Have I Effectively Been of Service with Regeneration, Equity and Justice?

One of the main purposes of the Annual Report is to share what a nonprofit has accomplished in the last year, with a focus on accountability to donors and to the public in general. I welcome you to read our 2024 Annual Report which gives a snapshot of our organization in 2024, including a breakdown of our finances. My experience with the Annual Reports over the last few years has been that I do them out of a sense of duty, and I have never felt that the Annual Report really conveyed what I would like to convey.

This is likely, in part, because I am not skilled in this area. I have no training in running a nonprofit organization and in complete honesty, I don’t have the desire to run a nonprofit organization. I have the desire to utilize my life to be in service. And the nonprofit is a tool in that regard. All of my service could be done without a nonprofit, but within the confines of the society in which I live, and the way that money is set up, the nonprofit is a tool that I use.

So, this year I have decided to do something a little different. To write a personal message, sharing my experience with the nonprofit and going into some deeper transparency.

With one of the main purposes of an Annual Report being transparency, this letter is an excellent addition. For anyone interested in knowing how our money is truly used, and whether or not we are effective as an organization, I think this letter will be of use.

I will also share some of the lessons I have learned over the last decade of being involved in running a nonprofit, including through my discussions with colleagues who run nonprofits as well.

This letter is also a practice in transparency. My personal goal is to practice a very deep level of transparency, to the point of complete transparency. And, I’m also on a mission to embody truth. That is my intention and my objective in this message, to bring transparency and truth in a deep way to the operation of Regeneration, Equity and Justice.

A Note on the “I” in the Organization
One note that I’d like to make before getting into any details is this interesting position of me or I, and then the organization, a separate entity. In many scenarios, it is quite feasible to separate the individual from the organization. And that is an area where I have struggled over the years, because we are a very small organization. We have had no employees. Independent contractors, yes, but no employees. As far as the long-term, big picture of this organization, it has been primarily me making decisions – what we’re going to do with the money, what programs we’ll run, what we will do and what we won’t do, etc.

I have wanted for quite some time to decentralize myself from the organization, and for it to have a much more communal leading and direction. However, I have not managed to do so. I would say this is for multiple reasons. First, we have had very little money, and I haven’t found anyone who wanted to take on substantial responsibility with a commitment of multiple years, without any financial compensation. We have done the majority of our projects, campaigns, etc., through the support of volunteers. Volunteers have generally supported us for days or weeks or months and sometimes up to a couple years. I have not had the stability, structure or support that I need to be able to step away and decentralize the organization from me. For that reason, I feel it only makes sense for me to write this letter from a “first person” (“I”) position, rather than from an organizational position. So I am sharing this vulnerable, open message as myself.

I hope that those reading this will gain what they desire by my opening in this way, because ultimately this letter is only relevant to those who have any vested interest in the organization or a vested interest in me as a servant.

The Question – Have We Been Effective?
In the pages ahead, I am going to share my thoughts on whether we have been effective with our usage of finances and resources. However, upfront I’d like to share that I do not know whether or not we have been effective as an organization. Rather than decide that, I would rather put the information out there and allow anyone who has an interest to make that decision for themselves.

In the past, I have always considered myself highly effective with the use of financial resources and felt confident that if someone were to donate to my work that I could put those funds to use as effectively as most out there. Especially in comparison to very large organizations that have very large operation costs. I always felt that with my grassroots work, I could be very effective with any funds that I received. Part of this is because I have always been, in my personal life, very detail oriented and I’ve always scrutinized the dollars that I have spent and kept a ledger of my finances to track every dollar in and out. And I have always been creative and resourceful. So with all of these traits, I have for the longest time believed that I could very effectively utilize others’ money in service.

Over the last few years, I have become less confident that this is the case. Not to say that I haven’t been effective. I may very well have been. This is a matter of perspective. Some may see that I have managed to accomplish a lot with what I’ve had and others may think that I have squandered resources. Again, I am not sure.

