Compassion, Truth, and Bonesetting

I was taught that setting the bone is a crucial part of being a priest/ess, a leader. That sometimes we have to hurt in order to heal. And I was also taught that truth often hurts. We couch so many things in white lies to salve someone’s feelings, to soothe it over, to make it hurt less. But those attempts to ease pain in the short term often cause longer term pain. In essence–sometimes the deepest form of compassion is to say the hard thing. It hurts in the short term, but it heals in the long term.

I’ve written about the Frosts, and I’ve received a number of comments on my Facebook, and private messages, from people who feel that I lack compassion for Gavin Frost’s family by posting some reminders about their writings where they detail an entire chapter on sexual initiation of barely pubescent minors.

It’s not that I don’t have compassion, it’s that I’m not codependent. I’m not responsible for the feelings of the family members, and I certainly am not responsible for the feelings of those who support them somehow despite the horrific things the Frosts wrote. I am sorry that they lost a loved one, and I mean that sincerely. But I’m not going to lie about the Frosts just to make them feel better.

I’m reporting what has happened because it’s important to the broader community to not lie about Gavin Frost. You can’t ethically/honestly/journalistically write an article about a public figure and speak about the awesome stuff they did without speaking about the horrible stuff too. I’m not defaming the Frosts (or any other leader/elder I speak about), I’m speaking to things they wrote in their book or in blog posts, things they said in interviews.

Defamation means telling a lie, speaking an intentional untruth. It’s not defamation to speak the truth. And it’s not speaking ill of the dead to speak the truth of what that person did in their life.
My compassion is for the broader community, for the current future Pagans that need to remember our history so we don’t repeat it, so we don’t continue making space for leaders and authors that harm us.

I’ve not said anywhere that Gavin Frost sexually abused anyone, because I have no proof of that, so saying that would not be the truth. What I’ve said is that the chapter in the book by the Frosts (The Witches Bible and later, The Good Witches Bible) is a how-to manual for sexual abuse. And it’s a chapter, a guide, that Pagan/coven leaders have used or at least tried to use as a template. I personally know several people (and I know of others) who were harmed by coven leaders who were following the teachings of the Frosts.

My compassion is for the victims. My compassion is for all those who come after us who deserve better. My compassion and my love is for the community that (I hope) survives us. And my deepest hope is that this future Pagan community is not riddled with rape culture, misogyny, homophobia, nor with with unethical, harmful leaders. This goes far beyond the Frosts, but they are a part of our past, and sweeping what they wrote and said (and held to) under the rug is a lie.

I’m speaking up because people are eulogizing Gavin Frost without telling the whole story–or without knowing the whole story. What is remembered lives, and we must remember our failings as a community. One of our grossest failings collectively is failing to speak up when something’s wrong.

I don’t believe Gavin Frost was a completely bad person, any more than my ex was completely bad. People are complicated. The labels of “good” and “bad” aren’t really useful. People can do good things, and also bad things. People can be beloved teachers who helped you find your spiritual path, and they can also have taught and promoted some very harmful practices.

If you believe that I’m heartless for posting about the Frosts now, I’m not going to be able to convince you otherwise. But the way I was trained was in the magic of the bone-setting, of healing the longer term even if there is pain in the short term. That speaking the truth is healing, though it can hurt. There’s no way I can write about the topics that I do without hurting someone, but I do so with that intention of setting the bone, of longer term healing.

I don’t enjoy writing those posts about our harmful leaders and elders. Those are hard posts to write, and they lead to days of stress dealing with angry comments and hatemail. I lose friends when I post about these things. I lose paid teaching engagements. I don’t write these things without a cost to myself, but I write them because I love my community and I want to see it thrive. I want to see a healthy, sustainable Pagan community.

What is remembered lives, and we must not forget the mistakes of the past or we are doomed to repeat them.

Chanting, Trancing, and Ecstatic Techniques for Aspecting Part 2

This is part 2 of my post on using singing, toning, chanting, and other ecstatic techniques for aspecting and trance possession in ritual. You’re really going to want to read Part 1, and you’ll also likely want to read this post on the theology/function of aspecting and trance possession.

Toning and Singing

Toning is one of the best ways to get people singing. It’s very safe. And, there are instruments you can use to support and cradle the sound. It’s hard to get a big/enveloping sound with only 3 people in a small group. It’s even hard with 10, unless you’re all really committed to singing and making sound. You can use a singing bowl or a Shruti box or something else that makes a droning/toning sound and sing along with that.

There are two major types of chanting/breathwork–there’s chanting that slows your breathing (like toning) and there’s chanting that speeds up your breathing. One slows your heartbeat, one speeds it up. They do different things to your brainwaves too; the science on that is just a bit beyond my pay grade, but try it some time, you’ll feel the difference.

The type of chanting you use depends on what you want to happen. With trance possession in the style of Vodou, you’re looking at heavy drumming, dancing, and chanting in a faster way that makes your breathing staccato. Whereas if you have seen a roomful of Tibetan monks chanting steadily and slowly, that affects your consciousness differently.

Both are effective chanting techniques, but the question is, effective at what?

Toning

Toning and slower chants (like the Tibetan monks, or just singing OM) is an easier place to start. It’s safer, and it will build up people’s strength in their voices and their confidence.

