#because there are a ton of other nonprofits out there who I'm sure are doing a good job and I'd like to have a good variety

[shikai-the-storyteller]

Hey quick serious question: do any of you guys have nonprofits you know of and like who've talked about Palestine and/or put out statements about it?

I'd really appreciate some names and/or links if you've got any!

[foster-the-world]

Fun!

Oh Mary play was fun. Bizarre fun. Not sure it was my favorite but def some clever moments. My husband was a big fan.

A few years back I mentored one young mother through a very small nonprofit that helps former foster youth. Its basically two middle aged ladies who helped out a group of 8-10 former foster youth. They act as the informal support most people would receive from their family + recruit mentors. Anyway, they reached out today because one of the people in their current group has a ten year old whose struggling in school. Apparently her's in a not great school in the Bronx. Asked if I had any resources since we aren't that far. Neither of the group leaders have school aged kids. Wanted to know if a charter school would help him. So hard to know. If he's just having trouble because the schools not great then most charter schools will provide extra hours support to get him caught up. If he has a learning disability then most charter schools are going to counsel him out. They don't want kids who are going to bring down their test scores :( So depressing.

I tried to provide the DOE process of getting special need services but that takes months to even get an assessment spot. Compared to 99.9% of places there are a shit ton of resources. You can get literally hundred of thousands of dollars of services provided by the city. I know so many people who get over $200,000 of services per year free of charge from the city. Top notch/can't be better services. But its a fulltime job to figure it out and you've got to be first in line or its not happening. Or you need the cash to pay for assessments, etc that prove your kid needs these services. I have some friends that work in charter schools so if she's in the right neighborhood I can see if they still have room. I provided info on an organization that helps. But its all going to take so much time. For example today I've spent at least 2.5 hours researching, talking to other parents and texting with his providers. Its not an abnormal day. I'm not currently trying to chase down any new services. It just what is normal. I mean a little extra as its only the second week of school but still. I'm lucky I can do it at work/lunchtime. Anyway its all depressing. I don't know a solution. I'm thankful services are there but there has to be a better way.

I'm touring a school geared for ADHD kids next week. It would be for Kindergarten next year. Looks good for him. My only fear is they don't accept kids with behavior issues. He's a four year old boy with ADHD of course he has behavior issues. Why else would we be there? I assume they mean aggression? Going to find out. I read they require the kids to be medicated. I'm assuming that's for older kids. I can't imagine its a requirement for 5 year old. The APA doesn't even recommend until 6 unless there are extreme issues. We are unfortunately in the extreme issues territory hence looking for a school for kids with ADHD. I'm surprised private schools can make that requirement but I guess private schools can do whatever the hell they want. Seems fishy considering I'm sure every kid there has sued the city to have them foot the bill.

Baby boys doctor wants us to try Flovant to stop the asthma. Its the normal protocol. Not excited that some people have behavioral issues as a side effect. Not what my kid needs more of. Of course, as his doctor pointed out kids behavior gets much worse when they are feeling bad because of an asthma outbreak. Also, nervous because we are thinking of trying ADHD meds next month. I don't want to mix new things. Also, don't want to wait on the Flovant because Oct/Nov are his problem asthma months.

Feeling stronger about trying the ADHD meds. Every medical provider I've talked to has encouraged us to try. I know some people would take that as doctor's wanting a quick fix. I don't agree. I think they've seen it work from other kids and don't want our kids to suffer unnecessarily. Our ADHD parent coach- whose a big wig that's done a ton of published research on ADHD was very supportive of the idea.

Baby boy has also been using some language that is so sad. "My body feels wild. I can't stop it." "I'm mean to my friends. I don't know why." "I'm bad." He's only four. We don't use "bad" language. I don't want him thinking these things about himself. He has a really hard time controlling his body but he has the sweetest little heart.

Parent Teacher night for the girls. Excited to hear from Bee's teachers - as they are both new to the school. Bee had Rebel's teacher last year so that's not new.

The very kind teacher at the school who produces a morning announcement video created by/with the kids every morning announced she was pregnant today. I happened to be in the office. The kids were so excited. Very sweet.

[copperbadge]

sam, as someone who professionally stalks rich people for fun and profit and therefore have long term observational data on them as a class, how likely is it that the mess that is twitter is musk trying to get out of the loans that are pulling tesla down via bankruptcy, and relatedly, considering that he's obviously doing all the value tanking on his own either through incompetence or malice, how likely is it that it'd end up a bankruptcy fraud case?

