#and nonprofits need money for consistent employees too

[saintcarlyon]

It’s worth noting that the 211 program started with a regional United Way (San Diego or Pennsylvania, I believe) and has since gone nationwide. Who mans and funds a 211 is dependent on the state/region and the nonprofits based there.

I mention this because how 211 and its host nonprofit may need donor help. Grants, contract for services with governments, and key, high worth donors (like the wealthy and companies) MIGHT be funding these programs. It’s usually a portion of overall cost though. And government spending is generally frowned on in the US. So Individual donations to these organizations are still critical.

Every United Way is a little different- please research to see if they’re hosting a 211 or resource navigation. And if so, please consider making a donation or suggesting a workplace campaign to help fund those efforts! These past couple of months we’re hearing and seeing the need for assistance spike throughout the US. If you prefer, donate to food pantries and nonprofits that assist with housing. One way or another it’ll benefit the whole!

If you live in the USA and you're pleading for donations to pay your rent, bills, or get food then dial 211! Please dial 211 before the last minute!

It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.

It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.

You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.

Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!

https://www.211.org/

[anerdyfeminist]

Very long and self-centered work rant incoming.

I know I've referenced a few things about what a hard and weird time it is at work and honestly I've only said about 5% of the truth of what all I'm carrying and that is going on. The ambiguity around what happens w/ my role, in particular, is killing me. I'm not at risk of losing my job, but a major leadership transition is looming and it's all very confusing. The cut to the chase is that I don't know what my role actually is in the new FY, which starts in 3 weeks now. It's a total shit show and in the process, I've discovered that I could be making almost twice what I make now at different nonprofits in fundraising, in positions that carry about 1/3 the responsibility and weight of other people's roles/livelihoods, etc. (It really is true when you are someone who STAYS you get penalized financially.)

I've loved this mission and this team for nearly 14 years now but IDK how much longer I can wait through all this bullshit. Someone I know from the Austin nonprofit world reached out to me to offer me free career coaching bc she's getting her certification and needs guinea pigs and I don't mind being one because I just need HELP and some outside perspective on what I actually want to do as I am 18 years into my nonprofit career at this point.

At our last session she asked me if I ever think about what's best for me instead of constantly focusing in on what's best for this organization and like I knew that's a problem for me but I didn't KNOW-know it until she said it. It's sitting really heavy for me.

I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I'm going to for a second. I'm really good at my job. Like REALLY REALLY GOOD. Like award winning in my industry good. Like has a reputation as one of the few very healthy mangers/team leads of nonprofit fundraising in Austin good. (All 3 of my current direct reports at different times have told me they'll also plan their exits when I go, and I've successfully retained all of them for 5-10 years depending on when they joined.) Like have been attempted headhunted many times but haven't ever wanted to leave this mission before good. Like I wanted to see what's out there that may want me, and I've gotten 3 interviews w/in 2-3 days of contacting some recruiters or putting my resume out there good.

And it's all just making me so fucking sad because I don't WANT to leave, but I DO want to feel appreciated and seen and make the kind of money my peers are, for doing FAR FAR less work....or to at least feel as recognized by my current employer as I do these prospective new ones for how obviously awesome and valuable I am.

I've always been an authority-pleaser (ugh abuse baggage.) I've damaged myself tenaciously reaching goals that were too much, too hard, etc. I've been working now for 25 years in some form or another and I'm consistently told I'm a top performer...so why don't I feel like it here and now??? I started working as a babysitter and tutor when I was like 13, and I began pulling down "real" paychecks when I turned 16. Across the dozens of jobs I've had, I've never had a single corrective action taken against me...I've never been written up or fired. I barely have any listed areas of "needs improvement" on any of my reviews across ALL TIME. I don't say all of this because it's how i believe employees should act, but because I just want to paint a picture for you as to what a dream I am to have on a team because my sense of self-worth has been toxicly linked to what I do/produce and if I can get an A, and if the teacher/boss/lead loves me, since Day 1.

And HEY KIDS, GUESS WHAT??? It hasn't been worth it!!!!!

Thankfully, I do get to take care of myself fairly well in my current organization's culture and I do take time off and I don't have to pull crazy hours. But I also carry and "produce" and take care of way more than anyone else in my side of the org. Way more than anyone SHOULD. It's been admitted to me several times by leadership that I am "the agency's most precious human resource" (even if they don't make me feel that way by how I'm compensated or treated when it comes to this ambiguity.) But carrying this much means I've probably had 2-3 true incidents of burnout w/ my org in the pushing 14 years I've been with them, but I always somehow found a way to recover and get back to happiness or at least contentment.

I'm not sure if that's possible for me now, and it's largely due to the fact that our board doesn't know what they're doing and they are torturing someone who they really really depend on for the agency to stay afloat w/ unnecessary ambiguity. I'm drowning in the ambiguity.

[antoine-roquentin]

SO, WHAT DO WE KNOW about them, these vocal second-home owners? They worked hard for everything they own. They are clear on this. Their critics, they believe, are often motivated by jealousy. “I’m certainly not ‘rich.’ I’ve worked for my entire life to have the properties I own,” wrote one group member. Like many mountain communities, the Gunnison Valley attracts a motley mix of younger residents — seasonal public-land employees, ski bums who work the lifts, river guides, college graduates who stick around. “Irresponsible, non-tax-paying, bored children who will never plant roots here successfully,” one Facebook comment called them. In early April, a second-home owner from Oklahoma City, described “local adult skateboarders and bikers” picking up donated food at a food pantry in Crested Butte. “These takers need to pony up or get out,” she wrote. “Sadly,” another replied, “there are many entitled ‘takers’ here.”

In a phone interview, Moran dissected the implications of the word “rich.” Describing the second-home owners as such was a tactic employed by the media to “divide people by social strata,” he told me. I pointed out Gunnison County’s housing shortage to Moran, who, from 2008-2011, was an advisor of the private equity firm Lone Star Funds — the biggest buyer of distressed mortgage securities in the world after the 2008 financial crisis. After the crash, the firm acquired billions in bad mortgages and aggressively foreclosed on thousands of homes, according to The New York Times. I asked Moran if, compared to locals who struggle to pay rent, people who own two or more properties should be considered wealthy. “I think that’s wrong,” he replied.

Over the summer, I obtained access to the Facebook group. Beneath the anger at the County Commission and the exasperation with the local newspapers and adult skateboarders, a deeper grievance burned, one that was expressed consistently in the group. “Our money supports all of the people in the valley,” wrote one man. “Where is the appreciation and gratitude for the decades of generosity?” wrote another. According to the second-home owners, Gunnison County’s economic survival and most of its residents’ livelihoods depend on their economic contributions and continued goodwill. Their donations prop up the local nonprofits. Their broken derailleurs keep the bike shops open. In late April, Moran sent an angry message to a local server who had criticized the second-home owners, posting his note to the GV2H Facebook group as well. Moran, who had apparently left the server a large tip, called her comments “a betrayal of the good people who have been gracious to you.” Around that time, there was talk on the Facebook group of compiling a list of locals they considered ungrateful. “People who rely on others for their livelihoods should not bite the hand that feeds them,” wrote one second-home owner.

The list, which was posted on Facebook, became known as the Rogues Gallery. It named 14 people described as “folks who oppose GV2H.” The list, which was later deleted, included a local pastor and an artist. Sometimes it noted where someone worked and what they did. Repercussions were hinted at. “One of those big mouths is slinging drinks for tips — I’ll be sure to leave her a little tip — ‘Maybe don’t run your mouth so much on social media when you depend on those people to help pay your bills,’ ” one Facebook commenter wrote.

Amber Thompson, a longtime server at Crested Butte restaurants, was not in the Rogues Gallery, but was mentioned later as a possible addition after several online arguments with Moran and others from the GV2H Facebook group. She gets especially mad, she told me, when a second-home owner cites a big tip as evidence of their authority and value. As a server, she said, her job is simply to deliver food. The demand for gratitude, the resentment when they don’t receive it: “It’s a way to intimidate people, to make them bow down, and I just won’t do it.”

The first name on the Rogues Gallery was Ramgoolam, and he, too, declined to back down. His offence was a Facebook post in which he asked why Gunnison County residents were incapable of making their own political decisions — a thinly veiled critique of the super PAC, which Moran had registered in May. Shortly after learning about the Rogues Gallery, Ramgoolam wrote another Facebook post, thanking the community for its support during the pandemic. It included a picture of him in a red bandanna, carrying a Captain America shield. He intended it as defiance.

“I think (the super PAC) spits in the face of the relationship we have with our neighbors in this valley,” Ramgoolam said. “Whether you are a primary homeowner or a second-home owner, you respect people’s opinions and everyone is welcome to the table, but to overpower everyone at the table and try to take all the chairs for yourself is just wrong.”

For many in the Facebook group, opinionated locals interfered with their ability to relax and enjoy the Gunnison Valley. Fun, after all, is what brings them to Crested Butte. But fun was hard to come by in 2020. People were irate when the county declared a mask mandate on June 8. “We come to decompress, to relax, to regenerate!” one person wrote. “That’s a pressure we don’t need! Or don’t WANT, which isn’t a crime either!”

This came to a head when local demonstrations were held, prompted by George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. One of them took place on June 27, in Crested Butte. After a short rally, a crowd proceeded up main street, led by the Brothers of Brass, a funk band from Denver. Demonstrators then lay on the blacktop for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the time that Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. Many diners, who were sitting at outdoor patios on either side of the march, paused their meals for the duration. But on the Facebook group, indignation bubbled up. “People come to the Valley to relax and enjoy nature,” wrote one commenter. “This is made impossible when ‘protesters’ are bused in for a photo-op (not to mention pollution, noise, aggravation, and trash).” Several other commenters also insinuated outside influence. (Other than the band, there is no evidence that the protesters were not primarily local.) The Crested Butte Town Council’s subsequent decision to paint “Black Lives Matter” on the main street prompted another wave of irritation. “Crested Butte has clearly forgotten why people (tourists or second homers) like going to the mountains. It’s about escaping the craziness and the BS of the cities,” one of the second-home owners wrote. A few others announced that they would no longer go downtown.

This hostility came as no surprise to Elizabeth Cobbins, the lead organizer of the Gunnison Black Lives Matter demonstration. The second-home owners come to their vacation properties to “escape the real world,” she said. They forget, she told me, that the valley is more than a ski destination. It includes a college that is home to many students of color, and a sizable Hispanic community. The second-home owners feel their opinions matter because of their economic contributions, which, Cobbins said, are important, but, “the people who serve them live here, too, and they live here for the whole year.”

[phoenixyfriend]

What can I do to limit Amazon’s* negative impacts without harming vulnerable communities who rely on their services?

* or any similar company that people are forced to use to survive if they are poor, disabled, elderly, rurally isolated, or any combination of the above

My post on Amazon has been circulating pretty far these past few weeks, and a lot of people keep trying to argue about what can be done right now. 

1. Contact your representatives

If you live in the US, there are several sites you can use to figure out your senators (you have two) and your representative (you have one). Call them if there’s a phone number. Email them if there isn’t. They’re obligated to have SOME form of contact. If your rep is already on your side, they can use your email as evidence for how citizens feel about the issue when Congress is in session to argue. If your rep is NOT on your side, they will see the email as evidence that a portion of their constituency is NOT willing to reelect them if they don’t play nice, and that scares them a lot. Either way, make yourself heard. Harass them if you have to.

(For more local issues, especially things like minimum wage and labor laws, you can find your representatives for your state or city government, like your mayor or governor or county rep, and contact them as well. Make yourself heard.)

Write emails in your own words about one of the following subjects:

Supporting the USPS. It’s the backbone of the US shipping industry, and major shipping companies like UPS, FedEx, and Amazon use it for overflow.

Monopolies and antitrust acts. Reference past antitrust acts leveled against oil, railroad, and telecom monopolies.

Raising the minimum wage. Reference inflation.

Enacting a marginal tax rate on high earners (re: the 1%, but phrased in a way that they’ll take seriously). Reference the marginal tax rates of the fifties.

Increasing disability benefits. Try to work something in about how stringent the requirements to qualify are, and how benefits don’t cover enough for medical care, transportation, assistive technology, and so on.

Increasing social security benefits for retirees. People pay into this fund all their lives as part of their income tax; it’s supposed to benefit them right back! (You can circle back to marginal tax rates and how the rich usually have savings and don’t need social security, but the poor often don’t have savings and rely on it.)

Enforcing corporate taxation. Find some statistics on who paid corporate  taxes in the past few years and who didn’t. Make sure to find a few big names and what their tax rate SHOULD have been. Emphasize how much extra money the government would be making.

Nationalizing the health care industry. Reference how well it works for countries like Canada, Korea, or Sweden, and how often hard-working Americans are bankrupted by unexpected medical emergencies.

Enacting or enforcing higher standards of employee rights. Did you know that minimum wage employees in Indiana don’t have the right to a lunch break unless they’ve been working at least twelve hours?

Legal repercussions for predatory pricing practices. Walmart is the best-known for this, but Amazon does it too, and they’re a fair bit sneakier about it.

Capping rent prices. Housing costs are among the highest financial pressures Americans face right now, and the fact that housing costs have risen SO much faster than the minimum wage is why it’s impossible to rent a one-bedroom apartment on a minimum wage anywhere in the US right now.

Capping upper management incomes. A CEO should not be earning several thousand, or several million, times as much money as their employees. It’s a long stretch (so argue the more achievable things first), but imagine if we could convince the government to say “actually, you can only make up to twenty times as much per hour as your lowest-paid employee.”

Banning police as threats against unions. UNIONS ARE GOOD THINGS. SUPPORT THEM.

Anything else that comes to mind! There are lots of subjects. This list is not an exhaustive one.

2. Vote

Pretty self-explanatory, I think. Vote in every election. Sometimes you won’t be able to vote for your top choice, and that sucks, but remember that our system is fucked and you have to go for the lesser evil that’s still capable of winning. So vote Blue (because ambivalence to our desires is better than glee at our suffering), and then send as many emails and make as many calls as you can to force them to recognize that, since you helped them get into office, they have to honor the deal to actually represent you now.

3. Support small businesses

Okay, so supporting local businesses probably isn’t too easy in a pandemic. You can’t just walk to your nearest mom and pop store to see if there’s an affordable option. That said, if you can afford to do so, try to see if there are small businesses in your area that are doing delivery or curbside-pickup.