I don’t have exact answers, but I at least want to address my concerns and be transparent. We have generally been limited in our financial resources, so doing a deeper analysis of our effectiveness is not something that has ever been done. I’m sure that there are tools that would be helpful with this. There is so much that I have wanted to do but have not managed to do. This being one of them.

There are a couple of realizations I’ve had over the years as to where I have been less effective than I would like to be.

Taking on More than We Can Handle
First, I’ve consistently had the habit of taking on more than I and the organization can handle. Generally out of a place of care and love and desiring to contribute positively to society. But also from a place of ego, of wanting to be viewed as such a contributor.

Secondly, what I’ve found is that as we have taken on more than we can handle, that we have been less effective than we could be. In 2019, at the beginning of the organization, I started Community Fruit Trees, Free Seed Project, Gardens for the People, Community Compost and Free Seed Library. I thought I could do it all. At the same time, I thought I could continue my activism. My immersive campaigns that educate and create change through my personal experience is where I’ve always been the most effective in being of service to society. For multiple years, that ended up taking a back seat as I developed all of these programs and realized I did not have the capacity to do it all. So, in a sense, I felt that I became less effective in service as I ran an organization. Ultimately, I have seen this to be a pretty standard experience among my generation, that of taking on much more than we can handle and doing it with integrity. That has resulted in projects being done with a lower level of integrity even when the heart and intentions are there.

Over the last years, I have consistently realized this, but putting this lesson into place is much harder than realizing it. I have been consistently pulling back and realizing I need to do more pulling back, and that is the path that I have been on in order to do what we do with a higher level of integrity, and for myself to live in a higher level of integrity to be of service.

Much of the time I have underestimated how much time tasks would take. For example, self-publishing Food Freedom in 2024, turned into an incredibly time intensive task, which I vastly underestimated.

One of the challenges when it comes to reporting our year is that we are an organization that is very multi-faceted. We don’t have one central, simple program that all of our time, resources and energy goes into. Rather, we have many programs going on at once (which you can see in the 2024 report). That makes reporting more challenging and harder for the public to get a full grasp on our work and understand whether or not we are an organization they want to support and put their resources into.

When I had a team of five people working together and living together in Asheville, generally every one of them was working on a separate project. And, while there was some overlap, each one was running their own area, whether it was Free Seed Project, or Community Fruit Trees, or video production. This made it challenging for the teams, because they were often kind of working on their own islands. I found that most people who want to work with me really want to collaborate and that is a need that hasn’t always been met fully.

This year we put substantial time and energy into developing a film that explores the issues of school lunch in the United States. After months of work, the project did not happen because we were not able to find a school to partner with. We had been so certain that we were going to have a school to partner with that we had moved forward on a lot of production. We spent so much time in back and forth with schools and in our planning meets. This was not efficient at all.

More Service = More Expenses
I’ve found that the more we did, the more expenses there were and then the more money we needed. Then more time had to be put into trying to get that money, rather than doing our service. In my view, too large of a portion of the time and energy of the teammates of the organization was going into that. Our fundraisers were never what I would consider to be highly successful, so our ratio of time going into them was not as worthwhile as I had always hoped.

Having a Team = Resources for Management
What I’ve found with managing a team is that it takes a substantial amount of time and resources of the organization just to go into managing a team. In order to be of service with a group of people, the group has to be functioning cohesively together at least to a certain degree. I found that so much of my time ended up going into managing the organization and people, which was never my intention. My intention was results, to be of service, not to manage people. What I learned early on in the experience was that managing people is not really my skill set or my gift. In fact, it is one of the most challenging things for me.

I struggle substantially with communication. I’ve had a lot of struggles with the people I’ve worked with. In 2022, I was introduced to Nonviolent Communication, or Compassionate Communication, and quickly saw how incredible a tool it was for our organization. From that point on, it became central to our work. We practiced Nonviolent Communication together in our meetings, we took classes together, we went to Compassion Camp together, and it became a central focus of our work to bring compassionate and cohesive communication into our organization. Thus, a substantial portion of our time, energy and money went into this, which was never part of the plan.