The problem is that by the time people get to where Elon Musk is now, most nonprofits have "disqualified" them. It's not that we won't take meetings with them or take their money, but we won't go out of our way to solicit it unless we are willing to take that PR hit. So I haven't researched many people who are malignant supervillains in quite the public way Elon Musk is. War criminals, yes; incredibly unethical finance guys, tons; active public fuckups like Elon Musk? Not as much. So I'm actually less well-educated in this kind of situation than one might think.

I have researched numerous finance guys who were convicted of financial misconduct. They fight it every step up to a point, they do everything possible to seem conventional and innocent...and they take their medicine quietly when it becomes obvious they're going to have to, so that they don't create a three-ring circus and endanger future investments by making too much noise. They get banned for three or five or eight years, and then they either get a shell to do their work for them or they take a three year vacation and then come back and quietly start up again.

As opposed to Elon Musk, who’s just like “I’m not afraid of the FTC. Come at me bro” and then shrieks like a child when they do.  

It's actually really difficult to tell what Musk is doing deliberately and what is just overwhelming incompetence. Like, how the fuck do you get where Twitter is this morning without doing it deliberately? But there’s no overestimating human stupidity, its well is bottomless. 

I don't subscribe to the Four Dimensional Chess theory that this was planned from the beginning. Musk tried too hard to squirm out of the deal, and he's much, much too sensitive about the way people have seen his actions, for me to think this is part of some master plan. He's also kind of a dumbass. But I'm not sure he's the extreme dumbass he's coming across as, either. It’s hard to know. The second he was forced to buy Twitter, I suspect either he realized, or someone close to him casually said, "You know, you can buy an asset, load it with debt, and dump it, especially if society values it highly enough to want it back from you." So what he's doing now might be deliberate even if it didn’t start out that way. 

On the other hand, I have my doubts, because every time he fucks Twitter up he does seem to be demanding someone else fix it. Tanking the value of an asset deliberately generally goes smoother than this to be honest. And I don't credit him as being canny enough to seem this random in order to fool the authorities that he's not committing fraud. So I lean, slightly, towards “Oh he’s just a real dumbass who’s not used to things not going his way.” but I can’t say with confidence that this is the case. 

I am also not following this as closely and breathlessly as some, so what I know of the situation is generally osmoted from daily headline reading and whatever crosses my dash on tumblr. I'm not buried in the specifics, so this is coming from a very distant view of what's happening. If he does declare bankruptcy for Twitter, I think there will be a fraud case regardless, because it's such a huge asset and he took it down so fast -- and he himself was so mired in debt -- that there has to be. You can’t just accept it. But I don't think he'll get convicted, if push comes to shove. I think probably there is a large bailout somewhere in his future, because that's just how life seems to roll these days.

I suppose we'll see. Sorry, this is a very ambiguous answer, but I'm working on like 3/4 of the knowledge I'd have if I was asked to do this for work, and I'd do more research but I'm real tired of seeing his incredibly punchable face.

[cuntwrap--supreme]

In my city (over 1mil people if you count the metro area), there are 5 main homeless shelters. There are a handful of others, but they're small and more choosy with who gets in.

Of the 5 main shelters, only one doesn't require Sunday services. That single shelter that doesn't require attending church still wants you to verbally say you've converted. If you don't follow these requirements, you're out.

Of the 5 main shelters, none of them allow you to return past 8pm or leave before 6am. If you do, you're no longer allowed in that shelter. If your bus breaks down on your way back, it's back to the streets.

Of the 5 main shelters, only one has any real oversight during nights, and it's city cops who probably resent having to be there. The others have an unpaid volunteer who sits at a desk and is supposed to make sure no one is being assaulted or stolen from or dying, but is usually just a volunteer from whichever church runs the place who sits in a closed room and watches TV.

Of the 5 main shelters, none are disability or child friendly. If you're in a wheelchair, you have to hope someone around you can help you down to your cot on the floor at night, or help you piss when you go to use the non-handicapped stalls. If you have a child, that child is instantly taken from you (from birth to the day before they're 18) and they only let you have custody back if you manage to pull yourself out of extreme poverty. I imagine you do this via the bootstraps method?