I have a few of songs that I sing along to when I drive (here’s my start-up song) so I’m basically singing, toning, and harmonizing long drones for as long as I can sustain my breath. Here are all the reasons I do this:

• Personal spiritual practice
• Keeping my voice warmed up
• Continually build my capacity to hold more air and control that air so I can sing for longer without needing to take a breath

I can hold a note for 20 seconds with no problem. Sometimes 30 or more if my voice is really in shape. That’s important for the way breathing shifts your body and your heart rate and your brainwaves; you’re using toning as a form of breathwork, and you’re using it to shift your consciousness in a very particular way, so the more control you have over when you take a breath will impact the kind of spiritual work you can do.

It’s also important as a facilitator. If you want to build your capacity to lead chants; you need to be able to control where you breathe. One of the biggest problems facilitators run into when leading a chant is that, when they take a breath, the group stops singing. When I chant with a group, I don’t breathe in the places you’d expect so that the chant just keeps going. I breathe when the group is singing strongly, not in the “expected” breathing spaces between the lines.

Faster/Rhythmic Chanting

Eventually, you might want to try something with more staccato breathing, and bring in drumming. It’s easier to do more complicated chants once your group is feeling stronger about singing and they’re used to it, and when there’s more safety/intimacy as a group.

These could be chants with more words, and chants that are intended to speed up as you go along. More words tends to force breathing more quickly, particularly if you are also moving or dancing, or even just rocking back and forth more and more quickly.

With larger groups, I tend to caution people away from using canned music (ie, playing a CD or MP3) but with a small group, it might work well if you use it a lot and are used to it. Really depends on the song. Pre-recorded music doesn’t allow for the energy to shift in the moment, however, it can be a place to start to help get people more comfortable.

For more physical trancework, think dancing to techno or heavy drumming, bellydance, or firespinning, and singing along with that. The movement plus the chanting will put you into a different kind of altered state than the calmer toning/droning.

Here’s a video that shows two different chants. The first is a slower chant used to hold space while we journeyed to the Sacred Well one at a time. The second chant is faster and speeds up leading to an energy peak. The audio’s not the best but you can at least see the progression.

Trance Possession

If you’re trying to effect a trance possession of one ritualist, then it becomes almost the opposite of what I do when I lead a chant. When I lead a chant for a group ritual, I’m anchoring the chant and working to get the group more comfortable, helping them sing it until it “takes off” on its own and then I guide it, shape it.

With a trance possession, the group encircles the Vessel, and works to get the Vessel possessed by shaping the energy, building it higher. There can still be a facilitator guiding the speed/energy, but the Vessel is giving over to the group energy and letting that shape the experience. The group is using their own energy to help the Vessel “get there.” So the Vessel may be dancing, but the group is singing, dancing, moving as well to help build that energy and help the Vessel get possessed/draw down. It’s a collaborative effort.

Here are some videos that show chanting and drumming used by a very skilled ritual/musical group. This group has practiced together for quite some time and they have a very specific tradition, though I’m unfamiliar with it or its roots. You can see how the group works to use music to build up the energy focusing on the person who is doing the trance dancing, and how they speed up/get more into it as they give over to the music. (There are a lot of videos of this group on the channel, but I’ll just post a few here)

You can get a sense of the kind of vulnerability of the vessel, which is why I so frequently emphasize that the sense of safety is crucial to practices like this in ritual. I’m able to get large groups there because there’s a sort of anonymity in a group larger than 50.

In a group smaller than 10, you need to trust each and every person in that group to be able to go into the kind of deep trance state for invocation/aspecting/trance possession. In our culture, we’re so often wired to laugh at the person who sings and dances if it’s not performance quality, and in ritual work like this, your ability to look “good” dancing isn’t what’s required. It isn’t even required to be a good singer, though being able to stay on the melody or harmonize does help. It’s required that you do it, that you give yourself over to it, that you sing and move your body and go into the rhythm.

It’s required that you participate, that you engage, that you are present, that you are bringing your energy through your voice and body. If you sing quietly or limit yourself to small, tight movements, because you’re nervous that you’ll be judged by the group, because you’re worried someone’s going to see your fat jiggling or any other perceived physical flaw, you won’t be able to go into the depths.

Thus–using these ecstatic techniques goes far beyond just singing and toning during ritual work. All of this weaves together.

Working This Into Group Practice

What I’d suggest more than anything if you want to weave ecstatic techniques, particularly singing, is teaching the techniques themselves and why you are using them. Teach your group the singing and chanting techniques. Encourage them to practice singing as a personal spiritual practice so that they get more comfortable singing alone and as a group together.

Pro tip: I warm my voice up for about an hour before leading a workshop or ritual. I don’t wake up in the morning with a ready-to-go voice, I need to work out the gravelly sound and warm up the muscles. Your voice is a muscle, and you’re more likely to be able to sing and stay on key if you 1. warm up your voice muscles by singing and 2. regularly sing the chants you’ll be singing in ritual.

I wish every ritual participant bothered to warm their voices up before a ritual so that they are ready to jump in and participate!