If you live in a more rural area, see about ordering from small online businesses for non-essentials. If you’re thinking “hey, I’d like a new scarf” or something, check Instagram or Etsy first. All faults aside, Etsy is only a marketplace, not a seller themselves, so they rely on the vendors using their site to remain in business. (Whereas Amazon tries to drive their vendors out of business to take over their market share.) You can also use Google Shopping, eBay, or Craigslist.

4. Don’t Use Amazon (or similar), but don’t shame people for using it either

Some people rely on loss leaders to survive. That’s a fault of the American economy being a horrifying mess, and I listed a whole litany of the causes above. Money talks, so avoid using Amazon unless there is NO other way to get your product, but if someone you know uses Amazon, and you know they’re struggling, keep your mouth shut. If they’re not struggling, mention your distaste for Amazon but don’t push the issue; they’re more likely to come around if they feel like you’re not passing a moral judgement on them for it.

5. Recognize that many fairly-priced products are more expensive than you’re used to

The example I usually use is fashion. We’re used to a shirt costing ten or twenty dollars, even at places other than Walmart or Target. This price is what we’re led to believe is reasonable, but it’s really a factor of incredibly underpaid workers, usually overseas. If you can’t afford it, feel free to blame the low minimum wage (I certainly do), but remember to take a step back and remind yourself that it’s not that the piece is expensive, it’s that you are underpaid, and the current system is trying to teach you to expect cheaper items as the norm so they can get away with paying even more people less than they deserve.

6. DONATE

Yeah! There are a whole lot of nonprofit agencies that focus on issues that relate to this topic. I prefer to donate to organizations that focus on enacting systemic change through legal or institutional channels, like the ACLU and AAPD, but there are a lot of options, some of which focus on more direct help, or on specific parts of the country. Figure out one that speaks to you, check it against a trusted charity rating system like Charity Navigator, and set up a monthly donation if you can afford to. Constant support can cause compassion fatigue, but consistent support is how you Get Shit Done.

7. March

Join an activist group and march. Sometimes there are other major events going on (hijacking one of the current marches against racism and police brutality in favor of one about monopolies would be in bad taste AT BEST), but there will come an opportunity to make your voice heard by showing up on the street and just yelling with a sign.

Now go forth and unleash hell.

[nightcoremoon]

advertising is bullshit. not just for the carbon emissions, not just because they don't work, not just because they gather information on individual users, not just because unbridled capitalism is fundamentally broken without consistent regulations and control, not just because businesses are putting ad revenue ahead of human life.

here's the thing

you ever heard of acorn?

no not the video streaming service

there's an app called acorn that enables short form investment capital. you put in pennies to businesses to financially support them and if/when those businesses are successful then the amount of money you invested gets to be a lil bit more. so it's basically the stock market. you cannot eat the rich if you don't know what they eat. anyway it's a way to make supplementary income that's as far as I know untouchable by the IRS. but that doesn't matter. the thing is that this thing exists.

I can guarantee that 9 out of 10 people reading this has no idea that this app existed. and it's probably because you don't ever see ads for it. they don't really advertise. it seems to be some sort of communal hub for mass mutual financial growth among corporations and investors since that's how stimulating economics works. you don't hear about it on tv, radio, internet, video games, magazines, whatever. so clearly they have a tiny if not nonexistent budget for ads.

gambling ads are fucking everywhere. you got casinos, you got fantasy football leagues, you got horse racing, you got private pools for F1 and nascar, you got lottery scratch off tickets, you got fortnite overwatch battlefieldfront etc lootboxes, you got so much shit shoveled out every orifice of society, media, social media, radio tv websites and magazines. everywhere. they have a huge budget for ads because they are traps designed to steal money from gullible idiots privileged enough to have extra cash. and they take maybe 10% of that and sell out adspace to attract more gullible idiots. it's a predatory business model and it WORKS and it works because people are stupid and they're still clicking on ads and buying lootboxes and scratching scratchoffs and betting on football.

gambling doesn't serve society. it's a for profit model that the privileged elite use to suck up extra cash from sad pathetic losers who chase that high from a squirt of serotonin from hitting three lemons or a solid gold ak47 skin or a jpeg. so they can afford to throw cash away on ads.

but sheena, I hear you ask, what about all of the businesses that DO provide valid services to society?

spotify makes enough money from ad revenue to shill out Premium™ to people who happily vomit up $5/monthly en masse. even though there's plenty of ways to listen to music that a) directly benefit the creator or b) are 100% free.

places that serve food make so much extra money from sales that they can afford to fuck over they're employees by paying them dirt and shill out for ad spaces even though nobody's gonna watch a commercial for red lobster on tv and think OOOHHH I WANT JUMBO SHRIMP and you know why? because people who are rich enough to eat ad red lobster on a whim all have enough income they probably have dvr or Premium™ streaming and don't see ads in the first place. they're gonna spur of the moment think mmm cheddar bay biscuits (because when the fuck has red lobster shilled their delicious biscuits??? NEVER, THEY SHILL THEIR SCAMPI LINGUINI AND L O B S T E R.

(red lobster did not finance this post and you can easily find imitation recipes anywhere on google but damn what tasty cheesy bread).

United States Military spends $100 MILLION dollars on shilling ads to join the army on poor people's tv to boost enlistment for their blood machine instead of the government taking that money and using it to finance our schools. we can literally cut our military budget from $780 BILLION dollars to $779 billion- that's B as in billion- remove all military ads from our TVs and buy new textbooks for every single school in the entire country. I don't know why learning institutions hide knowledge behind class gates and why historical mathematical scientific and artistic groups don't just fucking give copies of one textbook about the subject to everyone, or why the publishing companies want so much goddamn MONEY from FUCKING SCHOOLS for LITERAL CHILDREN to LEARN but whatever I'm just someone who succeeded in high school in spite of its hundreds of open glaring flaws but whatever. anyway the point is the military could give money to groups that want to end wars but no they want poor people with nowhere else to go to oil the gears with their entrails so we can continue bombing the shit out of the middle east to steal their petroleum. and ads is how they do it.

charities who claim to want to help kids with cancer or endangered animals will gladly take vast portions of the money well meaning idiots send in, pocket 1/4 of it, put another 1/4 in the tv commercials, give 1/4 to some female adult contemporary singer who isn't famous anymore to sing a sad song over the sadness porn and then give the remaining 1/4 to people who are constantly failing to cure cancer, save animals, and just give up and join the nonprofit orgs that actually accomplish things instead. if a charity can afford to spend millions of dollars on fuckin ADVERTISING, they're a bunch of bloated and corrupt bastards who shouldn't be trusted with a goddamn penny. their members should be promoting shit FOR FREE if they actually care. not buying ad space on the cw tnt cbs & nbc. unless the businesses DONATE ad space. but they don't do that because all CEOs are evil. lol

what does wikipedia do when it needs cash? it POLITELY ASKS FOR MONEY IN A BANNER IN THE CORNER OF THE WEBSITE. ao3 does it too. and if dumb motherfuckers wanna shit on wikipedia for being the most accurate and communally moderated source of information on the entire internet "inaccurate"[citation needed] or ao3 for being the last bastion of independent fiction against federal censorship whores and virtue signaling white-knight moral guardians who don't actually care about victims of rape and csa "having incest fics", and yet say absolutely nothing to greedy conglomerates who destroy the planet, commit genocide and enslave coastal & island nation child residents, spread eugenics & other evil pseudoscientific propaganda, sexualize infantilize and fetishize women, and let millions die from cancer every day? then they're just as culpable.

fuck advertisements.

unless you're an independent content creator or something in which case that's not ads it's marketing and publicity which is different.

[toxicnonprofits]

Shared from @thecomradecloset Original caption: “This is one of the first photo-essays I wrote way back when (as in almost exactly a year ago lol). I had been struggling with months of unemployment after the end of another nonprofit position that left me in extreme pain and constantly sick. These are some of my compiled reflections after about a decade of being in and out of the NPIC realm - I figured they could use a design upgrade from quickly typed story notes Thank you to @subversive.thread for helping format and streamline this piece. And shout out to @nowhitesaviors for taking on the work of challenging and outing anti-Blackness and white supremacy in the social good/nonprofit sector.”

ID: Reflections on the Nonprofit Industrial Complex “After years of working in the nonprofit industrial complex, I’ve seen white saviorism replicated repeatedly in the name of ‘helping the community.’ Over and over again, white leadership teams have created and dictated work policies to BI&POC employees, tokenized and otherized BI&POC program participants, and funneled large grants towards white-led research projects that could have been answered easily by people who have been deeply impacted by hierarchies of oppression.  It’s mind-blowing when I hear nonprofit leadership / founders talk about how they really need to work on having community connections.

How can you work in a community without starting with the fundamental requirement of having relationships within that community? It reminds me of white entitlement, of the phrase ‘nothing about us, without us.’ Because nonprofits were created with the intent of neutralizing and funneling resources away from BI&POC resistance movements, they are the embodiment of white saviorism: hierarchical charity rather than solidarity; volunteering as a hobby / a philanthropic act of donating leisure time; and the performance of self-sacrifice as a measure of commitment.  This often leaves little to no room for an analysis of systemic oppression - or of the ways in which white leadership is still complicit with white supremacy.  For example, white-savior expectations of self-sacrifice and charity are (re-en)forced upon direct service workers who are mostly BI&POC, often on the lower rungs of the nonprofit hierarchy — ignoring how the circumstances or backgrounds of their BI&POC employees are frequently similar to, if not the same as, the ‘target populations’ that the organization ‘serves.’ BI&POC workers are expected to donate free time past our paid hours and to push ourselves far beyond our capacity in order to demonstrate our ‘commitment to the cause.’ There is a longstanding myth that there is no money for nonprofit or social work, so BI&POC employees are also pressured to donate to charitable causes as if we aren’t struggling too. We’re told that this is ‘just the way things are’ and that we must focus on maximizing output and minimizing costs, nevermind sustainable workloads or a living wage.  Meanwhile, there are 501c3 executives who are awarded six-figure salaries when direct-service employees are the ones who work most closely with clients who are often in crisis mode or navigating deep trauma. Unsurprisingly, the majority of nonprofits perpetuate an ableist capitalist work ethic of endless production, an obsession with metrics and measurable data to ‘prove’ worth to investors and funders, often compromising meaningful work for rapid growth and scaling services year after year. 

In part, this is because under capitalism people have internalized the idea that social work, especially in a direct service capacity, is simply less valuable — and therefore not worth the investment.  This is unsustainable. We should be able to work for and support the communities that we are from — but it shouldn’t come at the cost of our own survival, nor should it be subject to the exploitation and gaze of white leadership. This isn’t to say that nonprofits led by BI&POC are automatically better — they might also overwork their staff, refuse to interrogate their ableism, maintain power imbalance through strict hierarchy, or work closely with carceral state agencies.  Although nonprofits are often the closest we can get to doing meaningful paid work while also supporting ourselves with a consistent income, they’ll never be enough.  It’s important to keep in mind that nonprofits work to reinforce the status quo and exist very much within the system, not outside of it. We need to keep building and supporting alternatives wherever we can. Ultimately, no community relationships should need to be mediated by state-sanctioned 501c3 organizations.  As anarchists, our major goals are community self-determination and autonomy. And we won’t see liberation as long as we rely on venture capital to fund our work.” 

[hub-pub-bub]

Wage theft is when your boss doesn’t pay you what you’ve already earned. When I learned that Massachusetts had “blue laws,” that my bosses weren’t obeying them, and had shorted me around three thousand dollars, it was wage theft. 

This was the law: retail employees were to be paid at a “premium” rate on Sundays and holidays, time-and-a-half, the same as overtime. But none of the booksellers where I worked had ever been paid it. And while not being paid overtime is a textbook example of wage theft, when I tell people, they are happy to qualify it for me with a “Well…” or an “Okay, but…” I don’t know where this instinct comes from. Maybe it’s because “wage theft” makes it sound premeditated, more like a crime. (But it was a crime!) Or maybe it’s because I worked at an independent bookstore, and indie bookstores are beloved pillars of the community. (What would that mean about the community?) Maybe it’s because it doesn’t makes sense that an independent bookstore would do something like this. Everyone knows indiebookstores are thriving! (Which is true—it’s the people who work in them who are struggling.)

I found out when I was trying to see if I could afford to take a sick day. I felt like I was coming down with something, but taking a day off meant losing a not-insubstantial chunk of my monthly take-home pay ($11.50 an hour). Since there were sick hours adding up in a box labeled “time-off accrual” on my pay stubs—and surely they had to amount to something—I went to mass.gov to check the law. But they amounted to literally nothing, as it turned out: Massachusetts businesses only have to provide paid sick leave if they have more than eleven employees, and we had ten. My “sick days” meant I couldn’t be fired for staying home sick (as long as I wasn’t sick more than five days per year).

But I learned something else. There were links to related pages and I clicked the one about “blue laws,” which I didn’t know we had in Massachusetts.

Later that day I emailed the bookstore’s owners. Is there a reason our bookstore is exempt from blue laws, I asked, or was this an oversight?

They responded the same night. They’d heard that other area bookstores had to pay the premium rate, they said, because their booksellers were unionized, but that otherwise there was some exemption. They said they would investigate, that they’d talk to their lawyer and get back to me.

After that the story gets so routine you could probably write it yourself. When I followed up a few days later, they said their lawyer was on vacation but that they’d update payroll and we’d receive the premium pay on Sundays and holidays from then on. When some of the other booksellers and I contacted the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division, they only sent a form letter saying the matter was too small for them to investigate personally, but we were welcome to pursue legal action (on our own time and at our own expense). I found some free legal clinics on wage theft, but only once-a-month and while I was scheduled to work. Ten days after the first email, I followed up again; “still the same conflicting intel,” they said, “but when we told our lawyer that we started paying 1.5 for sundays and holidays, the matter dropped. (lawyers are expensive!) let me know if it’s not reflected in your check.” A coworker who already planned to quit asked the owners specifically about back pay–which I hadn’t had the courage to do—and they told her no, they weren’t going to pay it, and they said it in writing.