Of the 5 main shelters, not a one gives people privacy. At best, you get a ratty old sheet draped across a wire to give yourself the illusion that you're not 2ft away from the next guy. Most just had mats or blankets on the floor and that's that.

I have talked to tons of homeless people in my day. Especially those who are homeless due to untreated mental illness. It's like random schizophrenic people can sense that I'm like them but have just been lucky enough to be able to force myself to hold together and not let the brain demons win. If that makes sense. Anyway. Across the board, I've heard people say they'd rather be in the streets than suffer through sleeping in a shelter. Even in the dead of winter. It was 13 degrees outside early this year and I'm trying to tell this woman sleeping under a bridge that I can take her wherever she needs to go (though I don't make the kind of money that would allow me to book her a hotel room, and I have no space in my apartment) and she told me she'd rather freeze to death than go to a shelter for the night. Or a knew a man once who had finally managed to get himself a job, but the job wanted him to be there at 5am and the shelter wouldn't change when they let him leave, so he had to go back to the streets and lost the job because he then had no address. Or another guy I ran into frequently who knew how to fix shit, but had a really bad meth problem, who would dig through dumpsters for broken electronics and small motor items and fix them for cash; he said it was less dangerous to sleep in the ditch between two highways because no one ever stole from him there, whereas any time he was in a shelter people would steal the stuff he was working on and no one would help and would focus too much on 'you're on meth again huh?'

That being said, there are various churches and nonprofits here who do a good job. There's an organization I worked with for a little while that takes single mothers off the streets, gives them a home, helps pay their legal fees so they get their kids back (if applicable), and gives them free childcare. The only downside is they expect you to have a job to sustain your family within 5 years, but they also have a program that allows the mothers to go to school for free for 2 years. There's also a church that has a creepy basement that they've outfitted with small rooms that they'll allow people to stay in so long as they don't cause trouble. But they only have about 10 beds, so there's not a lot they can do. Or I recently delivered groceries to a lady in a shelter that runs out of an old school. I think they said they have 100 rooms and are geared towards homeless people who want to get off drugs but don't have the resources to do so on their own. They give you up to a year to break your addiction, they give you space for relapses, and they allow people to stay there up to 3 years. If you feel like staying past your 3rd year (which I was told a lot of people do because you form such strong bonds with one another in a place like that), they charge you regular market price for a studio apartment.

But, sadly, the norm is horrible and unsafe conditions, unless you're like the biggest guy there. Staff at most shelters don't care. They don't consider those there to be people. And the few that do can't do much because those places are already so fucked up that one single person can't change much.

I've had this idea for years that, if I ever somehow had tons of cash, I'd buy up one of the dozens of empty warehouses in the city and convert them to studio apartments for the homeless. Just enough space for a bed, closet, kitchen, and bathroom. A place to restart safely. Have full time mental health staff available if anyone needs them. Locate it someplace near bus lines so it's easy to hop on the bus and go. Encourage people to try to get back on track but don't enforce it; rather, focus on building healthier habits overall, whether it's drinking less or not self sabotaging or being better about taking your meds, etc. The idea is to go about it from a mental health perspective instead of the usual, which is just focused on "ew these gross people live on the streets, put them in a building someplace." I think the only requirements I'd want is to check on daily so people know you're safe and a no violence policy.

Anyway. If someone has 5.6mil on hand, I live in a city with a homeless population that like doubles every year due to the ridiculous price of housing.

Also, like, I'm sorry but if you've set up a free shelter, and people refuse to go because sleeping on the sidewalk under a freeway bridge is more pleasant, that's fucking on you, that's not on them.

You really can't compete with sleeping under the overpass so you are going to force people into shelter?

Unspeakably cruel and stupid.

[olderthannetfic]

i saw a thread on twitter saying that otw elections being only for $10+ donators is intentionally leaving out people from the global south and other financially challenged people. i know that it's kind of BS but i cant exactly put my finger on why

--

It's not entirely BS.

Literally any price point has this issue. $10 is quite a chunk of change for some countries and is less than 2 fancy coffees for others.

We discussed this when we were setting up OTW. We opted not to have a labor-instead-of-money thing because it would involve keeping "Fannish name X is wallet name Y" records. I think we can all see that this practice would lead nowhere good.

(In nonprofits that are some uncontested "save the children" stuff, I think it would make sense to allow people to donate services instead of $10. People serve in those under their wallet names anyway.)

