM Jean-François Caron jfcaron3@gmail.com wrote:
The AMS Bike Co-op & The Bike Kitchen at UBC in Vancouver went through two such transitions.
One was a transition on the Bike Kitchen (DIY social enterprise bike shop) from worker-run to having a formal manager. The transition was forced by the volunteer board of directors of the AMS Bike Co-op (student club under the university's student union) who officially have authority over the Bike Kitchen. It was not a friendly transition, but it was deemed necessary since the business was basically failing.
There was not enough coordination between stocking supplies, parts, scheduling shifts, and pricing policy. We (I was one of the directors) made the seniormost existing mechanic into a manager, and some mechanics left as a result. IIRC they left explicitly because they only wanted to work in a worker collective context. Since then, a new manager has been hired as a joint effort between the outgoing Bike Kitchen manager, employees, and the AMS Bike Co-op.The other transition was on the AMS Bike Co-op side. We're still technically a student club under the university student union, but in addition to the volunteer board of directors, we have now had permanent paid staff for many years. We initially only had temporary student labour paid out of grants, but at some point we passed a student levy that greatly increased our funding. Our initial move was to hire an "Executive Director" permanent employee. The title was just chosen because that's what we saw other non-profits using, but it turned out to be a problem because it implies global scope and it gave directors the wrong idea about what their job was, and the contract was too vague so everything became their job. We renegotiated a contract with the title changed to "Programs Manager" along with other terms to make it more clear what was the scope of the job, and things went pretty well from there. The Programs Manager managed the various outreach, volunteer, and collaboration programs, and also hired other permanent staff as needed.
My little summary probably grossly oversimplifies things. If anyone adds further details that contradicts some of what I said, I assume responsibility for misremembering.
Jean-François
On 2020-06-19 8:39 p.m., Carlyn Arteaga wrote:
We are paid-staff-run but still consensus-based and mostly still sales-via-donations sustained. I wasn't around during the transition, though, so I can't help much on that front. But happy to answer any specific questions about how we make it work. ~Carlyn
On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 1:29 AM Dennis Wollersheim <dewoller@gmail.com mailto:dewoller@gmail.com> wrote:
I would also like to hear about this. Our organisation is tryingto
hire a manager for the first time, and I can see it will be difficult for the board / senior volunteers to let go of control. I get exasperated when the board spends an hour discussing the wording of a social media post. In my view, these should be procedural issues, dealt with by the manager. It will be a painful transition, I reckon. Cheers Dennis On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 9:13 AM Thomas Butler <thomas.unavailable@gmail.com <mailto:thomas.unavailable@gmail.comwrote: I’m interested to hear from people whose organizations made transitions from: volunteer-centric to staff-centric all-donation to grant-(or retail-)funded consensus-run to exclusive/majoritarian board (or somethingelse)
In particular what were peoples’ objections to the transition? What problems or pitfalls were there? Did the shop lose its independence? What net-negatives were there (even if overwhelmingly outweighed by all the positives?) Please feel free to reply to my personal email here if there’s something you don’t want to put on blast: thomas.unavailable@gmail.com <mailto:thomas.unavailable@gmail.com>
My interest is not regarding articles of incorporation or howto
fill out 501c3 paperwork. (there are threads on those topics in TheThinkTank archives <http://lists.bikecollectives.org/pipermail/thethinktank-bikecollectives.org/
if anyone is curious). Your testimonial is likely more relevant if your organization's incorporation is far in the pastrelative
to its transition(s). Thank you all so much for the work you do in your own communities and for the work you do in this community of ours. Thomas Butler he | they Austin’s Yellow Bike Project ____________________________________ The ThinkTank mailing List Unsubscribe from this list here:http://lists.bikecollectives.org/options.cgi/thethinktank-bikecollectives.or...
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*Carlyn Arteaga*
/pronouns: they/them/theirs/
Youth Program Coordinator____
*BICAS____*
2001 N. 7th Ave. | Tucson, AZ 85701 | Shop: 520-628-7950__
carlyn.arteaga@bicas.org mailto:carlyn.arteaga@bicas.org |www.bicas.org http://www.bicas.org | Facebook http://www.facebook.com/bicascollective/ | Instagram http://www.instagram.com/bicastucson/
/Through advocacy and bicycle salvage, our mission is to participate
in
affordable bicycle transportation, education, and creative recycling with our greater Tucson community./
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