Over time, I started to remember that I never wanted to manage people. I simply wanted to be of service. And I realized that very well may have been one of the great struggles of the organization. I never set out to manage people. I tried to pass off the management, but never managed to do that very effectively.

Working with Volunteers
The other great challenge has been working with volunteers. No doubt, we have managed to be effective in service through volunteers. We have leveraged thousands of hours of volunteer support over the last few years. This amounts to likely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of resources of time and energy. When I do include these many hours of volunteer service in analyzing whether we have been effective, I feel a sense of satisfaction and positivity in what we’ve managed to accomplish with our limited finances.

Over the last years, I became astounded by just how much of my time and energy went into management of a team rather than being directly of service. Additionally, management often drained my energy rather than increased it, whereas my activism and my direct service increased my energy, allowing me to be even more effective in being of service.

Working with volunteers was central to our times of ineffectiveness. There was such a large amount of turnover and I felt that I was constantly training for the job over and over. I was constantly making systems. I would build systems and then there wouldn’t be people to run the systems anymore. I’d rebuild systems to meet the needs of new members. So much of my time and energy went into creating systems.

I have a high level of confidence that the systems I created were generally well laid out and clear. Yet I have found teammates often confused with the tasks. Thus, I have found myself putting substantial time into explaining the systems and trying to overcome confusion (which is not the most helpful for flowing relationships). Much of the time, it was because the teammate would simply not read the document in full or wasn’t diligent in following the instructions. I’ve come to see that a lot of minds simply do not flow well with technical issues, numbers and so on. Many of the people I work with have ADD/ADHD and struggle to stay on task or remember how to do the tasks from week to week. Yet, I still take the majority of the responsibility for this ineffectiveness in that the organization has had too many systems and different tasks. I’ve come to believe that having a more singular mission would help us to be far more effective in this regard.

My dream was always to have enough funding to be able to pay people enough money to where they could work with us for long term and really take over their program with autonomy and creative control. At times, we did get to that place to some degree, but I was never able to bring in the funds that people needed to be able to do that long term. So, responsibilities kept returning to me that previously I thought I had successfully passed off. Thus, the never ending cycle of recreating systems and reimplementing systems and training people. When I look at that area of our organization, I see myself as having been quite ineffective with my time and the resources of the nonprofit.

I’d like to note that I’m not blaming anyone and that I take full responsibility for everything. When I say that it has been hard to find volunteers that stay long term and who are dedicated, I take responsibility for that. Yet, I also have heard the exact same story consistently from many of my colleagues who run nonprofits. It seems to be that this, in large part, is because we live in such a fragmented society, one where people are pulled in so many directions at once. So many people are just trying to meet their basic needs of paying for rent and food and then are not able to follow through. Our society is set up for so little support for people. At the same time, I do think we are a generation of people that never has quite learned how to manage our time. We are in a constant state of yearning and striving, where we latch onto things, even when we know we can’t do them with integrity. I can speak personally, and say that I have experienced this myself. And I have spoken with others who have experienced this themselves. This is one of my substantial lessons in running an organization.

My Personal Labor
Another aspect to take into account as to our effectiveness with our finances is my own personal labor. Since REJ was founded, I have not been paid for any of my service financially. I have very much been paid in purpose and meaning, meeting my needs to contribute to the well being of Earth and others, and this is far more meaningful to me than money. So, I have joyfully done this service without financial compensation. I do not track my hours, but if I were to estimate, I would say I probably put in a minimum of 1,000 hours in each year. Ten hours per week would add up to 500 hours already, and there are plenty of days where I did ten hours in that one day. When we take that into account, my thoughts of whether we’ve been effective with our usage of our public support lean more towards yes, we’ve been quite effective.