We also opted not to make it $1 because if you put it very, very low, it's not an effective deterrent to people from rich countries who would misuse it.

People do try to game the Hugos, which is expensive, but it's people who might well already have attended those cons or bought the supporting memberships. For a lot of things, once you get above a couple of dollars, the temptation to buy 5 in your friends' names goes away.

--

Moreover, this is not the only way that money shit is unfair internationally.

In the early days, we couldn't accept donations from a lot of places. I'm sure there are still some where it's an issue. There are tons of fans who could save up the equivalent of $10, but they can't get a credit card or access to Paypal or any of the easy ways to send money to the US.

Being an international organization of this type means providing services to a wide array of people who simply can't participate financially.

--

Building something like AO3 is inherently the work of people with more resources for the purpose of benefiting a larger community with fewer.

It sucks that some passionate people simply cannot participate in voting. But that's the reality of organizations: sometimes, practicality has to trump being scrupulously "fair" about giving absolutely everyone a turn.

Making a system where the barriers to entry were so low that douchebags in the US could flood in with spurious voting accounts would also not be fair to people from the global south who just want an uncensored archive that stays up.

--

I think it's less that the OTW rule itself is unfair and more that it highlights inequality that already exists and is a fact of life.

In an ideal world, sure, OTW would find a way to charge different prices depending on local cost of living. Maybe they will one day. But doing that requires time and resources. There is no magic "Be fair and nice to everyone! It costs nothing!" answer here.

--

So basically, I think that observation is true as a literal fact.

The reason it smells fishy is that you can tell the people saying it have ulterior motives.

They want to pretend that the ~noble oppressed people~ of the world would side with their pro-censorship message. Or they want other whiny people from rich countries to agree that OTW is Big Unfair Meanies. It's not actually about figuring out how to get the ability to vote to specific fans who genuinely want it.

I'll also note that you don't have to be a voting member to be a volunteer or a staff member or to run for the Board. Someone with few financial resources but with time and skills could still have a fair amount of power in OTW.

There are other practical realities aside from money that are also not fair, like many volunteers being in one time zone and not another, so realtime meetings will suck for the outlier. OTW operates in English and has a strong American contingent; culturally and linguistically, that excludes people who are nonetheless welcome to post works on AO3. Working for OTW requires a lot of free time and specific skills. Not everyone has those.

Life ain't fair.

[aurumacadicus]

If you're still taking AUs:

Nat and Pepper (maybe +tony), starting a nonprofit/working at for and nonprofit. Basically just doing charitable things or planning for it.

If you are not taking AUs:

I'm really enjoying them! They are tons of fun and the humor is great for short blurbs! I really like that I can see a whole story set around the AUs but they still feel complete on their own- I think that takes tons of skill. You really balance leaving people wanting more and feeling satisfied with what just what they read amazingly well.

This probably wasn't the direction you were going for but like always, I like all my characters to be idiots. Natasha owns her own dance studio but her dream has always been to help poor kids into dance. At the end of the semester she takes them to see a real professional ballet performance. Pepper sponsors the kids that really want to continue after the program but can't afford it. They write essays as to why they should receive her sponsorship (more as a formality, she's literally never turned anyone down). She keeps all of them.

--

Pepper was in the office. Clint had told her about it as he'd left to go take care of something at his building.

Natasha pretended it didn't bother her as she directed her students through their basic positions. She was pretty sure she'd filed all her bills correctly. She was still getting used to it, but she was a quick study. Maybe she hadn't itemized something properly? Normally Pepper just sent her a quick text if she needed to fix something, though. Had the Maria Stark Foundation decided against funding her charity? Or--maybe the foundation had been scrutinizing the fact that she and Pepper were dating. Could it be a conflict of interest?

"That's all for today. I'll see you all on Wednesday," she told her students, who excitedly ran to gather their things for the bus. She waited until the bus driver waved and pulled away from the curb, because she took her students' safety very seriously, then turned and headed for the office, hoping she didn't look like a child headed to the principal's office.

Pepper was typing on Natasha's computer, brows furrowed together. Luckily, when she glanced up at Natasha, she gave her a wide smile and immediately turned away from it. "Hey! Happy one-month!"

"Huh?" Natasha blurted out as Pepper carefully pulled a little cake from the mini-fridge she kept under the desk.