I learned the hard way that I have to keep my voice warmed up. I had been singing and leading chants in rituals for a couple of years, and then I ran a weekend-long class on Raising Energy in Ritual. The morning the class started, I led the group with the first chant I’d chosen. I’d sung it so many times I was surprised to hear my voice straining to reach some of the notes, and my voice sounding a little wavery, not strong at all. I realized that I hadn’t been singing in weeks. Your voice is a muscle and you lose muscle tone fast. And let’s face it, many of us wake up and cough, there’s phlegm, our voice is deeper and maybe a little hoarse. Not the most pleasant topic, but it’s important if you’re looking to sing in ritual.

It can take me a half hour to an hour to be ready to hit the notes and sustain them for group chanting, particularly if there are difficult acoustics (like I’m chanting in an open field with no tree cover or next to a soccer game). This is part of your work as a ritualist, as a leader, as a professional. Leading rituals is work, and singing in ritual takes dedication and practice just as it does for a professional musician.

Experimenting With Techniques

I also strongly suggest being willing to experiment. You might start out with the toning/droning kind of singing, since it’s a bit more accessible. But then you can switch it up.

There’s a trance technique I use, I call it the Trance Hammer where I have the whole group singing a note/tone, and then I sing something more complicated over that. (That article also now contains a video of the technique.) In that scenario, you only need one strong singer to handle the melody, the rest can handle the tone. This adds texture, and it’s also a trance technique called “confusion technique.” It works because your brain is trying to process two separate things–the toning, and the other song–and it sends you into a deeper subconscious state.

Once your group is comfortable with the idea of singing in ritual and willing to do that, you can try more complicated chants, or add in drumming. And sometimes it’ll work and sometimes you’ll fumble, but that’s the advantage of working with a smaller group; you get to try things out without screwing up a big public ritual.

Advanced Personal/Professional Practice

As part of my own personal practice that crosses over into professional-ritualist-practice, here’s something I do regularly. I practice singing songs/melodies that I’m going to use for sung trances like the cantillation/Trance Hammer technique I mention above. Here’s how I do it.

I’ll play a song that has a melody in harmony with what I’m singing, but with different words. (Here’s the song I use for this most frequently.) I practice singing over that and not getting distracted by the other words; in fact, I try to keep an ear open for the song that’s playing so that I can sing certain words at the same time, or certain notes at the same time. And, I do all that while I’m doing a third task that requires me to pay attention to basic logistics. It could be anything like folding paper or looking up directions on Google maps, just something kinesthetic that takes my attention. In my case, I might practice this technique while painting gold borderwork on one of my art pieces or gluing tissue paper to cardboard.

Sounds complicated? It is. But, it has to be.

I’m training my brain to know that song even in the midst of chaos, in the midst of a really complicated task, and in the midst of competing music. I’m training myself to be able to not just memorize that song, but  memorize it in a way that distractions at a festival, or logistical issues with a ritual, won’t make me lose what I’m supposed to be singing. I’ve memorized the melodies and words in a way that I can sing it even when dealing simultaneously with complicated ritual logistics, or people whispering a question into my ear about their cue for the next ritual part. I can even communicate with others by nodding or offering hand signs while I’m still singing and not lose my place.

And the side benefit is that when I practice this technique at home, I get myself into a trance state and it’s part of my own personal spiritual work.

Chanting, Trancing, and Ecstatic Techniques for Aspecting Part 1

Using ecstatic techniques of singing, dancing, and drumming to draw down deities or get possessed by spirits is both an old ritual technology and a new one. It’s been used for thousands of years and you see this in the tribal customs of many religions that have continued on to the present day.

It’s a technique that also has become used more and more in modern Pagan groups, though many Pagan groups have had to rediscover it since certain traditions didn’t seem to use any ecstatic processes for this ritual function. Thus, as these techniques are rediscovered, the old is new again. However, it means we have to re-look at these techniques and look at what will work for us in our own traditions and rituals, and what won’t. And it also serves to burrow down a bit into why it works.

I was specifically asked via my Facebook group on Ritual Facilitation Skills how one could use singing and chanting as part of drawing down, but the answer’s a little more complex than that. It’s worth pointing out the framework of the person asking; she’s forming a small group, so perhaps 3-4 people to start with, and she comes from an Alexandrian tradition.

The TL:DR on this post is, if you want to use singing and chanting techniques in ritual, you have to learn how to do it, and you have to teach your group to do them too. More, you have to get their buy-in, their willingness to do it without you having to pressure them. If you have a very small group and some of them are reluctant to sing and aren’t willing to engage whole-heartedly, these techniques may fall flat.

If you have a group of five people, but only two are willing to sing, it’s like two people trying to carry a 200 pound cauldron while the rest of the group stands there and watches: not going to work out well.

What Is Aspecting, and what is Ecstatic?

Let’s start with definitions of terms. Trance possession, drawing down, invocation, and aspecting are all terms for the same basic function, but they have different connotations, as I mentioned in my last post. Trance possession is typically done with a lot of ecstatic support.

When I say ecstatic, what I mean is physically embodied techniques that take us into a deep altered state. We’re talking drumming, singing, dancing. Now, some ecstatic techniques involve sensory overstimulation, and some could involve sensory deprivation (dancing with a blindfold, sensory deprivation water tanks, etc.) Sometimes alcohol or entheogenic substances are used.