I ended up speaking to a lawyer, who offered to represent me on a contingency fee basis: I wouldn’t have to pay if we lost, and the bookstore would be responsible for my legal fees if I won. But he recommended I not move forward until I got a new job. It isn’t legal to retaliate against an employee for bringing a case, he told me, but, you know, it also isn’t legal to ignore blue laws.

I said thank you, I’ll consider my options.

One day in November one of the owners called me into the office at the bookstore. She gave me $500 in cash and $500 in store credit, about a third of what I was owed. I spent the store credit on gifts for the holidays and I looked for a new job. I ignored a follow-up call from the lawyer and tried not to wallow in the humiliation. I was not successful. Even now it feels like admitting something shameful: I was fooled, maybe, or I’m some kind of miser. A few people asked me, what if they can’t afford to pay back pay and they go out of business? You hear it more than once and it’s easy to forget it’s not a ransom, that you didn’t pluck the number out of nowhere. 

It’s hard to compare independent bookstores to other kinds of retail stores. Bookstores sell a cultural product and booksellers insist that bookstores can’t be compared to other retail stores because they sell a cultural product. And bookstores don’t exploit their employees more than other retail. But what grates is when bookstores market themselves as more than stores, as community hubs.

“Independent bookstores act as community anchors,” the American Booksellers Association declares, at the bottom of every page on their site; “they serve a unique role in promoting the open exchange of ideas, enriching the cultural life of communities, and creating economically vibrant neighborhoods.”

This same lofty idealism justifies why booksellers don’t need to be paid a living wage, like employees of nonprofits or teachers: because bookstores are so vital for the community, the assumption goes, the job should be reward enough itself. The work is so important that maybe booksellers should make personal sacrifices, working well below the value of their labor.

I spoke to around twenty booksellers while I was writing this, and I was struck by how many are willing to make trade-offs. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. “Independent booksellers consistently describe their work as more than just a way to make a living, and more than just a means of escaping the constraints that come from working for somebody else,” writes Laura Miller, in her 2006 book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption; “These booksellers see themselves as bettering society by making books available.” Plenty of the booksellers I spoke to saw bookselling as a calling. Because of course they do! If they weren’t willing to make sacrifices, they couldn’t still be booksellers. And how else could bookstores get away with paying them—they, who generally have to have a college degree; who have to spend a lot of unpaid time reading across all genres and topics; who have to have at least a little knowledge about everything, from the ancient Greeks to Dog Man 7: Brawl of the Wild; who, at at least one store, famously have to correctly answer quiz questions before being hired—so little, while so successfully preserving an image as a (generally progressive) force for social good?

And it is so little. A bookseller in Southern California with eight years of experience still earns less than $20 per hour; “I can’t think of another industry where you could work for eight years and still be making that little,” he said. A different Southern California bookseller/assistant events manager earns $17.50. A bookseller/assistant events manager in the Boston area is earning $14. A former bookseller in Northern California was making $14.25, a quarter above the minimum wage. A part time bookseller in Chicago makes $13, the city’s minimum wage. A former bookseller in Minnesota was salaried after two years at $30,000 while a bookseller and events manager in Tennessee started at $25,000, six years ago, and now makes $31,500.

I started at $11 per hour and ended around eighteen months later at $11.50, and as far as I know, none of the booksellers at that store even earned $15. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston is $2400 per month, which I could cover if I worked 50 hours a week, didn’t pay taxes, and didn’t need money for food, utilities, medical care, or literally anything else.

The booksellers I spoke to reported quite a range of benefits—in one year, for example, a Bay Area bookseller accrued three weeks of vacation time, and in the same time period a Pennsylvania bookseller got three days. But some booksellers told me that their benefits were mostly on paper. Not being fired for calling in sick or going on vacation doesn’t make it financially viable, after all. A Minnesota bookseller told me she has ten paid vacation days per year, but the store has so few employees that taking time off means she’d have to make up the missed hours working overtime. A bookstore in California offered a health insurance program, but gave employees a fifty-cent raise if they didn’t enroll.

It’s not so bleak for everyone. Unionized stores generally fight for better benefits and act as safeguards against labor law violations; I talked to a handful of booksellers whose stores had some kind of profit sharing, which can make a big difference.

But… I don’t know. There’s a bookstore owned by people who, all evidence suggests, really give a fuck and want to do right by their booksellers. They pay at least $15 per hour, and I heard one of the owners say on a podcast how much is required of booksellers; “If you’re a college graduate, and you’ve spent all this time reading, in addition to going to college—yeah, you deserve $15 an hour. Period.” But when his interlocutor mentioned a bookstore that had profit sharing, the owner was quick to say it wouldn’t work at his store. (And it wouldn’t, yet—the store is young and not yet profitable.*) But “It’s also a matter of loyalty,” he said, and explained that he couldn’t envision employees staying longer than a year. “I would love to find a bookseller who I know would be around long enough. Right now it just hardly seems even worth doing all the work. No one would qualify, because they won’t stick around long enough.”

Tell me, what are they going to stick around for? The bookstore owner said all of his employees are part-time—they’re either in grad school or working other part-time jobs. Are they supposed to stick around for a part-time job that pays $15 per hour?

What is there to be loyal to?

IndieBound—an ABA project—has a section on its website dedicated to answering Why Support Independents? One answer is that “Local businesses create higher-paying jobs for our neighbors.” But you can also find a page at the ABA website on “The Growing Debate Over Minimum Wage,” warning that “a minimum wage increase that is too drastic could result in reduced staff hours, lost jobs, or, worse, a store going out of business.” There’s also an “Indie Fact Sheet” to print out and give to local politicians; “Many indies pay more than the current minimum wage already for senior and full-time staff,” it says; “They do this because offering superior customer service is one of their competitive advantages—it is what separates them from their chain and remote, online retailing competitors. This also helps indies retain and attract good employees.”

See? Many bookstores pay their booksellers more than the minimum wage! It’s not their problem that that same minimum wage isn’t enough to cover a one-bedroom in any state in the country. It’s not their problem that inflation has eroded the value of the minimum wage. It’s not their problem that low wages are an affront to basic dignity or that higher minimum wages save lives. They’re just fiercely committed to their neighbors and their communities.

The ABA is happy to help its member stores fight even modest wage increases. “If the minimum wage is raised,” the Indie Fact Sheet continues, “it inevitably means indies will have to increase the wages of senior and full-time staff, in addition to increasing the wages of any minimum-wage workers. This increases the ripple effect. A seemingly ‘insignificant’ wage increase can have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, sending a profitable store into the red.”

There’s no mention of the dramatic effect an increase in the minimum wage could have on employees.

At Winter Institute–an annual ABA conference for independent booksellers–there’s a town hall where members can share their concerns. According to the ABA’s coverage of the event, an independent bookstore owner went to the mic to speak about the minimum wage. “I’m very happy the staff is getting a pay bump,” she said, “but that’s a huge adjustment to make every 12 months and once you get a handle on it, then it’s going up again. I feel like this seems to be going countrywide and that is something that is extra important to our nonexistent margins.”

Why this framing? Why not ask how other stores are handling the adjustment? Why not pay employees a living wage now so as not to have to change business model every year? Why does a bookstore owner feel comfortable getting up and saying this in front of an audience of booksellers?

If your local indie bookstore skirts labor laws or advocates against them, at the expense of its employees, can you still be sanctimonious for shopping there? Is your local indie bookstore thriving if its employees skip doctor’s appointments they can’t afford? If your local indie bookstore’s trade group doesn’t have resources for booksellers on paid sick leave, health insurance, or wage theft–in an industry famous for its tiny margins–is it an industry you’d recommend joining?

“We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being believers in social and economic justice while struggling to pay our employees a salary they can survive on,” writes Elayna Trucker on shopping local and running a bookstore; “We urge our customers to Shop Local but make hardly enough to do so ourselves. It is an unintentional hypocrisy, one that has gone largely ignored and unaddressed. So where does all that leave us? Rather awkwardly clutching our money, it seems… All of this brings up the most awkward question of all: does a business that can’t afford to pay its employees a living wage deserve to be in business?”

I am so glad I don’t have to come up with an answer. I have no idea. I haven’t the faintest idea at all.

In the end it was a tweet. I left the bookstore after the holidays and started a new job in January. In February, after a night of shitty sleep, I tweeted, “I have been spending hours lying awake at night doing nothing but feeling this intense shame like a stone in my chest about experiencing wage theft at my last job and I am sincerely just hoping that tweeting about it is enough to make it stop so let’s see if it works.”

A day or two later I got an email. “It’s filtered back to me that the $1000 we gave you to settle the Sunday pay issue,” they said, “didn’t resolve it.” They said some things about how they hadn’t known until I told them. They cut me a check for the back pay that same day.

I didn’t delete the tweet. I don’t know if any of my coworkers got back pay.

A little later, I read an article about the student-run Harvard Shop in Cambridge. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office found that the store owed almost $50,000 in back pay to their employees and $5,600 in fines for violating blue laws. “In this case, we unknowingly did make a mistake in how we were paying our students for Sunday and holiday pay,” the store’s manager said.

I only saw the article because the union I joined at my new job shared it on Twitter.

In Seasonal Associate, Heike Geissler’s barely-fictionalized account of her time working at an Amazon fulfillment center, she writes: “What you and I can’t do, because you and I don’t want to, is to think your employer into a better employer, and to compare these conditions to even worse, less favorable conditions, so as to say: It’s not all that bad. It could be worse. It used to be worse. We don’t do that. You and I want the best and we’re not asking too much.”  

I loved bookselling. I loved it for the same reasons everyone does: the community of readers and booksellers, the joy when someone came back into the store and says I recommended the perfect read, the pride when authors reach out directly to say how much my work meant to them. The free books, the discounts, the advance copies, all of it. And I do believe that bookstores can be forces for social good, insofar as bookscan be forces for social good, which I think they can. It is self-evidently better to get your books from a local store than from Amazon, and for precisely the reasons the IndieBound website gives.

But it’s not enough to Not Be Amazon, and framing bookstores as moral exemplars regardless of how they treat their employees isn’t to the benefit of booksellers. Bookstores “thrive” by hiding how much their booksellers struggle. “Any thriving I do personally is in spite of my store,” one of the booksellers I spoke to said. Working at a bookstore is not as bad as working at an Amazon warehouse; I didn’t walk dozens of miles per day and my bathroom breaks weren’t monitored. But are we willing to let that be the baseline?

*clarification added after publication

[royal-red-asks]

Startup SEO: How to Get the Ball Rolling on a Limited Budget

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a complete nightmare if you are a new startup. The majority of new startups know that SEO contributes to online success but many do not fully understand how to develop an effective SEO strategy. SEO companies from every corner of the world constantly contact new startups, promising the same outcome: top rankings in the search results. There will be large experienced digital agencies that will quote large five-figure monthly retainers and there will be some overseas companies that will promise the world for a few hundred dollars a month. This confusion can be quite overwhelming for a new startup, especially one that is launching with a very limited budget. Paying a premium for service that doesn't deliver the promised results can quickly deplete a marketing budget and selecting a poor service can get the website penalized, presenting the startup with a major handicap from the start. The worst thing a startup can do is hire a low quality SEO company in an effort to save money. The cost to clean up the mess they create can far outweigh what it would have cost to go with a more expensive and experienced agency from the start. If your startup is brand new and you don't have the budget to hire an experienced SEO agency then take a deep breath and follow the tips below to start your search engine optimization internally until your revenue can support the cost of professional help. Get Your On-Page Optimization Perfected First Many startups (and SEO companies) forget about one of the most important search engine optimization factors Blog9T for long-term success, and that is the on-page optimization of the website. Neglecting the on-page optimization is like attempting to run a marathon with one leg. Sure, you might eventually get to the finish line, but it is going to take much longer and you are putting yourself at a severe disadvantage from the start. I was recently speaking with Weston Bergmann, lead investor in BetaBlox, which is an equity-based business incubator for startup entrepreneurs in Kansas City, and he also compared SEO to a marathon: "The most important thing to note about SEO for early-stage ventures is it's a marathon, not a sprint. I see too many people getting frustrated by a lack of stellar results in the first couple months, when this just isn't possible. These fights are long-term ones, so buckle down and stick to the basics. Eventually you'll look back and see that you've built a monster." Want to learn what proper on-page optimization consists of and steps you can take to make sure that your website is ready for SEO? My company SEO Blog9T used our nonprofit marketing page as an example and created a guide to help you with on-page optimization: The Definitive On-Page Optimization Guide. Build a Strong Social Media Presence (Attract Social Signals) A startup needs to have a strong social media footprint from the day of birth, and a well thought-out social media effort can help the growth of the startup along with providing a SEO benefit. Every re-tweet, share, like, mention, etc., is referred to as a social signal, and these signals are an important component of a successful SEO plan. A full time social media manager or agency might not be in the budget but that doesn't mean the startups social presence must be neglected. I know of a start-up that would designate one employee as the "social king" for the day and they would be responsible for running all of the social accounts for the day. This included posting the new daily blog posts across the social profiles, interacting with their followers, and handling any customer support inquiries that came over via social media. They were starting out on a shoestring budget but got creative and made it work. Launch a Blog & Keep it Updated With Fresh Content Every startup should have a blog on their website and it should be updated on a regular basis. A simple way to get good content for the blog is to source it from within the organization. In the beginning have one employee manage the blog and delegate writing assignments throughout the company. Employees of a new startup should have no objection to contributing a weekly blog post, as it will help with the growth and success of the startup. Assigning blog topics that are based around keywords that the startup is going to target for SEO is a great way to help get some quality content posted that can benefit the search engine optimization effort. Guest Blogging is NOT Dead When Done Correctly Look for industry blogs that have potential to get provide the startup with exposure and traffic and then pitch them guest posts. Again, this can be spread out through the startup at first. Have a contest that rewards the employee who obtains the most guest posts and reward the employee that creates the guest post that drives the most traffic back to the startups website. This kind of internal competition can produce great results while building work place camaraderie, something that is very important for a new startup. When I was speaking with Weston Bergmann of BetaBlox we also discussed guest blogging and he had this to add: "Recently I've heard a lot of people say that guest blogging is dead. Well it's not. What's dead is spammy and manipulative link building techniques. What's more important than ever is high-quality guest blogging and thought leadership. If you're sharing high quality and exclusive content you'll be rewarded, not punished. Also, guest blogging shouldn't be a one-and-done thing; aim to write for the same publication multiple times." Once a startup experiences some growth it is then possible to hire an agency to handle the search engine optimization. In the meantime, the tips above can be used to kick start a SEO effort with a limited or even non-existent marketing budget. Want more free online marketing tips? Sign up for the Market Domination Media newsletter and receive online marketing tips delivered to your email every week. Visit here and enter your name and email to be added to the newsletter list.