As I said, I have not paid myself or been paid, but there’s one exception that I would like to add to that. In 2023, when we started Barefoot School and Foraging School, part of my intention in doing that was to earn some personal funds. I had been earning the little bit of money that I needed from public speaking in the past, but was interested in seeing if I could make a little bit that I needed through teaching in a more grassroots way. So, in the summer of 2023, I hosted the Barefoot School in Asheville, and numerous Foraging Schools in the Fall. We ran the schools through Regeneration, Equity and Justice and I was paid for my time.

Part of the impetus for Barefoot School and Foraging School was to test these schools, because in the long run, I am interested in creating an educational center for teaching and providing immersions in these Earth skills.

We offered these schools on a donation basis, where anybody could come regardless of financial donation. My intention was for the schools to be financially viable, generating enough funds for both the nonprofit as well as to earn the money I personally needed for the year. Barefoot School turned out to be a financial loss, but that evened out with the Foraging Schools. The nonprofit broke even with expenses of experimenting with these schools and I earned my $9,000 for the year. (See my financial transparency here.)

With full transparency, I would have preferred to have kept my personal finances separate from the nonprofit, as I have always desired to not be paid by the nonprofit and keep my finances and the nonprofit’s finances totally separate. There is nothing inherently wrong with me being paid for my labor, but it has always been my intention to have my service to the nonprofit be unpaid. I prefer to have it be clear to the public eye, that whenever I am raising funds, it is always to be applied directly to the service our nonprofit does and not be used to pay for my time. (Note: With these schools I was fully transparent that the funds generated were paying my income.)

Financial Compensation of Our Teammates
One of our great struggles has been the desire to pay people a living wage, but also being a nonprofit on a mission with very limited resources. A couple years back, I remember getting our wages up to $15 per hour and being elated with that. Within a very short period of time however, $15 per hour was not enough for most people. When I was bringing new people on, and I shared that we had $15 per hour available to pay, I would share that with a level of hesitancy, anxiety and disheartenment. Because of the expenses that most people have, it’s just not enough.

We always struggled with what we would like to be able to pay and what they would like to be paid, knowing that the more we paid, the less we could be putting into our programs. For multiple years, I tried to bring in enough funds to pay wages that were level with the current market, but I just was never able to.

I felt strongly that for the nonprofit to be effective and efficient, I needed to be able to hire people who were highly skilled. By bringing on these people, they would be able to have autonomy and creative control and take these programs away. I tried to for a couple of years and was never able to accomplish bringing in these funds. Thus, I was continuously cycling through volunteers and people who were not experienced in the tasks at hand. Along with that, was that we didn’t have the ability to even pay for people to work full time and I found that if someone was working just ten or fifteen hours a week for us, the service would often not be their top priority. That was one of the challenges of working with volunteers, is that we were often not the top priority and tasks that I hoped would take a couple days would take a couple of weeks. Things would continuously drag out and this was really inefficient. It was really ineffective as a usage of my time. I experienced a lot of anxiety and stress when I had many different areas that are pending and holding on. This is the experience I have consistently encountered when working with volunteers and paid teammates who have a limited amount of time.

One area that we’ve been very effective is in hiring a teammate in Nigeria. He reached out in late 2023 asking for a job, offering to work for $1 per hour, but having limited experience in anything we were needing support in. I asked what $1 per hour would do for him and he said it would be life transformational. Over the next months, we gave him paid job training, bought him a laptop and solar panel and he learned to do some of the tasks we needed support in. We’ve managed to accomplish a lot together and with his earnings he has managed to pay for his daughters schooling, move into a better apartment, buy land in which he intends to build a house and overall improve the quality of life for himself and his family. We’ve certainly accomplished a lot together and are glad to be working with him, but much inefficiency does arise as he is still new to a lot of this work.

A Leap of Faith in Hiring
In early 2024, I decided to take a leap of faith and pay a higher wage to someone in order to bring in someone I thought was highly qualified. I brought someone on with a budget of about $9,000 to be paid over three months, with them working maybe around 25 hours a week. Their wage was in the $30 an hour range, which was substantially more than I had ever paid. We had the resources to be able to do it, but with the idea being that their work was also going to generate funds, through their building of an ecommerce platform and usage of Google Ads. I put a substantial amount of time into developing this relationship.