You will commonly see ecstatic work used for trance possessions in African Diasporic traditions like Vodoun when people are ridden by the Loa, or in traditional tribal cultures where the whole community is singing and dancing together and the shaman/spiritworker (or other specific people) go into shaking trances. I’ll go ahead and use the word shamanic in the anthropological sense of how the word is commonly used; these techniques are common in shamanic traditions where the tribal spiritworker is supported in their work by the singing and dancing of the whole tribe.

There’s a great documentary, Dances of Ecstasy, that I often recommend as it offers up video of several different world traditions that use trance techniques. The DVD is available on Amazon or you can order it directly from the people who created it.

Working Within A Tradition

It’s worth pointing out that I have little experience with Alexandrian or British Traditional Witchcraft, and that’s the framework the original question comes from. I’m familiar with what I’d call the “standard Wiccan ritual” format that comes from BTW since I’ve attended plenty of them, so I’m using that as sort of a guideline here for the rest of my response.

However, if you’re in a similar tradition, one potential resource is Janet Farrar. Janet trained with Alex Sanders so she comes from those traditions, but her ritual work has evolved over the years. She gave a talk a few years ago and spoke very specifically about how they are doing a lot more ecstatic trance work in their rituals, and the way they do drawing down is closer to what’s usually referred to as trance possession.

So if you’re working with traditional witchcraft and Wicca, it’s possible that Janet Farrar herself might be a good resource for how to do this within the constraints of your own tradition. She may have written about this as well, but I’m not familiar with the content of her books. (Feel free to comment or message me if you are and can recommend one of her books that might go into her approach on this).

Constraints and Intentions

One of the reasons I don’t work with what I call the “standard Wiccan ritual format” is in part because those traditions tend to offer too many limitations on the shape of the ritual. I could get into orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but the idea is that when you study in a particular tradition/religion and you’re told that the ritual must be done like this, otherwise it’s not correct, that becomes a limitation on what you can and can’t do in your ritual and still call it XYZ tradition.

I take a completely different approach. I’ve mentioned it in a few articles, but basically the way I do ritual is entirely geared toward engaging the group in a trance state. I build up layer and layer of participation to get people willing to sing, move, dance. I’m concerned with trance technique, not orthodoxy.

Some traditions have a set format for how things must be done, and sometimes those things make it hard to engage a group in participation. I talk about one ritual in my book Spiritual Scents where each person was expected to sage/smudge the person next to them, one at a time. With 60 people, that ended up taking 45 minutes, just for smudging. We were all bored to tears before the ritual even started.

The energy was flatlined.

Thus, I look at traditions and expectations around ritual and I may shift things a bit to make it more ecstatic. Cakes and Ale is one I have gone after in some of my articles too; in a larger group, Cakes and Ale is (in some traditions) supposed to be the Big Divine Communion Moment. And instead, it’s this long, annoying process of passing out styrofoam cups, juice with preservatives, cookies with preservatives…not very magical. People start having side conversations while they wait for their juice and cookie–the energy diffuses.

In my ritual work, I don’t do smudging or cakes and ale, and that’s for a few reasons but one is that if it’s going to take a long time and be boring for the group, that’s not going to make it easy to sing and build energy.

Thus, one of the pieces of advice I always offer up is, look at the intention of each piece of your ritual and what it’s supposed to achieve. If you’re told to do ABC format, and the intention is building communal energy, but the ABC format doesn’t do that…perhaps your tradition needs to be updated. Perhaps a different ritual technique would better serve that intention.

Take a look at each piece of your ritual and honestly explore whether or not the ritual techniques you’re taught to use actually effect that intention.

Ritual Logistics That Impact Ecstatic Work

It’s worth mentioning that my specialty is large group ritual; I’m not always the best at small group ritual. However, in large group ritual the challenge is getting a bunch of strangers to energetically connect and be willing to sing/dance/look like a dumbass in front of strangers. In a small group, you have the advantage of intimacy and connection. As the group’s connection builds, it can become easier to do the ecstatic work because you have that relationship and you’re not worried about looking stupid while you sing, dance, etc.

I mention all that because if you want to use singing and other ecstatic/embodied techniques, people need to feel comfortable enough to do them. In our culture, most people don’t feel comfortable singing. We’re taught that only “good” singers should sing.

I get away with it in large groups because, among other things, I’m loud enough to anchor the chant and keep the melody until the group starts to feel comfortable. Plus in a group of 50+ people there’s a certain amount of anonymity.

But the other reason I get away with it and get people singing that weren’t expecting to sing is that I’ve structured my whole ritual to build people up, to help them participate more and more until they feel safer. I don’t ask them to jump in and sing a complicated chant right away, I don’t ask them to jump in and dance in the middle. I ask for them to speak a word, or sing a tone, or to move their arms or maybe sway from side to side. And then a little later, I ask for more sound, more movement, more words.

I build it up layer by layer.

There’s an axiom of facilitation (workshops, rituals, etc) that what you do in the first five minutes sets the tone. That’s true, but it’s more complex than that. If I want the group to participate (not just watch) I do have to set that up in the first five minutes. But, I also have to layer that up through the ritual. I can’t expect someone to be comfortable anchoring a chant, or go into deep ecstasis, if they’ve been standing and watching me talk for 20 minutes. People go into “audience mode” and then getting them to do anything participatory is like stirring glue.