[orbemnews]

Biden Takes On Sagging Safety Net With Plan to Fix Long-Term Care President Biden’s $400 billion proposal to improve long-term care for older adults and those with disabilities was received as either a long overdue expansion of the social safety net or an example of misguided government overreach. Republicans ridiculed including elder care in a program dedicated to infrastructure. Others derided it as a gift to the Service Employees International Union, which wants to organize care workers. It was also faulted for omitting child care. For Ai-jen Poo, co-director of Caring Across Generations, a coalition of advocacy groups working to strengthen the long-term care system, it was an answer to years of hard work. “Even though I have been fighting for this for years,” she said, “if you would have told me 10 years ago that the president of the United States would make a speech committing $400 billion to increase access to these services and strengthen this work force, I wouldn’t have believed it would happen.” What the debate over the president’s proposal has missed is that despite the big number, its ambitions remain singularly narrow when compared with the vast and growing demands imposed by an aging population. Mr. Biden’s proposal, part of his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, is aimed only at bolstering Medicaid, which pays for somewhat over half the bill for long-term care in the country. And it is targeted only at home care and at community-based care in places like adult day care centers — not at nursing homes, which take just over 40 percent of Medicaid’s care budget. Still, the money would be consumed very fast. Consider a key goal: increasing the wages of care workers. In 2019, the typical wage of the 3.5 million home health aides and personal care aides was $12.15 an hour. They make less than janitors and telemarketers, less than workers in food processing plants or on farms. Many — typically women of color, often immigrants — live in poverty. The aides are employed by care agencies, which bill Medicaid for their hours at work in beneficiaries’ homes. The agencies consistently report labor shortages, which is perhaps unsurprising given the low pay. Raising wages may be essential to meet the booming demand. The Labor Department estimates that these occupations will require 1.6 million additional workers over 10 years. It won’t be cheap, though. Bringing aides’ hourly pay to $20 — still short of the country’s median wage — would more than consume the eight-year outlay of $400 billion. That would leave little money for other priorities, like addressing the demand for care — 820,000 people were on states’ waiting lists in 2018, with an average wait of more than three years — or providing more comprehensive services. The battle over resources is likely to strain the coalition of unions and groups that promote the interests of older and disabled Americans, which have been pushing together for Mr. Biden’s plan. And that’s even before nursing homes complain about being left out. The president “must figure out the right balance between reducing the waiting list and increasing wages,” said Paul Osterman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who has written about the nation’s care structures. “There’s tension there.” Elder care has long been at the center of political battles over social insurance. President Lyndon B. Johnson considered providing the benefit as part of the creation of Medicare in the 1960s, said Howard Gleckman, an expert on long-term care at the Urban Institute. But the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills, warned how expensive that approach would become when baby boomers started retiring. Better, he argued, to make it part of Medicaid and let the states bear a large chunk of the burden. This compromise produced a patchwork of services that has left millions of seniors and their families in the lurch while still consuming roughly a third of Medicaid spending — about $197 billion in 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. By Kaiser’s calculations, Medicaid pays for roughly half of long-term care services; out-of-pocket payments and private insurance together pay a little over a quarter of the tab. (Other sources, like programs for veterans, cover the rest.) Unlike institutional care, which state Medicaid programs are required to cover, home and community-based care services are optional. That explains the waiting lists. It also means there is a wide divergence in the quality of services and the rules governing who gets them. Although the federal government pays at least half of states’ Medicaid budgets, states have great leeway in how to run the program. In Pennsylvania, Medicaid pays $50,300 a year per recipient of home or community-based care, on average. In New York, it pays $65,600. In contrast, Medicaid pays $15,500 per recipient in Mississippi, and $21,300 in Iowa. This arrangement has also left the middle class in the lurch. The private insurance market is shrinking, unable to cope with the high cost of care toward the end of life: It is too expensive for most Americans, and it is too risky for most insurers. As a result, middle-class Americans who need long-term care either fall back on relatives — typically daughters, knocking millions of women out of the labor force — or deplete their resources until they qualify for Medicaid. Whatever the limits of the Biden proposal, advocates for its main constituencies — those needing care, and those providing it — are solidly behind it. This would be, after all, the biggest expansion of long-term care support since the 1960s. “The two big issues, waiting lists and work force, are interrelated,” said Nicole Jorwic, senior director of public policy at the Arc, which promotes the interests of people with disabilities. “We are confident we can turn this in a way that we get over the conflicts that have stopped progress in past.” And yet the tussle over resources could reopen past conflicts. For instance, when President Barack Obama proposed extending the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to home care workers, which would cover them with minimum-wage and overtime rules, advocates for beneficiaries and their families objected because they feared that states with budget pressures would cut off services at 40 hours a week. “We have a long road ahead of passing this into law and to implementation,” Haeyoung Yoon, senior policy director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, said of the Biden proposal. Along the way, she said, supporters must stick together. Given the magnitude of the need, some wonder whether there might be a better approach to shoring up long-term care than giving more money to Medicaid. The program is perennially challenged for funds, forced to compete with education and other priorities in state budgets. And Republicans have repeatedly tried to curtail its scope. “It’s hard to imagine Medicaid is the right funding vehicle,” said Robert Espinoza, vice president for policy at PHI, a nonprofit research group tracking the home care sector. Some experts have suggested, instead, the creation of a new line of social insurance, perhaps funded through payroll taxes as Social Security is, to provide a minimum level of service available to everyone. A couple of years ago, the Long-Term Care Financing Collaborative, a group formed to think through how to pay for long-term elder care, reported that half of adults would need “a high level of personal assistance” at some point, typically for two years, at an average cost of $140,000. Today, some six million people need these sorts of services, a number the group expects to swell to 16 million in less than 50 years. In 2019, the National Academy of Social Insurance published a report suggesting statewide insurance programs, paid for by a dedicated tax, to cover a bundle of services, from early child care to family leave and long-term care and support for older adults and the disabled. This could be structured in a variety of ways. One option for seniors, a catastrophic insurance plan that would cover expenses up to $110 a day (in 2014 dollars) after a waiting period determined by the beneficiary’s income, could be funded by raising the Medicare tax one percentage point. Mr. Biden’s plan doesn’t include much detail. Mr. Gleckman of the Urban Institute notes that it has grown vaguer since Mr. Biden proposed it on the campaign trail — perhaps because he realized the tensions it would raise. In any event, a deeper overhaul of the system may eventually be needed. “This is a significant, historic investment,” Mr. Espinoza said. “But when you take into account the magnitude of the crisis in front of us, it’s clear that this is only a first step.” Source link Orbem News #Biden #care #Fix #longterm #Net #Plan #safety #Sagging #Takes

[easyfoodnetwork]

How the James Beard Foundation Failed the Most Prestigious Restaurant Awards in the Country

James Beard Foundation CEO Clare Reichenbach at the 2018 James Beard Media Awards  | Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images

The foundation violated its own ethics rules to ensure that award winners fit into its new narrative of progress and social justice

Finalists had been announced. A virtual ceremony had been planned. Acceptance speeches had been filmed.

Then, in late August, the James Beard Foundation abruptly announced that it was effectively canceling its Restaurant and Chef Awards, widely considered the most prestigious accolades in the American restaurant industry, not just this year, but until 2022.

The annual black-tie gala for these awards — a multimillion-dollar production that some have referred to as the Oscars of the restaurant industry, with big-name sponsors like San Pellegrino, All-Clad, American Airlines, and Capital One — had already been delayed and moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic. The foundation blamed this dramatic pullback on the pandemic as well. “Considering anyone to have won or lost within the current tumultuous hospitality ecosystem does not in fact feel like the right thing to do,” CEO Clare Reichenbach stated in a press release.

A few days later, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells reported that the James Beard Foundation had not been entirely forthcoming about the reasons for its decision. Around the time of the announcement, the foundation had quietly appended a note to the nominee list, claiming that several nominees had “withdrawn their nominations for personal reasons.” But, according to Wells, the foundation had in fact deemed some too “controversial” and asked them to withdraw “because new allegations about their personal or professional behavior had surfaced over the summer.”

Most striking, however, was the revelation that “no Black people had won in any of the 23 categories on the ballot,” despite multiple Black nominees and semifinalists — a result that, as Wells noted, “would not have been a first for the James Beard awards.”

Over the decades of their existence, the awards have struggled to be inclusive and representative of the diversity of America’s restaurants and chefs, and the foundation has only recently begun to address and rectify these issues.

In short, according to Wells, the James Beard Foundation found itself with a list of award winners that was incompatible with its recent attempt to reposition itself as a vanguard for social justice causes within the restaurant industry. This seemed particularly untenable in the wake of this summer’s Black Lives Matter movement — which has sparked an ongoing reckoning, not only across the restaurant industry and food media, but among the foundation’s own staff. Instead of being transparent about these issues, the foundation decided to sidestep them by canceling the awards.

As someone who has been involved in the James Beard awards process for more than a decade, I was shaken by these allegations, and undertook my own inquiry. A series of correspondences with members of foundation’s leadership, as well as conversations with others within the award process and restaurant industry, seem to confirm Wells’s reporting — namely, that the foundation tried to take a shortcut to virtue by manipulating the results of this year’s awards, and has been trying to cover it up.

I believe that, motivated by the desire to keep sponsorship and donor money flowing, employees of the foundation violated its own longstanding ethics and procedures to avoid a possible public backlash over the award winners. Rather than trying to devise an equitable path forward, these employees attempted to manipulate the results after the fact, hoping to create a superficial appearance of diversity and wholesomeness without doing the work of achieving this in a meaningful way.

As a result, the foundation disenfranchised committee members, voters, and restaurants — many of which desperately needed the boost that an award might have given their businesses during a pandemic — and corrupted the integrity of the awards. This threatens to render what is widely considered America’s most respected measure of culinary excellence — one that can be a platform for greater equity — meaningless. To let that happen would not merely be a professional failing on the part of an organization that is ostensibly a beacon and guardian of the hospitality industry, but a profoundly moral and ethical one.

Established in 1983 to honor the “dean of American cookery,” the James Beard Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to “celebrate, nurture, and honor chefs and other leaders” in America. Over the years, it has added initiatives that focus on sustainability, scholarship, and inclusion in the restaurant industry.

Despite its issues-driven programming, the foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Awards have become both its crown jewel and cash cow. Perhaps because of this, many believe the selection process is a conclave of cloistered agreements, favoritism, and pay-for-play among industry cardinals. It was not designed that way. Though the system may seem convoluted, it was in fact devised to ensure as much transparency and impartiality as possible, largely in response to a prior scandal.

In the mid-aughts, the foundation was left in disarray after gross mismanagement by then-president Leonard F. Pickell Jr. He was caught embezzling foundation funds, pled guilty to larceny, and served time in federal prison. The cleanup was expensive — at least $750,000 in attorneys and accountant fees — and the nonprofit found itself in a financial free fall as donations, its primary source of revenue, quickly dried up.

The foundation realized that in order to regain the trust of the public — and its donors — it needed to reform. Among numerous policy changes, a key component of its rehabilitation required divorcing the award process from the foundation’s operations. The committee overseeing the awards, which is composed of unpaid volunteers, was hermetically sealed off to guard against undue influence from the foundation and its employees.

One of the chief fears was that chefs and restaurateurs might feel pressured to perform favors for the foundation to increase their chances of winning an award. For instance, a centerpiece of the foundation’s programming is the dinner series it hosts at the James Beard House throughout the year, which features guest chefs from across the nation. Being invited to cook at one of these pricey, ticketed events is generally perceived to be an honor, but it requires the visiting chef to shoulder much of the associated costs (the food they’re cooking, as well as travel to the event, among other expenses), making participation tantamount to donating thousands of dollars to the foundation, and therefore a privilege accessible only to the best-capitalized chefs. (If it’s unclear which way the largesse flows, while the chefs gain exposure and a measure of pride, the information page for guest chefs helpfully points out that “events such as yours are an important source of revenue for the Foundation.”)

Given the obvious potential for quid pro quo, it was deemed vital to the integrity of the awards that foundation employees had no part in the award process. To underscore this imperative, the foundation agreed to a set of policies and procedures that removed the awards from its reach, and placed them under the management of an independent committee of financially disinterested volunteers.

This umbrella awards committee oversees six separate subcommittees, each one responsible for a different set of awards: Leadership, Books, Restaurant Design, Broadcast Media, Journalism, and the best known, the Restaurant and Chef Awards. It is the annual gala for this last set of awards, traditionally held in May, that is the glittering, red-carpet ceremony that most associate with the James Beard Foundation’s awards.

The committee that oversees the Restaurant and Chef Awards is composed of 20 members: eight at-large members and 12 regional representatives, each representing one of the committee’s 12 geographic regions. To ensure a degree of impartiality, these committee members do not work in the restaurant industry; many are journalists. Each regional representative on the committee impanels 25 judges in their region to provide perspective on and knowledge of America’s restaurant community at the local level. Like all committee members, judges serve voluntarily and are not paid. (The sole perks of monetary value are an annual membership in the foundation — normally $150 — and a ticket to the awards ceremony, which was valued at $500 in 2019.) Here is where you will find me, at the bottom of the awards pyramid, where I have served as a judge in the Midwest region for 14 years.

The award process is initiated by the committee late in the preceding year, when judges are solicited for nominations and input. Over the following months, the committee holds a series of closed-door sessions to determine the semifinalists for that year’s awards. The resulting list of 20 candidates in each award category is usually published in February. These semifinalists are balloted and sent to the voting body, which consists of the committee members, regional judges, and all past Restaurant and Chef Award winners. The initial round of voting whittles the nominees down to five finalists per category, who are usually announced by late March. A second, final vote is conducted to determine the winners.