"Your dancing program for impoverished students has been officially running for a month! I know you put in a lot of hard work so you could do it by yourself, so I wanted to celebrate it with you," Pepper explained, setting the plate on the desk.

Natasha blinked at it slowly. Chocolate, with cherry icing. Her favorite. She looked back at Pepper. "I thought that's what the dinner tonight was for?"

"The dinner tonight is because Tony doesn't know how to not be extravagant," Pepper deadpanned.

"Does Tony take all of the people rewarded by his charities out to dinner?" Natasha couldn't help but ask as she pulled up the chair on the other side of the desk. "What are you doing, anyway?"

"No, Tony only takes people he likes out to dinner. I'm ninety-five percent sure that he's not aware we've been dating for almost six months," Pepper replied. "And I was typing up a spread sheet for you to track your mileage. Tony says you need that if you're going to be driving to pick up stuff specifically for your charity program." She handed Natasha a fork. "Dig in. I can't have this because they couldn't promise not cross contamination with their strawberry icing."

Natasha frowned, but she decided to take it in the spirit it was given. She had worked very hard to set up this dance program, even consolidated two of her classes to open up space for it at an hour that was conducive to keeping the kids after school until their parents got off from work. There was still plenty of work ahead of her, but it was nice to see it acknowledged. "Thanks. What do you mean Tony doesn't know we're dating? I literally kissed him on the mouth last week."

Pepper waited patiently for her to chew and swallow her bite of cake before she very kindly said, "He kissed Jim and Carol on the mouth last week, too."

"Why the fuck is he so weird," Natasha exclaimed immediately, even though she was glad that she'd been given the opportunity to not choke.

"I try not to think about it, honestly," Pepper said with a shrug. "I'd be more upset, but I'm honestly looking forward to when he figures it out. I think he'll be speechless for at least five minutes, which is longer than he's ever willingly gone without talking."

"I think ten," Natasha countered without a second thought, then slapped a hand over her face and sighed. That was basically admitting that she wasn't actually surprised either, wasn't it?

Pepper smirked at her. That was probably a yes.

[fishmech]

it just happened really. like yes sure the computer I was using when I was 2 was my mom's college PC that was at least 5 years old by the time I was allowed to put my Disney educational game 5 1/4 inch disks in and out to switch, and schools still had apple iis of various kinds in use when I was old enough to start going, but those didn't mean much in themselves.

what really got things going was that when I was further into elementary school in the late 90s, I started helping my grandmother and her friends in a little nonprofit organization that sent various donations over to Lithuania, where most of that side of the family as from before immigrating to the US. There was sections of this for sending over clothes and other psych goods, but what I helped with was the computer operations.

see a lot of the schools over there were still stuck with their late Soviet era computers when they had any at all, I started assisting in this in 1998 when final separation of Lithuania from the USSR had now been about 7 years past. meanwhile up there in North Jersey, NYC, the rest of downstate NY, there were a lot of businesses and schools and individuals who were looking to get rid of computers that were a bit old, but you could still use them. as far as I'm aware the main incentive to donate them to my grandmother's group was there being favorable tax benefits.

so we'd get these machines in, and primarily we were configuring them for Windows 3.11 in a network setup with basic office and educational software. We'd process through the machines we got, diagnosing any issues, doing the rote work of installing things. I got a ton of experience in troubleshooting details of these primarily 386, 486, and early Pentium machines. And they'd end up going in a container down at the port to ship off every so often.

But of course there were computers that were too old or had too many issues to be sent off usefully. And we did not send off non-wintel machines of any sort though of course the bulk of what we got in were wintel. This is where me being a real retro computing hobbyist starts because I got to take home pretty much my pick of things that weren't going to go to Lithuania.

I'd get to load up the back of my mom's vehicle, or my grandma's if she was driving me home, with all the stuff I found interesting except for one category - Atari 8 bit gear. Because one of the adults working on this was this guy who'd been an enthusiast since his first Atari 800 in 1979. But I could take macs, pcs we determined were too old for the school project, useful components for upgrading our main home computer or some of the others I got, lots of commodore 64 stuff, lots of Apple II stuff. I had full on tricked out c64 and iigs setups at the home by the early 2000s, with tons of software that had been donated. And there was absolutely no way me or my family could have afforded to buy all that I was allowed to scavenge.