Now…as you can tell, this topic is deeper than just getting people to sing. I’m not explaining simple concepts, so this post has gone on pretty long and we haven’t even gotten to actual singing and chanting techniques. Part 2 will do just that, and you’ll really want to read it now that you have some background information. I also go into some of the chanting and music techniques I use as a personal practice and to train my voice. Sounds simple to say, but you can’t lead chants in ritual if you haven’t prepared yourself to sing.

Part 2 tomorrow!

Exploring Open Relationships: Part Two

When I was first exploring more casual relationships, this was also the first time that I was seeing/dating men in the Pagan community. I immediately ran into the social complexities of that. I had just finished the leadership program at Diana’s Grove, and I was realizing how very, very quickly a bad breakup could lead to disharmony. I think I managed to keep on good terms with most of those guys, but I recognized that the whole prospect was fraught with peril.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be TMI for some folks. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

Heck, I realized there was even a challenge just by connecting to Pagans on an online dating site. Imagine; I’ve been talking to a Pagan guy for a while via an online dating site, and then I realize I’m not interested in him romantically…and then I run into him at a local Pagan event. That leads to awkwardness at the very least, if not worse. If we’re both just attendees that’s one thing, but when I was in the position of running events and leading workshops and rituals, the potential for complicated group dynamics increased. Or, if it turned out that they were the leader of a Pagan group I was thinking of working with.

Hurt feelings over romantic rejection have fueled more than a few Pagan conflicts. And, on the flip side, I was becoming more concerned that my position as a leader/teacher/ritualist would cause a power dynamic. How could I know whether someone was genuinely interested, or whether they were just attracted to the “glamour” as it were? You can see where this all starts to get complicated, and that’s before any actual dates/relationship have happened.

I faced this scenario with a number of the men I briefly became lovers with: We went out, maybe had sex, and I realized that we weren’t really compatible. In some cases I liked them as friends, but not romantically, but didn’t want to hurt their feelings…and yet, I certainly couldn’t keep having sex with them just to not hurt their feelings. And in our society, we are trained to take it as a personal affront when someone “friendzones” us. I mean, I know I’ve struggled to have better boundaries around the fact that some men just aren’t going to be attracted to me, and that’s not a judgment against me, it doesn’t mean I’m bad or not attractive, it’s just that people have preferences. Chemistry is a factor. You can’t “make” someone be attracted.

So frequently, I wish I could simply say, “I’m just not that attracted to you,” or, “The way you have sex isn’t really compatible with what I need,” or whatever the issue happens to be, and have that be ok.

During this time period, I also hooked up with a guy who turned out to be not polyamorous, but a cheater. He had told me he was poly before we got together. I discovered that he was, in fact, a cheater while he was driving 6 hours to Chicago. He was going to be in town for something and we decided to get together again so he was going to stay at my place. While he was on the road, his girlfriend instant messaged me in a panic; she’d logged onto his computer and found my information. I talked to her for about 5 hours and discovered that he was a chronic cheater. When he arrived, I told him he could sleep on the couch.

Here’s the rub. He and I had met on an online dating site but we’d first met in person after he attended a Pagan event I helped to organize. And his girlfriend identified as Pagan as well. She was absolutely enraged and in tears and she said, “I’ve heard so much good about this Diana’s Grove place, I’ve always wanted to go, but to find out that one of their leaders would cheat like this, I never want to go there ever.” I sat listening to her pain for hours, and it took that long for her to understand that I was in the dark on this. That I had thought he was polyamorous because that’s what he told me.

Hopefully you can see the impact of one little thing; one date, one time having sex, one relationship, can have huge ripple effects. You make a mistake, or someone takes offense at something, and people get hurt.

After that span of months I was really unsure what to do about relationships. And I was really longing for the simplicity and stability of a monogamous relationship again. Dating is a lot of work for an introvert! It takes time to vet people, to get to know them, to meet them, to discover if there’s chemistry…and for me, having sex for the first time is fraught with peril; without diving into TMI land, I have a few issues that make sex with someone for the first time a little difficult. And, because I know that, I have some anxiety around it, which makes that even worse.

When I’m considering having sex with someone, I first engage in a lot of transparent communication about what works for me, and what doesn’t. I can’t even tell you how many men have told me, “It’s all good, we’ll do whatever you need,” or “Yeah, that sounds hot, that’s cool,” and then in actual practice, they were quite disgruntled to do anything different from their usual.

I will say that this particular time period in my life did at least give me the skills to get better at weeding people out based on their behavior either via email, instant messenger, or phone chats. “Baby, you’ve never been with me before” is a big old red flag that is now almost a sure-fire way to get me to say “No, I won’t go out with you. Bye.”

Thus, when I met Mark, it was all too easy for me to fall into a relationship with him. He was a motivated community organizer that shared a fair percentage of my geekdom. I did resist it at first, and we talked a lot about the impacts of dating within the community, particularly at the leadership level. He seemed reasonable and grounded, at the time, so I fell for that. Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time is that he was cheating on his wife with me; he’d said their relationship was over. I’m upset that I’ve been fooled by that more than once.

I’ll fast forward through most of that, but I’ll touch on this point: When he cheated on me for the first time a year after we started dating, it was with a woman that I actually liked rather a lot. She had been polyamorous for a long time, and she had been shocked when she found out that he was cheating and that he wasn’t actually in a poly relationship. I invited her over to confront Mark, and the three of us talked things through like adults. I’m sad that I didn’t get the chance to know her better. In a different time, in a different place, I’d have been happy to be her “metamor.” That’s a word I learned that night–the lover of your lover.