The results of this voting process are tabulated by Lutz & Carr, a third-party accounting firm that represents over 400 nonprofit organizations. According to foundation policy, Lutz & Carr is required to keep the results of the first vote confidential until the second ballot; the results of the final vote must remain confidential until they are announced at the award ceremony. To prevent tampering, vote manipulation, or the results from leaking, no one within the foundation is supposed to be privy to this information before it is made public. For similar reasons, the committee members are bound by nondisclosure agreements.

This year, it appears that the foundation violated these policies by illicitly obtaining the results of the final round of voting before they were announced. Dissatisfied with the slate of prospective winners, according to a follow-up story by Wells, the foundation tried to change the outcome by proposing to alter the composition of the voting body and holding an unprecedented revote. By removing past winners — a voting bloc that is traditionally dominated by white, male chefs — from the revote, the foundation hoped that a revote might yield a set of awards more compatible with the narrative of inclusion it has been trying to tell about the awards.

This raised red flags within the committee, which pushed back on the foundation’s proposal, saying, according to Wells, that it “compromised the integrity of the awards.” A revote never happened. But the foundation did not let this aborted revote go to waste: In the following weeks, it relied on the proposal of a revote to claim that it had no knowledge of the winners.

In public statements, as well as in emails to the committee, nominees, and me, members of the foundation’s leadership have adamantly denied knowing who the winners are. However, through my correspondence with foundation employees (which can be viewed in full here), it became clear that these denials have been purposely misleading.

In an email to me, Alison Tozzi Liu, the foundation’s vice president of marketing, communications, and content, wrote, “In reality, the lack of diversity in the original vote in May, and the eventual decision not to hand out individual Awards in August were not related. As previously mentioned, there was to be a revote with eligible nominees and therefore no-one had knowledge of the ultimate winners.”

This statement reveals a number of things. First, it suggests that the foundation did know who the winners were, because Tozzi Liu is claiming that the lack of diversity among them did not affect the decision to cancel the awards. Second, her wording indicates that these denials, thus far, have been cleverly worded to appear as denials of knowing the original outcome, when in fact, they are denials of knowing who would have won had there been a revote.

This sleight of hand relies on a revote having been considered, which Tozzi Liu attempts to legitimize by claiming that “the full Restaurant and Chef Subcommittee had agreed to the revote.” However, it is clear from Wells’s reporting that this is false.

Obtaining the list of winners and trying to manipulate a revote are just part of the foundation’s interference with a process that was designed to prevent that from happening. In addition to asking some nominees to withdraw due to allegations of wrongdoing, the foundation allegedly offered to help at least one of the chefs withdraw in a way that might have evaded public notice or implied a different reason for the withdrawal. If true, this flies in the face of the foundation’s narrative that it is trying to clean up improper behavior in the restaurant industry. Rather, this suggests the foundation violated its own policies to obscure such behavior.

The chaos swirling around this year’s awards is the result of talking about systemic problems, but doing little to understand or resolve their underlying causes. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in concern that the restaurant industry, as a whole, is an uneven field, which heavily favors some — again, traditionally white and male — while disadvantaging others. Meanwhile, far from the glamour of the foundation’s awards, everyday restaurant workers face pay inequality, hostile work conditions, a gender gap, and a lack of representation among those who hold the levers of power.

The current award process is a maze of compromises, to which many in the restaurant and dining community have tacitly agreed. But many now find it somewhere on the spectrum between unsatisfactory and unacceptable, and haven’t figured out exactly what to do about it — or are afraid to speak openly about their frustrations with the process for fear of reprisal from the foundation, especially with regard to their own award prospects. Even a past winner I know has expressed reluctance to question the foundation or how the awards work.

Certainly, one way to make the awards more inclusive is to redistrict the boundaries of achievement. For instance, the awards currently focus heavily on geographic diversity, but categories don’t distinguish between casual and fine dining restaurants, or different types of cuisines. Perhaps they should.

I don’t believe that correcting course requires canceling the past. But we need to stop clamoring for fairness before clarifying what that means and what it requires. The James Beard Foundation awards are a reflection of the restaurant industry they celebrate, and fixing them will require a far deeper and more honest examination of the underlying issues than the one that many in the restaurant community have been openly having. This will require, at a minimum, an acknowledgment that the industry is a complex ecosystem of symbiotic relationships that can’t be easily untangled.

Roughly half of the voting body is now composed of chefs, whose vast network of colleagues and friends present a minefield of conflicts. Or take my conflicts of interest, for instance: Like many in the voting body, I have working relationships with people who are eligible for awards — I’m a photographer who works with restaurants and hotels, and I’ve co-written a cookbook with chefs. I’ve also solicited personalities and restaurants to raise money for James Beard Foundation causes. I’ve always disclosed these professional relationships, as judges are required to do, and I’ve tried to remain faithful to the award process. But this should illustrate the difficulty of completely eliminating bias from the process, and I recognize that I have ultimately been complicit in perpetuating a systemic preference for those with access to resources.

Beyond the voting body, there are powerful external forces. Media and public relations firms play an enormous role in helping chefs and restaurants maneuver into advantageous positions, and in directing voters to the right tables. Chefs and restaurateurs have told me that they spend tens of thousands of dollars annually to make and keep themselves visible to the right groups of people. And in all of this, the dining public is the real apex of the food chain — a silent majority that votes with its dollars.

I have struggled to reconcile this tangle of conflicts, especially when there have been financial interests at stake. But I believe in what the awards can represent, and in the importance of recognizing excellence, so I have continued to participate in the process for years, wringing my hands and pushing as much as I could to make it better from my position. However, I can no longer be a part of it as things stand, especially because it is attached to an organization that I increasingly mistrust.

The foundation is using the issues of equity and representation to distract from what it has done: It wants the hospitality community to believe that it is suddenly and deeply troubled by the award process and its outcomes. In a scramble to respond to Wells’s reporting, the foundation issued a statement saying, in part, that it has “begun a comprehensive audit of every aspect of the Awards process.” But how meaningful can it possibly be if the foundation won’t be transparent about its shambolic mishandling of its awards this year?

The foundation’s repeated refusals to explain what actually happened that led to its decision to cancel the awards for two years continue to exacerbate the problem. While the awards committee has demanded answers and accountability, committee members are bound by nondisclosure agreements, the scope of which may need to be reconsidered. I fear that any answers the foundation provides them will likely disappear into a gagged group in a locked room.

Last week, Mitchell Davis, the foundation’s chief strategy officer — who never replied to a single email or question I posed to him about his involvement in this year’s awards debacle — unexpectedly announced that he is leaving the foundation. In his farewell post on his Instagram account, he wrote that he looks forward to “seeing how the Foundation evolves to meet the challenges & opportunities of the future.” But what about the challenges the foundation faces now — the ones that Davis is leaving behind for others to clean up? I believe that, until there is significant public pressure on the foundation and its financial sponsors, the foundation will have little incentive to be forthcoming.

The foundation must realize that the best path forward is transparency at a minimum, atonement if required, and reform at every level. Patching over the problems with platitudes and rigged votes isn’t just a woefully inadequate solution to systemic issues — at a moment when there is a demand for a more just and equitable hospitality ecosystem, it is unacceptable.

Bonjwing Lee is a photographer and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been a judge in the Midwest region for the James Beard Foundation awards since 2007.

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Awards.

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James Beard Foundation CEO Clare Reichenbach at the 2018 James Beard Media Awards  | Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images

The foundation violated its own ethics rules to ensure that award winners fit into its new narrative of progress and social justice

Finalists had been announced. A virtual ceremony had been planned. Acceptance speeches had been filmed.

Then, in late August, the James Beard Foundation abruptly announced that it was effectively canceling its Restaurant and Chef Awards, widely considered the most prestigious accolades in the American restaurant industry, not just this year, but until 2022.

The annual black-tie gala for these awards — a multimillion-dollar production that some have referred to as the Oscars of the restaurant industry, with big-name sponsors like San Pellegrino, All-Clad, American Airlines, and Capital One — had already been delayed and moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic. The foundation blamed this dramatic pullback on the pandemic as well. “Considering anyone to have won or lost within the current tumultuous hospitality ecosystem does not in fact feel like the right thing to do,” CEO Clare Reichenbach stated in a press release.

A few days later, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells reported that the James Beard Foundation had not been entirely forthcoming about the reasons for its decision. Around the time of the announcement, the foundation had quietly appended a note to the nominee list, claiming that several nominees had “withdrawn their nominations for personal reasons.” But, according to Wells, the foundation had in fact deemed some too “controversial” and asked them to withdraw “because new allegations about their personal or professional behavior had surfaced over the summer.”

Most striking, however, was the revelation that “no Black people had won in any of the 23 categories on the ballot,” despite multiple Black nominees and semifinalists — a result that, as Wells noted, “would not have been a first for the James Beard awards.”

Over the decades of their existence, the awards have struggled to be inclusive and representative of the diversity of America’s restaurants and chefs, and the foundation has only recently begun to address and rectify these issues.

In short, according to Wells, the James Beard Foundation found itself with a list of award winners that was incompatible with its recent attempt to reposition itself as a vanguard for social justice causes within the restaurant industry. This seemed particularly untenable in the wake of this summer’s Black Lives Matter movement — which has sparked an ongoing reckoning, not only across the restaurant industry and food media, but among the foundation’s own staff. Instead of being transparent about these issues, the foundation decided to sidestep them by canceling the awards.

As someone who has been involved in the James Beard awards process for more than a decade, I was shaken by these allegations, and undertook my own inquiry. A series of correspondences with members of foundation’s leadership, as well as conversations with others within the award process and restaurant industry, seem to confirm Wells’s reporting — namely, that the foundation tried to take a shortcut to virtue by manipulating the results of this year’s awards, and has been trying to cover it up.

I believe that, motivated by the desire to keep sponsorship and donor money flowing, employees of the foundation violated its own longstanding ethics and procedures to avoid a possible public backlash over the award winners. Rather than trying to devise an equitable path forward, these employees attempted to manipulate the results after the fact, hoping to create a superficial appearance of diversity and wholesomeness without doing the work of achieving this in a meaningful way.

As a result, the foundation disenfranchised committee members, voters, and restaurants — many of which desperately needed the boost that an award might have given their businesses during a pandemic — and corrupted the integrity of the awards. This threatens to render what is widely considered America’s most respected measure of culinary excellence — one that can be a platform for greater equity — meaningless. To let that happen would not merely be a professional failing on the part of an organization that is ostensibly a beacon and guardian of the hospitality industry, but a profoundly moral and ethical one.

Established in 1983 to honor the “dean of American cookery,” the James Beard Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to “celebrate, nurture, and honor chefs and other leaders” in America. Over the years, it has added initiatives that focus on sustainability, scholarship, and inclusion in the restaurant industry.

Despite its issues-driven programming, the foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Awards have become both its crown jewel and cash cow. Perhaps because of this, many believe the selection process is a conclave of cloistered agreements, favoritism, and pay-for-play among industry cardinals. It was not designed that way. Though the system may seem convoluted, it was in fact devised to ensure as much transparency and impartiality as possible, largely in response to a prior scandal.

In the mid-aughts, the foundation was left in disarray after gross mismanagement by then-president Leonard F. Pickell Jr. He was caught embezzling foundation funds, pled guilty to larceny, and served time in federal prison. The cleanup was expensive — at least $750,000 in attorneys and accountant fees — and the nonprofit found itself in a financial free fall as donations, its primary source of revenue, quickly dried up.

The foundation realized that in order to regain the trust of the public — and its donors — it needed to reform. Among numerous policy changes, a key component of its rehabilitation required divorcing the award process from the foundation’s operations. The committee overseeing the awards, which is composed of unpaid volunteers, was hermetically sealed off to guard against undue influence from the foundation and its employees.

One of the chief fears was that chefs and restaurateurs might feel pressured to perform favors for the foundation to increase their chances of winning an award. For instance, a centerpiece of the foundation’s programming is the dinner series it hosts at the James Beard House throughout the year, which features guest chefs from across the nation. Being invited to cook at one of these pricey, ticketed events is generally perceived to be an honor, but it requires the visiting chef to shoulder much of the associated costs (the food they’re cooking, as well as travel to the event, among other expenses), making participation tantamount to donating thousands of dollars to the foundation, and therefore a privilege accessible only to the best-capitalized chefs. (If it’s unclear which way the largesse flows, while the chefs gain exposure and a measure of pride, the information page for guest chefs helpfully points out that “events such as yours are an important source of revenue for the Foundation.”)

Given the obvious potential for quid pro quo, it was deemed vital to the integrity of the awards that foundation employees had no part in the award process. To underscore this imperative, the foundation agreed to a set of policies and procedures that removed the awards from its reach, and placed them under the management of an independent committee of financially disinterested volunteers.

This umbrella awards committee oversees six separate subcommittees, each one responsible for a different set of awards: Leadership, Books, Restaurant Design, Broadcast Media, Journalism, and the best known, the Restaurant and Chef Awards. It is the annual gala for this last set of awards, traditionally held in May, that is the glittering, red-carpet ceremony that most associate with the James Beard Foundation’s awards.

The committee that oversees the Restaurant and Chef Awards is composed of 20 members: eight at-large members and 12 regional representatives, each representing one of the committee’s 12 geographic regions. To ensure a degree of impartiality, these committee members do not work in the restaurant industry; many are journalists. Each regional representative on the committee impanels 25 judges in their region to provide perspective on and knowledge of America’s restaurant community at the local level. Like all committee members, judges serve voluntarily and are not paid. (The sole perks of monetary value are an annual membership in the foundation — normally $150 — and a ticket to the awards ceremony, which was valued at $500 in 2019.) Here is where you will find me, at the bottom of the awards pyramid, where I have served as a judge in the Midwest region for 14 years.

The award process is initiated by the committee late in the preceding year, when judges are solicited for nominations and input. Over the following months, the committee holds a series of closed-door sessions to determine the semifinalists for that year’s awards. The resulting list of 20 candidates in each award category is usually published in February. These semifinalists are balloted and sent to the voting body, which consists of the committee members, regional judges, and all past Restaurant and Chef Award winners. The initial round of voting whittles the nominees down to five finalists per category, who are usually announced by late March. A second, final vote is conducted to determine the winners.