And incidentally we almost never saw any like Amiga or Atari ST stuff come in. We of course never would have sent them over, they were useless for purpose. I straight up saw much more odd Soviet hardware, which would be sent over as container filler on the way back west, and other eastern bloc stuff, though. A lot of that we had some kind of interested local buyers for who had the necessary knowledge to operate them and get working displays and the like, so that those rare pieces didn't go into a dumpster but are probably still in east coast collector hands.

And so since I got basically pushed right into all the access I could ever want, I just never stopped being interested in this stuff. Eventually there was no need to do the sending computers over thing so that dwindled as a source, but into my teens I would be biking over to the town dump to climb and dig through the big bin where computers and tvs were dropped off and held before being carted off to the county electronics recycling facility. And yeah it was risky and eventually that stopped one month in high school when some rule changed and the guy working there said he couldn't let people in it anymore. But I'd gotten a lot of useful gear out of there and even the systems that really were good for nothing but trash were still interesting.

Towards the end of this I'd gotten our by then elderly Pentium 200 mhz machine from 1997 rigged up with scavenged video cards and monitors from both the dump and the nonprofit to the point that Windows 98se was driving 5 monitors simultaneously on the desk - albeit with one limited to 256 color mode. Felt very retrofuture, since they were all crts of various age and LCD panels would have been a lot easier to work with but hell, noone was leaving those out for free in working condition!

And another thing about working through all these trash picked and donated systems, even the ones I wasn't taking home, is that of course most of them were not wiped yet or anything. There was a fascinating array of business line software, games, apparently homewritten applications/menus, tantalizing glimpses of network drives they had been connected to via cached files - a real eye opener of what any given pc was really capable of. If you haven't gone hard on challenging yourself to explore the vast amount of things you can do, and really who has, you're just not going to even think about it. Here's a machine that was clearly used by an architect, here's one that appears to have been used to control chemical machinery, this guy must have spent days writing these nestled batch files that go to every random software he used, this machine has a DOD asset badge and a locked Windows NT Workstation install, this one has those odd hard drive caddies you can pull from the front.

Myriad uses! You usually just think of games, Microsoft office, and some hobby specific stuff. Obviously now a browser and media playback are also standard uses. But these were reminders that things could be so much more specific. These were things that truly shaped their users' lives in major ways really. I consider that a very valuable insight for everyone about all the retro systems that got used in their day as well as the current ones we are using right now.

How did you get into vintage computing as a hobby?

I've told my perspective before on how this became my hobby of choice, but I want to hear from YOU. What lead you to vintage computing?

[camp-counselor-life]

A sort of serious question you totally don’t have to answer, but as someone I respect in the camp world I’d definitely value your opinion on: what do you think of the labor ethics of standard camp practices? I’ve never worked for a Girl Scout camp, though I attended them as a kid, but I’ve worked at other national org camps and well as local non profits, and at all of the resident programs I’ve done, I feel like camp employees (both seasonal and year round) are vastly overworked and underpaid. I’m not sure how GS camps do it, but at camps I’ve worked at, working 23 hrs/day for 6 days a week, 7-10 weeks in a row is not uncommon. With average pay, say, $600/week, even if you only count the 15 or so waking hours counselors are working, that comes out to like $6 and hour. Considering that counselors are also on duty all night….I don’t even want to do the math. Am I crazy?? Are other camps not like this??? I know some of the justification for not paying more is because housing and food are provided but it’s not like counselors usually have the option to stay or eat offsite. Idk I know a lot of camps—especially non-profits—don’t make a ton of money, and I think they’re important for kids, but it feels like we really overlook the physical and mental well-being of staff to run them. So I guess I’m wondering, have you seen these issues at camps? Do you think most camps are ethically run?

So this is a huge can of worms in the camp industry and I know it's a touchy subject with a lot of followers and camp people in general. I think it varies A Lot between camps. Like, an absolutely wild amount.

First, $600/week for an overnight camp is fairly high in a lot of places. I won't get into what the overnight camps I know of pay, but suffice to say it is significantly less than that. The hourly wage (should you dare to do the math) is appalling. Hours wise we also less in my council: we have 2 hours off a day (we talked about changing to 3/day also) and then 5 day work weeks for the most part. A lot of camps (my old council) did a one night a week off as well.