I think that might have been the first time I ever seriously thought that I could have a friendship connection with someone that my partner was dating. I’d always thought that, in that scenario, I’d automatically feel antagonistic, and I didn’t. (Because it’s tangentially of interest, fastforwarding in time again, I’ve become friends with a number of the women Mark’s been in relationships with, whether women he cheated on me with, or women he dated after me.)

Mark agreed to go to therapy, and I began considering the notion of what it would look like to be in an open relationship. I was clear that I wasn’t ok with opening up our relationship until he could get a hand on his compulsive cheating, but I also recognized that I just didn’t have enough libido to keep up with him.

And of course–those of you who have been through this particular excruciating phase of a post-cheating relationship will probably resonate a lot with this. The problem with trying to rebuild after cheating is that sex can rebuild intimacy…but I was dealing with depression and I had almost no libido at all. I couldn’t keep up with him before the cheating, and after, I had even less desire for sex.

If you’ve read my Pagans and Predators series, you’ve read a fair amount about the latter stages of my relationship with Mark. More cheating, more betrayal. The thing was, I’d have been mostly ok with him dating other women if I genuinely thought that he’d still come home to me, but I could never trust that.

The other concern I had came from my own experience dating within the Pagan community, and watching other Poly people navigating that. I think there’s a math algorithm there–the more Pagans you date, the more likely you are to run into a community-destroying breakup catastrophe.

I’ve also found that Polyamory/Swinging/open relationships in general are also a compounded risk because if the relationship between two people doesn’t go well (or end well), each person’s other partner or partners sometimes get involved in the fallout.

I trusted my judgment, but I didn’t trust Mark’s. And, that’s for pretty obvious reasons at this point.

More than that, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When I was married and we opened up our relationship, I didn’t ever date anyone. When I’m already in a relationship, I just don’t have the desire to go out and date people; meeting new people is tiring and exhausting. I’m an introvert, not an extrovert. Extroverts tend to thrive on meeting new people, they love the newness of it. For me, that’s work. And even if I end up liking that person, it’s still work. Because then the relationship has to be maintained.

And, let me be totally honest here: One of the biggest complaints I’ve faced in my long-term relationships is that I don’t pay enough emotional attention to my partner.

I face this weird paradox; men fall for me and they are in love with my passion and my creativity. They love my artwork, my writing, my event planning; they love the spark and fire and what I throw into that work. And they want me to turn that love and focus onto them.

I’ll be honest again: I’ve never felt that way for anyone I’ve been with.

I’ve had feelings of deep friendship with men I’ve been with, deep friendship love. But not hot, fiery, “I’m in love with you” oxytocin-rush kind of feelings. I’ve come close a few times, I’ve started to have some feelings with specific people, but I’ve never been in love with anyone I’ve been with.

In the past I’ve joked that I can’t really be polyamorous because I just don’t have time for more people. “My work is my primary relationship,” I’ve said. And in the past years, that really has become true in so many ways. And yet, I also don’t seem to be “present” enough when I’m in a monogamous relationship for my partner to be satisfied with the time I can give them. This has left me with a lot of confusion about what to do about relationships.

Part 3 coming tomorrow!

Exploring Open Relationships: Part Two

When I was first exploring more casual relationships, this was also the first time that I was seeing/dating men in the Pagan community. I immediately ran into the social complexities of that. I had just finished the leadership program at Diana’s Grove, and I was realizing how very, very quickly a bad breakup could lead to disharmony. I think I managed to keep on good terms with most of those guys, but I recognized that the whole prospect was fraught with peril.

*** Note: This series of articles goes into me exploring what relationships mean to me, and what I want out of relationship. As I tend to, I write this from a pretty open/vulnerable place, but it might be TMI for some folks. Thus, you’ve been warned. ***

Heck, I realized there was even a challenge just by connecting to Pagans on an online dating site. Imagine; I’ve been talking to a Pagan guy for a while via an online dating site, and then I realize I’m not interested in him romantically…and then I run into him at a local Pagan event. That leads to awkwardness at the very least, if not worse. If we’re both just attendees that’s one thing, but when I was in the position of running events and leading workshops and rituals, the potential for complicated group dynamics increased. Or, if it turned out that they were the leader of a Pagan group I was thinking of working with.

Hurt feelings over romantic rejection have fueled more than a few Pagan conflicts. And, on the flip side, I was becoming more concerned that my position as a leader/teacher/ritualist would cause a power dynamic. How could I know whether someone was genuinely interested, or whether they were just attracted to the “glamour” as it were? You can see where this all starts to get complicated, and that’s before any actual dates/relationship have happened.

I faced this scenario with a number of the men I briefly became lovers with: We went out, maybe had sex, and I realized that we weren’t really compatible. In some cases I liked them as friends, but not romantically, but didn’t want to hurt their feelings…and yet, I certainly couldn’t keep having sex with them just to not hurt their feelings. And in our society, we are trained to take it as a personal affront when someone “friendzones” us. I mean, I know I’ve struggled to have better boundaries around the fact that some men just aren’t going to be attracted to me, and that’s not a judgment against me, it doesn’t mean I’m bad or not attractive, it’s just that people have preferences. Chemistry is a factor. You can’t “make” someone be attracted.