The results of this voting process are tabulated by Lutz & Carr, a third-party accounting firm that represents over 400 nonprofit organizations. According to foundation policy, Lutz & Carr is required to keep the results of the first vote confidential until the second ballot; the results of the final vote must remain confidential until they are announced at the award ceremony. To prevent tampering, vote manipulation, or the results from leaking, no one within the foundation is supposed to be privy to this information before it is made public. For similar reasons, the committee members are bound by nondisclosure agreements.

This year, it appears that the foundation violated these policies by illicitly obtaining the results of the final round of voting before they were announced. Dissatisfied with the slate of prospective winners, according to a follow-up story by Wells, the foundation tried to change the outcome by proposing to alter the composition of the voting body and holding an unprecedented revote. By removing past winners — a voting bloc that is traditionally dominated by white, male chefs — from the revote, the foundation hoped that a revote might yield a set of awards more compatible with the narrative of inclusion it has been trying to tell about the awards.

This raised red flags within the committee, which pushed back on the foundation’s proposal, saying, according to Wells, that it “compromised the integrity of the awards.” A revote never happened. But the foundation did not let this aborted revote go to waste: In the following weeks, it relied on the proposal of a revote to claim that it had no knowledge of the winners.

In public statements, as well as in emails to the committee, nominees, and me, members of the foundation’s leadership have adamantly denied knowing who the winners are. However, through my correspondence with foundation employees (which can be viewed in full here), it became clear that these denials have been purposely misleading.

In an email to me, Alison Tozzi Liu, the foundation’s vice president of marketing, communications, and content, wrote, “In reality, the lack of diversity in the original vote in May, and the eventual decision not to hand out individual Awards in August were not related. As previously mentioned, there was to be a revote with eligible nominees and therefore no-one had knowledge of the ultimate winners.”

This statement reveals a number of things. First, it suggests that the foundation did know who the winners were, because Tozzi Liu is claiming that the lack of diversity among them did not affect the decision to cancel the awards. Second, her wording indicates that these denials, thus far, have been cleverly worded to appear as denials of knowing the original outcome, when in fact, they are denials of knowing who would have won had there been a revote.

This sleight of hand relies on a revote having been considered, which Tozzi Liu attempts to legitimize by claiming that “the full Restaurant and Chef Subcommittee had agreed to the revote.” However, it is clear from Wells’s reporting that this is false.

Obtaining the list of winners and trying to manipulate a revote are just part of the foundation’s interference with a process that was designed to prevent that from happening. In addition to asking some nominees to withdraw due to allegations of wrongdoing, the foundation allegedly offered to help at least one of the chefs withdraw in a way that might have evaded public notice or implied a different reason for the withdrawal. If true, this flies in the face of the foundation’s narrative that it is trying to clean up improper behavior in the restaurant industry. Rather, this suggests the foundation violated its own policies to obscure such behavior.

The chaos swirling around this year’s awards is the result of talking about systemic problems, but doing little to understand or resolve their underlying causes. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in concern that the restaurant industry, as a whole, is an uneven field, which heavily favors some — again, traditionally white and male — while disadvantaging others. Meanwhile, far from the glamour of the foundation’s awards, everyday restaurant workers face pay inequality, hostile work conditions, a gender gap, and a lack of representation among those who hold the levers of power.

The current award process is a maze of compromises, to which many in the restaurant and dining community have tacitly agreed. But many now find it somewhere on the spectrum between unsatisfactory and unacceptable, and haven’t figured out exactly what to do about it — or are afraid to speak openly about their frustrations with the process for fear of reprisal from the foundation, especially with regard to their own award prospects. Even a past winner I know has expressed reluctance to question the foundation or how the awards work.

Certainly, one way to make the awards more inclusive is to redistrict the boundaries of achievement. For instance, the awards currently focus heavily on geographic diversity, but categories don’t distinguish between casual and fine dining restaurants, or different types of cuisines. Perhaps they should.

I don’t believe that correcting course requires canceling the past. But we need to stop clamoring for fairness before clarifying what that means and what it requires. The James Beard Foundation awards are a reflection of the restaurant industry they celebrate, and fixing them will require a far deeper and more honest examination of the underlying issues than the one that many in the restaurant community have been openly having. This will require, at a minimum, an acknowledgment that the industry is a complex ecosystem of symbiotic relationships that can’t be easily untangled.

Roughly half of the voting body is now composed of chefs, whose vast network of colleagues and friends present a minefield of conflicts. Or take my conflicts of interest, for instance: Like many in the voting body, I have working relationships with people who are eligible for awards — I’m a photographer who works with restaurants and hotels, and I’ve co-written a cookbook with chefs. I’ve also solicited personalities and restaurants to raise money for James Beard Foundation causes. I’ve always disclosed these professional relationships, as judges are required to do, and I’ve tried to remain faithful to the award process. But this should illustrate the difficulty of completely eliminating bias from the process, and I recognize that I have ultimately been complicit in perpetuating a systemic preference for those with access to resources.

Beyond the voting body, there are powerful external forces. Media and public relations firms play an enormous role in helping chefs and restaurants maneuver into advantageous positions, and in directing voters to the right tables. Chefs and restaurateurs have told me that they spend tens of thousands of dollars annually to make and keep themselves visible to the right groups of people. And in all of this, the dining public is the real apex of the food chain — a silent majority that votes with its dollars.

I have struggled to reconcile this tangle of conflicts, especially when there have been financial interests at stake. But I believe in what the awards can represent, and in the importance of recognizing excellence, so I have continued to participate in the process for years, wringing my hands and pushing as much as I could to make it better from my position. However, I can no longer be a part of it as things stand, especially because it is attached to an organization that I increasingly mistrust.

The foundation is using the issues of equity and representation to distract from what it has done: It wants the hospitality community to believe that it is suddenly and deeply troubled by the award process and its outcomes. In a scramble to respond to Wells’s reporting, the foundation issued a statement saying, in part, that it has “begun a comprehensive audit of every aspect of the Awards process.” But how meaningful can it possibly be if the foundation won’t be transparent about its shambolic mishandling of its awards this year?

The foundation’s repeated refusals to explain what actually happened that led to its decision to cancel the awards for two years continue to exacerbate the problem. While the awards committee has demanded answers and accountability, committee members are bound by nondisclosure agreements, the scope of which may need to be reconsidered. I fear that any answers the foundation provides them will likely disappear into a gagged group in a locked room.

Last week, Mitchell Davis, the foundation’s chief strategy officer — who never replied to a single email or question I posed to him about his involvement in this year’s awards debacle — unexpectedly announced that he is leaving the foundation. In his farewell post on his Instagram account, he wrote that he looks forward to “seeing how the Foundation evolves to meet the challenges & opportunities of the future.” But what about the challenges the foundation faces now — the ones that Davis is leaving behind for others to clean up? I believe that, until there is significant public pressure on the foundation and its financial sponsors, the foundation will have little incentive to be forthcoming.

The foundation must realize that the best path forward is transparency at a minimum, atonement if required, and reform at every level. Patching over the problems with platitudes and rigged votes isn’t just a woefully inadequate solution to systemic issues — at a moment when there is a demand for a more just and equitable hospitality ecosystem, it is unacceptable.

Bonjwing Lee is a photographer and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been a judge in the Midwest region for the James Beard Foundation awards since 2007.

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Awards.

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[sunshine-n-shit]

Social Entrepreneurship Regulation Needs

‘Social Entrepreneurship” is a major buzzword in the business world and the start-up arena. It brings to mind a business model that creates perfect harmony between achieving profit and making the world a better place. For this reason, social enterprises are often heralded as an achievement above and beyond those of a typical business; not only can they make a satisfying profit, they can do so while generating a net-positive externality.  Today, self-defined social enterprises have proven that they can be successful in mainstream markets; Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, and Tom’s of Maine have been standout competitors in their respective markets, gaining impressive market share while keeping their respective social missions at the core of their business model. As social enterprises gain traction in legitimate market spaces, they’ve gained a space in academics as well. Many universities now offer courses, and even programs, focused on social entrepreneurship. These courses are breeding a new generation of students who think critically about building corporations that focus on more than just satisfying shareholders; rather, how can business improve some aspect of social wellbeing in the long-run? 

All of this is well and good; as social and environmental issues from years of corporate irresponsibility begin to compound and cause devastating short and long-term issues, we need to look for business solutions that provide for the needs of consumers and generate profit while solving pressing social issues and mitigating their negative externalities. Social enterprises and social entrepreneurs are our current answer to this pressing need, and are proving to be up to the challenge. However, as social entrepreneurship shifts from a resume-boosting catchy phrase to a legitimate business practice, we have to consider what could be the biggest impediment to its success: a profound lack of definition, as well as an absence of ethical framework and standards by which to measure and critique the success of social enterprises. 

There has long been, and will continue to be, disagreement about the extent to which businesses and their affairs should be regulated. However, what’s always been clear is that regulation of business, whether by the government, shareholders, or employees, forces transparency from businesses. When they are held to standards of transparency, whether those standards focus on their investment practices, their social impact, or their legal proceedings, businesses are forced to make decisions that reduce negative externalities in a variety of areas. In addition by committing to and following through with standards of business conduct, businesses are legitimizing themselves and building trust with their shareholders. Social enterprises are no different; creating ethical standards and clearly defining what it means to operate as a social enterprise will legitimize existing entrepreneurs important work, help weed out businesses that aren’t making the necessary impact to be classified as a social enterprise, provide a supportive framework for new social entrepreneurs entering the field, and most importantly generate the maximum amount of social good possible.

Currently, the definitions and standards for social enterprises and social entrepreneurs are rudimentary at best. Simply google “social entrepreneurship”, and almost everyone defines it a little differently. Forbes defines being a social enterprise as “going beyond a focus on revenue and profit and clearly understanding that we operate in an ecosystem,'' while Investopedia defines a social enterprise as “ a business that has specific social objectives that serve its primary purpose”. Pretty different if you ask me. The problem is even more apparent if we try to look for agreeing definitions of social entrepreneurship. Again, Investopedia defines a social entrepreneur as “a person who pursues novel applications that have the potential to solve community-based problems”, yet Business Marketing Engine defines a social entrepreneur as someone who “sees money as just a tool to affect real change throughout the world”. Without agreement on who a social entrepreneur is and what a social enterprise does, we risk misplacing resources and trust in companies that aren’t being held to a consistent expectation. This is why having established legal and ethical standards for social enterprises are increasingly important; we feel comfortable purchasing an iPhone because Apple is held to legal standards of quality and ability backed by a warranty. Why should a social enterprise be any different? Some organizations, like Tom’s Shoes, self-impose regulation. They’ve pledged to donate one pair of shoes for every pair purchased. This standard gives consumers peace of mind and holds Tom’s accountable to their customers. But Tom’s is the exception, not the rule. Many social enterprises are less clear about the amount of funding they put towards their social missions, and we as consumers need to start asking more questions. Social enterprises tend to operate in a grey-area between nonprofit and traditional corporation. Because of this, innovative standards are needed to make sure they’re delivering the maximum social good possible. If a social enterprise builds its market based on selling clothing to benefit animal shelters, but in the process uses child labor to produce the clothing, is a net positive social impact being creating? Should this company be considered a social enterprise? Questions like these are difficult to answer, and even more difficult when put in the context of regulation. 

When thinking about regulation of social enterprises, the end goal must be realized and considered. Ideally, establishing ethical standards of social enterprise would provide measurable standards by which to define and regulate a social venture, bring recognition to organizations doing good work, and concentrate on the people and organizations that can be considered part of social entrepreneurship. From my point of view, there are two areas of regulation that need to be considered to make standards of social enterprise truly effective. Firstly, social enterprises must be held to a standard of donation or financial contribution ratio. What is meant by this is that social enterprises must give a minimum portion of their profits and/or product to directly benefit their stated social mission. Consumers need to know that when they buy a product or donate money to a social enterprise, they’re funding change in a social issue. A standard of donation and/or contribution forces social enterprises to keep their social mission at the center of their business and would theoretically prevent them from spending excess capital to scale their business or engage in any other activity that would divert funds from their intended social mission. Secondly, social enterprises must be held to environmental and ethical standards across all aspects of their business, not just their specified social niche. What a regulation of this type would accomplish is preventing social enterprises from creating positive social change on one area while simultaneously creating negative impacts in other ways. After all, what’s the point of a social enterprise that does great work to alleviate childhood hunger, while simultaneously creating massive amounts of food waste in the process? Although this example seems trivial, social enterprises need to be held to ethical standards that encompass all aspects of their business so we don’t find ourselves stuck on a hamster wheel of disaster; an endless cycle of social enterprises working to solve one social issue, while unintentionally contributing to another. 

It could be argued that social enterprises are held to higher standards than any other subsect of business; they must comply with the legal and financial regulations of a typical for-profit corporation, while balancing that with the potential ethical challenges that come with accepting donations like a non-profit or outside funding most for-profit corporations wouldn’t have access too.  The problem is, current regulatory standards are engineered for two distinct modes of operation: for-profit corporations and nonprofit entities. Social enterprises exist in the vast gray area between these two types of organizations, and the standards they are held to must take this into account and balance the unique needs of social enterprises with the ethical and fiduciary responsibility they owe their consumers and whatever social dilemma they’ve pledged to alleviate to the best of their ability. The idea of the B Corp is a good place to start; B Lab, which oversees companies that are certified as B Corporations, began assessing companies on the benefits they provide beyond just stakeholder satisfaction. This certification means that they meet standards of benefit in areas such as environment and towards employees. Well-known companies like Patagonia are taking part and are now certified B Corporations. This is a step in the right direction, but this certification is not legally binding, meaning that there’s no long-term enforcement of any standards of benefit. Furthermore, less than 3,000 companies are certified, a dismally small number when you consider how many companies or founders worldwide would consider themselves part of a social enterprise.

Overall, I'm ecstatic with the rise in social entrepreneurship and social enterprises. We need creative, socially responsible solutions to some of the world's most pressing issues that also satisfy consumers. But as consumers and future business leaders, we need to be mindful that the best intentions can often get lost in the pursuit of profit. We must recognize that if we truly are focused on creating enterprises that are beneficial to society as a whole, setting standards for social responsibility and establishing a clearer definition of social entrepreneurship will only support the process and allow the maximum potential for social good of every company to be realized.