Day camps are different, because many have to pay hourly, and many pay above minimum wage to be competitive. I know some camps (day camps) paying $18-20/hour (or more). Obviously this is not all camps, but especially in places like California and the Eastern seaboard, where minimum wage laws are different. We now pay hourly for 0-12 hours during the school year, although not at that rate, and a daily rate for overnight programs. The overnight rate is a significant increase from when I was seasonal staff.

Full time staff are also low on the pay rate, and I see a lot of FT camp director positions in the 35-40k range of salaries. Sometimes year round housing is included, but how much of a perk is it really (also a big debate) to live where you work and never really escape? Unfortunately, that extends to a lot of nonprofit jobs. I made a little over $17/hour when I started, including when I transitioned to exempt, but I've negotiated and earned many raises and bonuses, so now I make not a great wage, but not a terrible wage, and better than a lot of camp positions (I'm not technically camp, but it's a similar pay scale).

I think from a "reasoning" standpoint, it's difficult because staffing is such a huge expense and A Lot of funders don't want to pay for it. Many, many grants are restricted and can only be used for program supplies, or maybe food. Staff salaries though? Difficult to fun through grants. So you have to pay for them with kid's fees. But how do you do that and still be affordable? Still be a price people are willing to pay, beating out the competition? I think that's where a lot of camps struggle, but also, camp staff are necessary, you can't run camp without them, so how do you balance that budget?

Is it ethical to significantly underpay and overwork? Not really. It's bad for staff mental health and it decreases the pool of staff to privileged individuals who don't need the money. But I think that it is getting better, in a lot of places. Not everywhere, but a lot of places. And the conversation is there. I expect that camp wages and hours will drastically change in our lifetime. Will there always be camps that exploit legal loopholes? Yes, absolutely. But I think that the camp industry is changing, and it's going to change more.

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

Hope you don't mind me asking, but you seem compassionate and smart. I'm 25, I still live with my parents, one of my parents is vulnerable so I've not been going out recently in lockdown. I have found it hard to keep friends since leaving school and getting a job, and I might be on the ace spectrum. People that don't have friends that I know have partners, but I don't think I will. I'm an introvert, but feel like I'm failing and lonely. Any advice?Please delete if u don't want to answer. Thanks.

oof, sorry anon, I wish I had some actual advice for you but I'm not great with the whole "making/keeping friends as an adult" thing either.

I guess the only thing I can think of offhand is seeing if you can find relevant meetup groups that are still doing fully virtual or hybrid meetings. obviously that would depend a lot on what your interests are and what kinds of opportunities are available in your area, but you might find things like...maybe a local comics shop hosts tabletop game nights and they have a virtual option, or a local video game store has a regular raiding group in a free MMO, or whatever organizations run Pride events in your area also have year-round events of various kinds, or a nonprofit or activist organization has some volunteering opportunities that involve meeting like-minded local people in some way (most of the local textbanks I participated in were organized through Zoom calls, so people could talk a little while they did it, for instance), or somebody associated with one of the above is running a book club on a topic that interests you (like, I'd never want to just join a random book club, but I would potentially be interested in one focusing on sci-fi/fantasy, or books by and about queer people, or something like that). if you write, you might be able to connect with local people through the Nanowrimo site, even if you're not interested in doing Nano specifically. Facebook and Reddit can both be awful in their own very special ways, but they're also probably decent places to get started seeing what kinds of groups/events already exist in your area. (I've never used MeetUp so I don't know anything about that one personally, although it's worth a look.)

if you're not specifically looking for something local, of course, you have a lot more options, and there the problem kind of becomes choice overload...and I'll be honest, I'm not actually sure what would be the best way to go about looking for things? but I guess you'd probably start with some intersection of your interests, again, like...queer gamers, if you like games and you want to meet other queer people. or maybe somebody you know but don't get to talk to often enough is already doing something you could join. my friend invited me to a weekly Phasmaphobia game with a small group of people, for instance, and I know at least a couple others who run tabletop RPGs over Discord. I'm sure there are tons of extremely specific online book clubs.

I...don't know if any of that is actually helpful, but maybe it's a place to start? I'd also suggest checking out Captain Awkward, because I know there have been a lot of questions about what to do when you feel isolated and I've heard the forums are quite friendly.

for real though, anon, I promise you're not failing. you might be struggling, but you're at kind of a weird in-between point in life and we're still in an even weirder situation in general. feeling stuck and isolated sucks, but that doesn't make it a reflection of who you are as a person. ♥