So frequently, I wish I could simply say, “I’m just not that attracted to you,” or, “The way you have sex isn’t really compatible with what I need,” or whatever the issue happens to be, and have that be ok.

During this time period, I also hooked up with a guy who turned out to be not polyamorous, but a cheater. He had told me he was poly before we got together. I discovered that he was, in fact, a cheater while he was driving 6 hours to Chicago. He was going to be in town for something and we decided to get together again so he was going to stay at my place. While he was on the road, his girlfriend instant messaged me in a panic; she’d logged onto his computer and found my information. I talked to her for about 5 hours and discovered that he was a chronic cheater. When he arrived, I told him he could sleep on the couch.

Here’s the rub. He and I had met on an online dating site but we’d first met in person after he attended a Pagan event I helped to organize. And his girlfriend identified as Pagan as well. She was absolutely enraged and in tears and she said, “I’ve heard so much good about this Diana’s Grove place, I’ve always wanted to go, but to find out that one of their leaders would cheat like this, I never want to go there ever.” I sat listening to her pain for hours, and it took that long for her to understand that I was in the dark on this. That I had thought he was polyamorous because that’s what he told me.

Hopefully you can see the impact of one little thing; one date, one time having sex, one relationship, can have huge ripple effects. You make a mistake, or someone takes offense at something, and people get hurt.

After that span of months I was really unsure what to do about relationships. And I was really longing for the simplicity and stability of a monogamous relationship again. Dating is a lot of work for an introvert! It takes time to vet people, to get to know them, to meet them, to discover if there’s chemistry…and for me, having sex for the first time is fraught with peril; without diving into TMI land, I have a few issues that make sex with someone for the first time a little difficult. And, because I know that, I have some anxiety around it, which makes that even worse.

When I’m considering having sex with someone, I first engage in a lot of transparent communication about what works for me, and what doesn’t. I can’t even tell you how many men have told me, “It’s all good, we’ll do whatever you need,” or “Yeah, that sounds hot, that’s cool,” and then in actual practice, they were quite disgruntled to do anything different from their usual.

I will say that this particular time period in my life did at least give me the skills to get better at weeding people out based on their behavior either via email, instant messenger, or phone chats. “Baby, you’ve never been with me before” is a big old red flag that is now almost a sure-fire way to get me to say “No, I won’t go out with you. Bye.”

Thus, when I met Mark, it was all too easy for me to fall into a relationship with him. He was a motivated community organizer that shared a fair percentage of my geekdom. I did resist it at first, and we talked a lot about the impacts of dating within the community, particularly at the leadership level. He seemed reasonable and grounded, at the time, so I fell for that. Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time is that he was cheating on his wife with me; he’d said their relationship was over. I’m upset that I’ve been fooled by that more than once.

I’ll fast forward through most of that, but I’ll touch on this point: When he cheated on me for the first time a year after we started dating, it was with a woman that I actually liked rather a lot. She had been polyamorous for a long time, and she had been shocked when she found out that he was cheating and that he wasn’t actually in a poly relationship. I invited her over to confront Mark, and the three of us talked things through like adults. I’m sad that I didn’t get the chance to know her better. In a different time, in a different place, I’d have been happy to be her “metamor.” That’s a word I learned that night–the lover of your lover.

I think that might have been the first time I ever seriously thought that I could have a friendship connection with someone that my partner was dating. I’d always thought that, in that scenario, I’d automatically feel antagonistic, and I didn’t. (Because it’s tangentially of interest, fastforwarding in time again, I’ve become friends with a number of the women Mark’s been in relationships with, whether women he cheated on me with, or women he dated after me.)

Mark agreed to go to therapy, and I began considering the notion of what it would look like to be in an open relationship. I was clear that I wasn’t ok with opening up our relationship until he could get a hand on his compulsive cheating, but I also recognized that I just didn’t have enough libido to keep up with him.

And of course–those of you who have been through this particular excruciating phase of a post-cheating relationship will probably resonate a lot with this. The problem with trying to rebuild after cheating is that sex can rebuild intimacy…but I was dealing with depression and I had almost no libido at all. I couldn’t keep up with him before the cheating, and after, I had even less desire for sex.

If you’ve read my Pagans and Predators series, you’ve read a fair amount about the latter stages of my relationship with Mark. More cheating, more betrayal. The thing was, I’d have been mostly ok with him dating other women if I genuinely thought that he’d still come home to me, but I could never trust that.

The other concern I had came from my own experience dating within the Pagan community, and watching other Poly people navigating that. I think there’s a math algorithm there–the more Pagans you date, the more likely you are to run into a community-destroying breakup catastrophe.

I’ve also found that Polyamory/Swinging/open relationships in general are also a compounded risk because if the relationship between two people doesn’t go well (or end well), each person’s other partner or partners sometimes get involved in the fallout.

I trusted my judgment, but I didn’t trust Mark’s. And, that’s for pretty obvious reasons at this point.

More than that, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. When I was married and we opened up our relationship, I didn’t ever date anyone. When I’m already in a relationship, I just don’t have the desire to go out and date people; meeting new people is tiring and exhausting. I’m an introvert, not an extrovert. Extroverts tend to thrive on meeting new people, they love the newness of it. For me, that’s work. And even if I end up liking that person, it’s still work. Because then the relationship has to be maintained.