[simplifinances]

WHERE TO STASH YOUR CASH

Each dollar of yours is like an employee. If you let them sit around and do nothing, it will hurt your business. If you “employ” them, which means to put to work or make use of, it will benefit your company. Is every dollar of yours benefiting your personal finances or are there lazy dollars sitting around doing nothing for you?

Below I’m going to show you 5 places to stash your cash based on goals that are one to five years away to get the maximum value from each of your green employees.

Depending on your financial goals, where you stash your cash will determine if you reach those goals. If you plan to spend the money within one year, be safe with it. If you plan to spend it in one to five years, go for a higher rate of return.

Where I save my money depends on the goal. I’m willing to invest my savings for something like a vacation fund because the cost of a vacation varies and when we go is flexible. On the other hand, if I’m going to put money down on a house soon I don’t want to lose any of that money.

SHORT-TERM VS. LONG-TERM GOALS

Let’s use three examples of goals:

Saving for a vacation

A down payment on a house

And building an emergency fund

Using these three examples, where is the best place to stash your cash if your goal is one to five years out for each of these?

When it comes to long-term goals like saving for retirement I would look at different options than what is mentioned below.

1. CASH

Some people suggest you keep cash somewhere in your house. Other than the internet disappearing or banks seizing to exist, it doesn’t do you good to have cash under your mattress because those are lazy dollars that need to wake up!

Some people like cash because it’s tangible. If you’re new to budgeting or teaching your kids to manage money, using cash is powerful!

Read: The Jars Money Management System

Cash is good for teaching. It’s a powerful tool because you can hold it and feel it. And let’s be honest who doesn’t love holding a wad of cash! We live in a world where money is more of an abstract idea than a physical object.

Cash is good for changing behavior. I used cash for years as a teenager to manage my money. Now, I don’t have more than $5 – $10 of cash on me unless I am traveling (No thief would be happy to rob me).

If you struggle with spending, cash is harder to spend than swiping a card. According to a study, people spend 17% more money when using a credit card than if they were to use cash.

Other than for behavior change or teaching purposes, I think you’re better off doing something else with your dollars in place of using cash.

Read: Don’t Like Using Cash to Manage Your Money? Try This…

2. SAVINGS ACCOUNT

My bank is my central hub for my money and everything else flows from it. This allows me to transfer money easily to savings, investments or paying bills. The best part is I can track exactly where I spend my money unlike using cash.

Some people don’t like having their money sit in a savings account because most banks pay an interest rate of 0.000Nothing%. I don’t blame them with the average interest rate on savings being 0.06%. But, having money in your savings accounts could be good for a few reasons:

Liquidity – It’s easy to get to when you need it

Security – Your money is FDIC insured up to $250,000

Safety – Essentially no risk (except for one major risk below)

Although the peace of mind of having your money in a savings account is nice, you run a risk of leaving it there. That risk is called purchasing power risk. $100 today will buy you less in 10 years due to inflation. Inflation can fall between 2-4% per year. So if you’re not earning at least enough interest to keep up with inflation, the value of your dollar decreases over time. It’s not a good idea to leave too much money in a savings account.

3. HIGH-YIELD ONLINE SAVINGS ACCOUNT

Many online banks now are willing to pay a higher interest rate to keep up with inflation. Online banks have lower overhead costs because they don’t have to pay for physical branches. That means they can pass the savings to the consumer by offering higher rates. The interest rate is important when you’re looking for a place to keep your money, but it’s not the most important thing. Other things to consider are:

Your savings rate

The credibility of the bank

Terms and conditions

One of the downsides of a high-yield savings account is not having all of your money in one place. If you need to transfer money into your primary bank quickly it could take a couple of days. Don’t put your everyday spending money in one of these accounts. I’ve looked into savings accounts that offer up to 3% APY (Annual Percentage Yield) which is changing all the time. Let me know if you know of any good ones!

BANKS VS. CREDIT UNIONS

When deciding where to stash your cash should you use a bank or a credit union? There are pros and cons to both.

Banks are for-profit enterprises, while credit unions are nonprofits. Credit unions also offer higher interest rates on deposits, lower rates on loans and lower fees.

WHY CHOOSE A BANK?

More branches in the region or across the country

Typically quicker to roll out new apps and new tech

WHY CHOOSE A CREDIT UNION?

Typically has lower fees and higher interest rates on deposits

Emphasis on customer service

I go for the best of both worlds and use USAA for my personal banking and Wells Fargo for my business banking. I’m happy with USAA and would recommend them to anyone. Think of it as an online credit union with low fees, great customer service and always at the front of technology. They were the first bank to introduce biometric sign in. I was using my face to log in to my account back in 2014.

Although I’m happy with USAA, I’m always looking for something better.

4. MONEY MARKET ACCOUNTS (MMA)

Money market accounts are federally insured short-term interest-bearing instruments that generate a variable yield while preserving principal. They tend to have interest rates that are higher than savings accounts, but they often require a higher minimum deposit.

The difference between a savings account and an MMA is what the bank can do with your money. The bank is restricted in how they can loan your money. With an MMA the bank may put your money in a CD, low-risk mutual fund or government securities. Many people have an MMA already and don’t realize it. That’s because in your investment account there is typically cash waiting to be invested that is stored in an MMA. I wouldn’t be too concerned about these accounts for your goals.

5. CERTIFICATE OF DEPOSIT (CD)

A certificate of deposit (CD) acts as a savings account and has a fixed interest rate. It also has a fixed date of withdrawal, known as the maturity date. I call these certificates depression:). If you want to invest your money for the long run the interest rate is measly. Although it’s higher than a typical savings account or money market account your money is going to be locked up for a period of time. For example, at my local credit union the terms of a CD are:

2.00% 1-year CD

2.50% 4-year CD

3.15% 5-year CD

I don’t use CDs anymore because I had a bad experience. I deposited $5,000 into a 2.5 year CD back when I was 19 and made $50 in interest after two years. My car broke down and I needed to access the money early and paid a $25 fee. Then, I had to pay taxes on that $50 which was $7.50. So my $50 return went to $17.50 which is a 0.0035% return. Basically the same as if I would have left it in the bank.

I could have found a better CD and I could not have pulled it out early but either way, I’m not a fan of CDs. I want control over my money and I’m willing to take more risk if I’m going to be saving that money for a few years.

However, CDs seem to fit some people very well and there are many reasons why they may make sense for you. Something that seems to be effective with CDs is called a CD ladder. You open multiple CDs to have access to your money at different times in the future without locking all of your money into one long-term account. I still think there is better places to stash your cash.

BOTTOM LINE

To be honest I don’t use high-yield savings accounts (I may if I find a good one), money market accounts or CDs. I use traditional savings accounts and any other amount of money above that I invest it.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to take away information from this article and apply it to your situation. I didn’t talk about investing. If you would like to read an article I wrote about that:

Read: I Don’t Know How to Invest and I’m Scared I’ll Make a Mistake

These are simply a few ways you can employ your dollars and stash your cash. But, more important than getting the highest interest on your savings is how much money you save.

If you’re having trouble saving money I recommend you set it up automatically. You can set this up with your bank or you could use a tool like Qapital or Digit to do it automatically for you. They don’t have a high APY but they can help you consistently save. I love personal finance technology that helps change behavior!

Where do you stash your cash!?

[weeklyreviewer]

How Mezcal’s Boom Is Helping Lift Its Makers Out of Extreme Poverty

You can tell by the quiet smile on his face that Bonifacio Cruz Ruiz is proud of his agave plants. 

Inside a small handmade greenhouse in his backyard, Ruiz has thousands of plants growing on shelves lined with baking sheets. Each sheet contains hundreds of small seedlings that will one day grow into massive plants weighing hundreds of pounds. Bonifacio carries the trays with care, as if they hold his children, and in a way, they do.

The backyard nursery is the result of Ruiz’s work with nonprofit Heifer International, through its pilot program in Oaxaca, Mexico, Heifer’s first involving mezcal. The organization, which typically shares livestock such as chickens and goats with people in underdeveloped areas, came to Ruiz’s town and helped him and other residents build greenhouses for agave plants, showing them how to maintain those plants. Recently Ruiz was able to take things a step further and pass the gift along by sharing some of his beautiful seedlings, as well as directions on how to care for them, with neighboring villagers so they could do the same.

Bonifacio Cruz Ruiz holds a tray of agave seedlings.

After he delicately puts the tray back in its resting place, Ruiz leads me and a small group of Heifer employees down a slightly treacherous path roughly a half a mile behind his home. The journey takes us up and down hills and across a small river to a small garden, where he transplants the seedlings once they’ve outgrown their baking-tray beginnings. You can tell by looking at his face that he’s proud of what he’s accomplished and what the future might hold. 

Bonifacio Cruz Ruiz and Heifer project manager Rosario Isabel Gabriel Lopez talk about his young agave plants.

In the town of Santa Ana del Rio, there’s a saying: “Para todo mal, mezcal. Y para todo bien, tambien.” Translation: “For everything bad, mezcal. And for everything good, too.” It’s a saying best accompanied with a glass of the local spirit in your hand and commemorates a liquid that is used in the area for everything from an afternoon drink to a folk remedy to cure illnesses.

Mezcal has been an integral part of the local community for generations. However, families in the isolated town—which has exceptionally limited access to basic utilities like running water and electricity—have had trouble making the spirit a commercial success. They’ve also run into trouble keeping the tradition going, as younger members of the community tend to leave the area, seeking greater job opportunities. Many ultimately choose to immigrate to the United States. 

The agave used to make mezcal in the village has traditionally been harvested from wild plants. However, when something happened to those plants, the village was forced to buy them from other villages, cutting into their already meager profits. Wild agave can also be hard to find, making the process of collecting enough for a batch of mezcal a rather time-consuming task. 

Now, thanks to Heifer, that agave Ruiz is growing will ensure the area has not only a steady supply of the plant, but also that they’ll be able to locate them quickly.

In 2017, Ruiz along with other members of the village voted to sell their mezcal to Pernod Ricard, which is working with Heifer on the program, after a representative from the brand visited the area. The plan at the time was to ultimately integrate mezcal from the village into the company’s popular Del Maguey brand. That hasn’t happened just yet, but Pernod is consistently purchasing the mezcal and storing it with plans to release it in future.

Even without the official release, that partnership has fueled some tremendous results. Whereas the town once sold its mezcal for just eight pesos a liter (approximately 50¢), it’s now approaching 130 pesos per liter ($7.50), a significant improvement. The villagers are also selling more. Prior to Heifer and Pernod’s involvement, the Rodriguez family typically sold around 400 liters of mezcal per year. Now that number is closer to 1,000 liters. 

Heifer wants to help facilitate that growth, making the industry more sustainable for a community where the average annual family income is between $3,000 and $5,000. Now the community is making a consistent product and is aware of the spirit’s market value.

Beyond teaching Ruiz and others how to build greenhouses and nurture seedlings, the group also helps local farmers learn skills such as how to prevent pests from destroying the plants, which can often take five to seven years to reach maturity, and how to care for and prevent diseases in their livestock, which are often used to harvest those heavy plants on the steep hills where they grow.

Carlos Rodriguez and his father, Ciro, tie agave to a horse.

Ciro Rodriguez is one of the people responsible for harvesting agave in the village. Each day he, along with his two sons, labors in the sweltering sun, harvesting the agave plants, which can often weigh hundreds of pounds, and then cutting off their tough leaves with machetes before carrying the heart of the plant—the piña—back to their family’s outdoor distillery, called a palenque, to be turned into mezcal. 

It’s exceptionally hot, laborious work, even for an onlooker who isn’t actually wielding any tools or bearing any heavy loads. Plants often grow on steep, hard-to-navigate inclines, and they’re carried up or down these dusty hills, strapped to the back of the family’s donkeys.

“Heifer has provided us with vaccines for horses, mules, and donkeys,” Rodriguez says. “That has helped us a lot.”

Once the agave is harvested, a process that’s done by hand one plant at a time, the piñas are eventually loaded into the family’s truck and then driven back into town.

Members of the Rodriguez family load piñas on the back of their truck.

In town, the plants are placed in a large dirt pit filled with hot stones. Dirt is put on top, and the plants are cooked for roughly a week. Afterward, those piñas are manually pressed, and the fibers are placed in small stills where they’re distilled into mezcal.

Hired help at Abel Gil’s distillery prepare to cook the agave.

It’s a long process. And all these tasks are also performed outdoors in temperatures topping 100 degrees, making an already laborious process even more so. It’s also done in very much the same way it always has been from generation to generation in the village.

For now, that mezcal is only sold in bulk, and what is sold is made in a way that it meets quality standards Pernod has set in place. “If we wanted to bottle the mezcal that would mean a lot of money to pay to the authorities and to get permission,” Rodriguez says. Liquor sales in Mexico have high taxes, sometimes near 60%, which can make it hard to market the product in accordance with the law.

Cut agave piñas in a pit of hot rocks are prepared for burning at Abel Gil’s distillery.

Now that the village, and its mezcal production, can provide a living wage for its residents, the hope is that more of them will choose to stay in the area and keep those traditions going well into the future—and potentially grow the business further.

“Continue getting ahead. That is what we’re looking for right now,” Rodriguez says. “We would like the mezcal production to thrive. We used to plant agave and make mezcal just because, without seeing any improvement or progress. Now what we want is to have a brand of our own.”

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Germany might be producing the best Pinot Noir available today

—This restaurateur traded fine dining for Ben Franklin’s favorite milk cocktail

—Bar carts are back: How this revival is different

—5 Irish whiskey brands you need to try now

—How this 24-year-old entrepreneur is updating the biergarten experience 

Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.

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[personalcoachingcenter]

How This Year's 10 Global Good Fund Fellows Are Saving The World

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/how-this-years-10-global-good-fund-fellows-are-saving-the-world/

How This Year's 10 Global Good Fund Fellows Are Saving The World

The Global Good Fund is a nonprofit organization that supports high-potential social entrepreneurs in more than 25 countries globally, collectively impacting the lives of over 8.5 million people.  Since its founding in 2012 by Carrie Rich, a faculty member at George Washington University in Washington, DC., the Fund has supported 105 Fellows from three continents with over 18,000 hours of mentoring and coaching. Entrepreneur.com has named The Global Good Fund one of its Top 30 Startups to Watch.