We had a really good thing going. One of my greatest points of joy was when a month into the job, they expressed that they had experienced more healing working with me than they ever had with any other job and that it was incredibly fulfilling and meaningful work for them to be doing. My management skills had improved, my Compassionate Communication skills had improved. My ability to make sure people understood my communication style had improved and we were in a really good place. I was really putting a lot of our eggs into this basket and the plan was for them to be working with the nonprofit long term.

Things were going very well, proving the idea that if I spent more money and hired someone with higher skills that I would get those results. Much to my incredible disheartenment, toward the end of the initial three months, they had a mental breakdown of sorts due to circumstances in their own personal life. Weeks went by, and over a month went by of me patiently waiting and barely hearing from them as our work together was in limbo. Eventually it became obvious that there was not going to be the ability to continue together. This was an incredible hit to the nonprofit. This substantially impacted the nonprofit because all that we created together was designed for them to manage. To train others was a substantial task and we didn’t have the money to pay a person who was as skilled as them to continue the work forward.

All the time that had gone into creating systems with them was out the window. The tasks that they had for generating revenue such as Google Ads never generated a penny. The ecommerce website ended up being completely plagued with technical difficulties. For months after they left, I put in hundreds of hours into all the things that I thought would have been taken care of. It was a huge hit to the nonprofit. It was very disheartening and challenging for me, but very much a great lesson and a learning point.

The Year of Never Ending Technical Difficulties
One area in which we have struggled to be effective is the long stream of technical difficulties we have come across. As I shared, the ecommerce site we created was plagued with technical difficulties. I burned likely over 100 hours on the outfall of this. We had substantial issues with our newsletters, our website, our domains, and with our organization emails going to people’s spam. I have burnt hundreds of hours and a substantial amount of our funds on these technical issues between trying to fix them myself, managing others to fix them, earning money to be able to pay people to work on them and with the inefficiencies I’ve experienced when these things were not functioning properly. All of this was time that could have gone into direct service. I also experienced a lot of anxiety from these issues and I do not operate as effectively when I am under stress.

The Struggles of Managing a Team
Over the last few years, I had high hopes of the service I would be able to accomplish. I was not as effective in service as I wanted to be and I did not use the financial resources as effectively as I wanted to. However, I see that these years have been part of the formula for my work in the decades ahead. I see it not only as all worth it, but as incredibly necessary. The struggles of management and the conflict and the communication difficulties with the team led to bringing Nonviolent Communication into my life and into my service.

If I am to be of service to humanity, I will most definitely need to continue collaborating with others. I was not prepared in this manner when starting this organization and still have much work to do, however, I have come such a long way through my managing of and working with a team from 2020-2024. Although the fruits of those labors may not be seen in the productivity of the organization on a yearly basis, I do believe that the fruits of this labor will be harvested through the decades ahead of service.

Grateful and Relieved to Share This
I feel grateful and relieved to have this opportunity to share my deeper reflections on the work of our organization and my involvement in 2024 and the last few years. I am grateful to each of you who are here reading this. I do not take lightly your commitment to read this substantial article. It means a lot to me that you have the care and interest to read this through.

I also feel much relief in sharing this. I have been lacking in our financial reporting and I have been behind. I only just released the 2022-2023 Annual Report, nearly one year late for the 2023 report, and two years late for the 2022 report. I have not been living in the integrity that I desire in this realm and it is a substantial relief to be caught up.

I also feel excitement for having accomplished sharing with this level of transparency and truth. With some of these points, I felt quite vulnerable in sharing. I imagine that most people would like to show what has worked well and how successful they were, and it is quite challenging to be fully transparent as to whether we have been effective or not as an organization and whether I have been effective or not as the leader of the organization. Right now it is my central focus to bring every aspect of my life into truth and integrity. Having thoroughly shared about the nonprofit has been a substantial step in moving my life in this direction.

Love,
Robin