go thank yourself for nothing

Greets/Hey-Yo:

First, more fun with media, a nice story in El Hispanic News about the Nursery and our various goings on...

Second, last week saw us take a significant step toward one of the Nursery's key commitments, revenue sharing for Nursery Crew Members.

At our August 1, 2007 Weekly Classroom Training, funded by a grant from the City of Portland's Community Initiatives Program, Crew Members:

1. Discussed our earned income goals for FY 2007-08. The Nursery's budget anticipates we will sell 60% of our labor hours, resulting in $229,000 in fee revenue from a crew of 5 full time employees.

2. We then set a higher, internal goal: sell 75% of our labor hours. This would result in additional earned income. The questions then became how to track progress toward this goal, and what to do with this additional earned income.

3. Crew members will use our Job Site Visit Forms to track hours sold per day, turn in those forms every Thursday, and enter these numbers into a spreadsheet.

4. Each quarter, we will review these totals. If we have sold 75% or more of our available labor, we will have the opportunity to distribute this additional earned income (the difference btw 60% labor hours sold and 75% labor hours sold)

5. Crew members identified the following uses for additional earned income, allocating a percentage of additional earned income to each:

• Bonuses (50%). These can be used for any purpose, with several crew members expressing an interest in using the money to provide health insurance for dependents, or for investment purposes. Future trainings will present more information on these options.
• Operating Reserve (30%). This is especially exciting, because it demonstrates the crew's ongoing transition from thinking like a worker to thinking like an owner. Most of our folk have spent their lives working for someone else, in the worst cases being used up and spit out in an exploitative situation. Here, they have power, and they're starting to think about how to use it not just for themselves as individuals, but also for the good of the enterprise and the community.
  
• Field Training (10%). Sometimes, Prolandscape (or some other landscape contractor partner) offers us a training opportunity, like the chance to work with them on an irrigation installation or a bioswale project. They're willing to supervise Nursery Crew Members, but need Verde to pay Crew Member salaries.
• Donated Services (10%). Crew Members suggested we could use additional earned income as a way to donate Nursery services to an environmental project, like a restoration project prioritized by the Columbia Slough Watershed Council or some other organizational partner.

Exciting stuff 4-sho, 4-sho:



OkayFineGoodbye...