Here, meet The Global Good Fund’s seventh cohort of Fellows. This select group of ten social innovators, chosen from among thousands of applicants, come from around the globe. Yet each of them is striving to create a ripple effect of change around our world’s most pressing social issues, including health, education, and finance.

Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter is the CEO and Cofounder of IMPAQTO.

Francisco Alvarado

Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter, CEO and Cofounder of IMPAQTO

IMPAQTO has developed a network of social innovation spaces in emerging cities in Latin America, places that hold promise but are often overlooked. Currently, a new generation of change agents are seeking to build a new, sustainable economic model. However, the mortality rate for most startup businesses on the continent is exceptionally high due to lack of access to capital, high rents, low social mobility, and gender-based obstacles.

IMPAQTO assists Latin American entrepreneurs by providing co-working spaces, business acceleration programs, and social innovation consulting. In addition, IMPAQTO Network & Consulting serves leading public and private sector organizations, such as Nestlé and the City of Quito, thereby helping to sponsor scholarships for entrepreneurs in incubation programs.

Seven years ago, CEO and Cofounder Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter returned from a powerful job in Switzerland to her home country of Ecuador with the dream of starting an impact business around affordable housing. However, reality quickly set-in. “In a polarized society like Ecuador, the idea of a social enterprise was an oxymoron,” she says. “People questioned my enthusiasm and optimism.”

Nevertheless, she networked to discover a cofounder, and together they started hosting meetups for the change-maker community. Through this process, Arevalo-Carpenter found her life purpose: Empower an entire generation of Latin American changemakers in furthering the social innovation revolution.

To aspiring changemakers, Arevalo-Carpenter offers this advice: “Surround yourself with a community that inspires you and understands your mission. Your work as a changemaker will sooner or later put you to the test. When you run out of fuel, when the context seems too complex, when you doubt yourself, having a community to rely on is what will help you back on your feet.”

Hyasintha Ntuyeko is the CEO and Founder of Kasole Secrets.

Kasole Secrets

Hyasintha Ntuyeko, CEO and Founder of Kasole Secrets Company, Ltd.

Kasole Secrets develops and distributes organic sanitary napkins. The company also consults and runs menstrual hygiene management campaigns at a national level in Tanzania.

Although trained as a telecommunications engineer, Founder and CEO Hyasintha Ntuyeko started Kasole Secrets due to her own personal challenges. “My discomfort during my menses made me decide to dedicate my career as an entrepreneur to improving the menstrual experience for women and girls in Tanzania,” she says.

When she started advocating for menstrual hygiene management in her country, Ntuyeko faced many obstacles. “People thought it would be a losing battle,” she says. But she kept at it, working tirelessly for nearly a decade to push her agenda. And now, she feels that Kasole Secrets has managed not only to change the narrative in Tanzania but also to have a ripple impact across other countries.

In addition, Ntuyeko had to confront family and community members as well as potential partners and customers telling her that she was too young to be an entrepreneur. However, she remained consistent in her dedication to the task and eventually was able to win their trust. “Everything is possible if you are willing to walk the distance, focus and commit your full self to it,” she says.

Rachel Connors is the CEO and Cofounder of Yellow Leaf Hammocks.

Yellow Leaf

Rachel Connors, CEO and Cofounder of Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Artisan activity is the second-largest employer in the developing world, yet the vast majority of global artisans are mothers living in extreme poverty. When you combine that fact with women’s power to wrench their families, and by extension their communities, out of poverty, it becomes clear that the artisan sector needs to be brought into the 21st century as a tool for ending global poverty.

Yellow Leaf transforms “bottom of the pyramid” communities through sustainable job creation for women. By working with artisan mothers, the company produces hammocks that improve employees’ as well as customers’ lives. “The mothers we work with are able to make long-term investments in the health, nutrition, and education of their families,” says CEO and cofounder Rachel Connors. “This manifests in incredible ways. 100% of their children are able to go to school instead of working in slash and burn fields, and the first group ever are now attending college based on their mothers’ savings from weaving work.”

Bootstrapping the business from the beginning proved a huge challenge to Connors and her team. At the same time, it forced Yellow Leaf to be results-oriented. “When you bootstrap, you’re very in touch with your customers and your supply chain, which leads to a higher level of intelligence about every aspect of a new business,” she says.

“Bring your A-game,” Connors says to aspiring changemakers. “It’s not enough to have good intentions. You need to make sure you have the skills, hustle, and dedication to live up to your mission.”

Vaibhav Lodha is the Cofounder of ftcash.

Amanda Bensel

Vaibhav Lodha, Cofounder of ftcash

Every year, millions of people into poverty due to health problems, financial setbacks, and other shocks. Most of those living in or near poverty lack even the most basic banking services. This means they use cash, physical assets, or informal providers such as money lenders to meet their financial needs—from receiving wages to saving money. However, these informal mechanisms can be insecure, expensive, and complicated to use.

ftcash, one of India’s fastest-growing financial technology ventures, converts cash to digital payments and provides pre-approved advances and loans that can be disbursed at the click of a button. After a successful launch in India in 2015, the company was incubated by PayPal and accelerated by MasterCard. By enabling small businesses to accept electronic payments, ftcash empowers lower and middle class individuals, giving more people access to better health, education, and nutrition.

A series of early failures in the corporate world led Cofounder Vaibhav Lodha to re-examine his ideas about success in career and family. “I started to explore my true north, and aligned myself to more people who share a common purpose: To empower lives and create a just society,” he says. “Through entrepreneurship in financial inclusion, I believe I am doing good.”

Lodha compares life to a series of trapeze swings. “We are either hanging onto a trapeze bar trapeze bars,” he says. “Most of the time, we hang onto the same bar. But every once in a while, we look out into the distance and see another trapeze bar swinging toward us. It is our next step, our growth, our aliveness coming to get us. We know that we must release our grip on this present, well-known bar and move to the new one. Each time, we are filled with terror. This is where we need to rely on ourselves. Hanging onto that old bar is no longer on the list of alternatives. Transitioning to the new bar is the only place where real change occurs and we truly grow.”

Abbey Wemimo is the Co-CEO of Esusu Financial.

Johnny Vacar

Abbey Wemimo, Co-CEO of Esusu Financial, Inc.

Esusu uses data to financially empower marginalized Americans, students and immigrants. A smartphone app helps individuals save more money and access larger sums of capital through the digitization of rotational peer-to-peer savings and loan practices that are popular in immigrant communities. And by reporting rental payments to credit bureaus, Esusu helps individuals boost their credit scores. Both service offerings work to help more people gain access to affordable credit.

Co-CEO Abbey Wemimo was inspired to create Esusu by his personal experience. He immigrated to the USA with his mother, a single parent, when he was young. She had no credit score, and without that, she struggled to access bank loans and establish a financial identity. As a result, Wemimo is passionate about promoting financial inclusion for all Americans, regardless of their background. “It is easier for people to pursue their dreams when they are not burdened by crippling debt and when they are not ignored and shunned by mainstream capital providers,” he says.

The biggest challenge Wemimo faced in starting Esusu was winning over the trust of prospective customers. After some time, the company adjusted its go-to-market approach to partnering with nonprofits, community development organizations, and colleges in order to reach the core customer base. “The key takeaway: be persistent, nimble, and humble,” he says.

As an African-born American, Wemimo is fond of an old African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” He advises aspiring changemakers to “surround yourself with people who inspire you, and who you can collaborate with. Teamwork will sustain you when the going gets tough.”

Kevin Gibbons is the Cofounder and Executive Director of Health Access Connect.

Ronnie William Kyazze

Kevin Gibbons, Cofounder and Executive Director of Health Access Connect

Health Access Connect is a nonprofit organization that links Ugandans living in remote areas with healthcare resources. Through its Medicycles program, Health Access Connect uses micro-financed motorcycles to transport health workers to outreach clinics, where they focus on anti-retroviral treatment, HIV testing, antenatal care, family planning, and other essential health services.

“It is often difficult to see the global implications of our work because we spend so much time managing the day-to-day operations and trying to find funding and partners,” says Cofounder and Executive Director Kevin Gibbons. “But one of our main goals is to set up an open-source system for sustainable healthcare delivery that can be applied to many countries around the world.”

Gibbons joined the US Peace Corps as a volunteer after graduating from college in the US. He lived in the Philippines for three years, working for a small forest conservation nonprofit in remote communities. “I was never happier or more fulfilled than when working toward a goal larger than myself,” he says. Later, when traveling to Uganda to conduct Master’s research, Gibbons noticed that people kept mentioning the lack of access to healthcare. He decided that there must be a way to get the free, life-saving healthcare offered just a few miles away to people in more remote areas.

The biggest obstacle Gibbons has faced with Health Access Connect is funding. “We don’t quite fit into the way that donors give money,” he says. “We don’t build hospitals or give out medicine. We set up a sustainable way for communities to get health services. It is difficult to get people to understand that vision when they do not live in Uganda.”

To people thinking of starting a business or nonprofit, Gibbons recommends first working or interning at a similar organization. “Try to understand how work gets funded, what the important facets and vocabulary are, and how the organization is managed,” he says. “If you understand those three things (not easy!), you’ll be well-placed to make the change that you want to.”

Eyitayo Ogunmola is the CEO of Utiva.

Utiva

Eyitayo Ogunmola, CEO of Utiva

Utiva is a talent accelerator that seeks to rapidly develop Africa’s motivated young people with skill sets to transition into entry-level positions within startups and large corporations. The company is currently working with students across 25 universities.  “When you teach someone to be successful, she becomes a model of excellence to others,” says CEO Eyitayo Ogunmola.

Ogunmola himself was jobless after graduating from school and “almost lured into cybercrime,” he says. “I grew up in a community where most bright young people graduated from school without any opportunity in the job market. I experienced the same thing and I know the reality.”

 Two years later, Ogunmola met a mentor who helped him chart a new direction. He started learning new skills and got a job in consulting in Lagos, Nigeria. “I was excited, but I felt a deep sense of frustration because other youths around me were left without hope,” he says. “I discovered that unemployment in Nigeria is not caused by a lack of jobs but the unemployability of the youth population.”

The first struggle Utiva faced was finding quality faculty to commit time and resources to students. So, Ogunmola started doing the trainings himself. Within a year, he had found over 50 volunteers, professionals from different backgrounds. Today, Utiva has partnerships with firms and brands working to train college students through staff volunteers. 

“While it is easy to do small things because they make a difference, building scale into your model should be your focus,” Ogunmola advises to aspiring changemakers. “ From day one, think of how to scale your intervention. We need to create solutions that address big problems at scale.”

Tonee Ndungu is the Founder and CIO of Kytabu Inc.

Mwangi Kirubi

Tonee Ndungu, Founder and CIO of Kytabu Inc.

 Kytabu Inc. is an education technology company that provides students in Kenya with affordable access to required textbooks via their mobile devices. With an increase in access to both devices and data connectivity, more students are looking for technology solutions to access learning content. Kytabu has influenced the Kenyan government to pursue a digital policy that allows devices in schools.

Founder and CIO Tonee Ndungu grew up dyslexic and with ADHD, so he knows from first-hand experience the challenges students in the Kenyan education system can face in accessing affordable, relevant and relatable content. He hopes to scale his technology to a country-wide level in order to improve education for the young people of his country.

Fundraising is a huge challenge for an African-based African founder, according to Ndungu. “The majority of angel, venture capital, private capital, and seed investments come from Europe and the Americas. Most funders invest in those they can relate to. This has sidelined a majority of African founders,” he says.

 His advice is to practice “patience, persistence, and planning. With a clear and tested strategy, in those three words are the totality of starting and running a meaningful intervention.”

Neha Arora is the Founder of Planet Abled.

Planet Abled

Neha Arora, Founder of Planet Abled

Planet Abled, which recently was named one of the best innovative practices by the Zero Project Conference at the United Nations, provides inclusive travel solutions to people of all disabilities and the elderly. “A lot of times people with disabilities and senior citizens are apprehensive of traveling in India because they are at a loss of information about accessibility,” says Founder Neha Arora. “Planet Abled strives to break that barrier. One can travel solo, with family, as an institution or organization or join a group tour at over 35 destinations across the Indian subcontinent.”

When she first started Planet Abled, Arora says, people would look down upon their travel groups and make rude comments because it was something they’d never seen before. So, the company organized get-togethers at coffee shops and in pubs, at cultural places and festivals. “We’d go in large numbers, with a mix of people with various disabilities and people without disabilities all enjoying their time together. These get-togethers were then joined by other disability-focused organizations across the country,” she says.

Arora herself wasn’t able to travel much as a child owing to the disabilities of her parents. This is what inspired her to found Planet Abled. Nevertheless, she worried about the company’s commercial viability, laying the groundwork for three years prior to launch.

“If you find a problem and feel that you can solve it, do not wait for the perfect time and perfect circumstances to do it,” advises Arora. “It will never be right. Jump into it and get your hands dirty. The solution and problem both will evolve.”

Hitesh Tolani is the CEO of Virtudent.

Jeffrey Danford

Hitesh Tolani, CEO of Virtudent

Today, 40% of Americans can’t access basic oral healthcare. Virtudent makes high-quality dental care convenient and easy to access through a combination of onsite and telemedicine technologies. As the trusted onsite dentist for Fidelity Investments, Wayfair, LogMeIn, Hubspot, and many other companies, Virtudent is able to take a portion of its proceeds to serve 5,000 children who otherwise wouldn’t have access to basic oral healthcare.

CEO Hitesh Tolani, a child of immigrant parents, fell into “immigration limbo” for 22 years. During this time, he lost his father, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and his family was left destitute. Fortunately, their story went viral throughout the U.S. and 35,000 people wrote to their Congressmen and Senators to help Tolani’s family. “As I watched people go to bat for us, I wanted to do the same one day for others,” Tolani says. “I am a pure product of their generosity. As a dentist, I feel I have the ability to pay it forward.”

Although Tolani faces obstacles daily with Virtudent, he is determined to work hard, be tenacious, be kind, be humble, ask for help, and keep going. “No is not an acceptable answer,” he says to aspiring changemakers. “Respect rules, regulations and laws, but to get where you want, dig deeper. You have to look beyond and find the path that leads to the ‘but.’ No, but you could… that is when you know that you’re on the right track.” 

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