And, let me be totally honest here: One of the biggest complaints I’ve faced in my long-term relationships is that I don’t pay enough emotional attention to my partner.

I face this weird paradox; men fall for me and they are in love with my passion and my creativity. They love my artwork, my writing, my event planning; they love the spark and fire and what I throw into that work. And they want me to turn that love and focus onto them.

I’ll be honest again: I’ve never felt that way for anyone I’ve been with.

I’ve had feelings of deep friendship with men I’ve been with, deep friendship love. But not hot, fiery, “I’m in love with you” oxytocin-rush kind of feelings. I’ve come close a few times, I’ve started to have some feelings with specific people, but I’ve never been in love with anyone I’ve been with.

In the past I’ve joked that I can’t really be polyamorous because I just don’t have time for more people. “My work is my primary relationship,” I’ve said. And in the past years, that really has become true in so many ways. And yet, I also don’t seem to be “present” enough when I’m in a monogamous relationship for my partner to be satisfied with the time I can give them. This has left me with a lot of confusion about what to do about relationships.

Part 3 coming tomorrow!

Warding and Safety in Ritual: Video

At Pantheacon, I was invited to be part of a panel on warding and ritual safety. I blogged about my thoughts on the topic, but here’s the video of the panel discussion at Pantheacon. It includes everything except the Q&A at the end. So…feel free to ask questions here if you like :)

Warding in Ritual

I’ve been invited to be a panelist on the topic of Warding in Ritual at Pantheacon, which is the largest Pagan conference and takes place in a few weeks in San Jose, California. The folks organizing the panel worked to create an outline of questions and topics, which is very helpful for us panelists! Since I’m thinking about all of these questions, I thought I’d work up my responses as a blog post. In fact, it’s a 2-parter, because (as I tend to) I went into some depth.

Part of why I want to think about these questions a bit is because I’m a bit of the “devil’s advocate” on the panel. Meaning, I don’t really approach warding as a magical act. For me, it’s very pragmatic. In fact, I don’t even really call it warding. And yet, that piece of what I do in a ritual is still incredibly important and is still the foundation of an effective ritual.

Let me back up a bit. I approach religion and spirituality as a pantheist. I’m not a polytheist or an animist. Heck, most days I’m barely a theist at all. It’s not that I haven’t felt the grip of divine communion, of connecting to the greater mystery, it’s just that when that happens to me, even if it’s in the form of working with a specific deity, I look at that deity as a mask, a lens, a part of the greater whole. I see the various deities and archetypes not in a polytheistic sense but as a part of the All That Is.

I’m also not a dualist. Dualism (loosely) means that there is good and evil. Duality is more commonly seen as the idea of transcendance; the idea that the body and earthly concerns are to be “transcended” and that spirit is the ultimate attainment. It implies that spirit (or “up”) is “good,” and earth/body (or “down”) is “bad. Dualism then bleeds into a lot of other dualities–white/black, male/female, etc.

Because, as a pantheist, I believe in the immanent divine–that is, that everything is already divine–I don’t believe that a ritual space needs to be cleared because it’s not impure. I believe that we need purification in the sense of focus. We can’t just go from “driving our car” to “in ritual headspace.”

Being a nondual pantheist, I don’t really work with the idea of bad spirits. In my theology, I don’t need to set up magical protections against evil spirits because I don’t believe there are spirits out there with evil intent.

But that asks the question, what does warding even mean for me?

What does warding mean?
If you’re worried about a bad spirit, I can’t help you with that, it’s not my theology. For me, warding is about the people in the room and their intentions and energies.While I don’t really do much magical warding in ritual, I see the general concept of warding as establishing a boundary of general safety for the ritual work. I’d say that in most rituals, warding serves a few primary functions.

1. To protect the group from spirits or deities that might cause problems in the ritual.
2. To protect the group from humans (not present at the ritual) who would harm the ritual working
3. To protect the group from humans (present) who have ill intent toward one of the ritualists or ritual attendees.
4. To ensure that the people at the ritual can handle the ritual working, that the ritual won’t harm them, that participants have a reasonable degree of safety within the working of the ritual.

Since, theologically/cosmologically, I don’t really work with 1 or 2, I’ll focus on 3 and 4. Now–I’ll go into this more in a bit, but I hold a paradox about ritual. My job as a ritualist is to make the work as safe as I can for the participants. And, I don’t feel that deep, transformative ritual or any ritual where we’re connecting to the divine is actually ever “safe.”

First, let me talk about my concrete, brass tacks approach to ritual warding:

1. I tell people ahead of time what the ritual theme is going to be about. If we’re going on a journey to the Underworld to face our shadows, I let people know that in the email or Facebook event invite, and I also address it before the ritual begins. This gives people a chance to opt out if they aren’t prepared for such work. I feel it’s pretty rude to do an intensive ritual and not let people know ahead of time.
2. I give people some general ground rules. Some are things I don’t generally have to say, like “nobody punch each other.” That one is kind of assumed. I offer a few general agreements such as:
   1. Self responsibility: People can leave the ritual space if they need to use the bathroom, get some water, handle a coughing fit, or even just get some space.
   2. They are responsible for themselves and taking care of their needs. I just ask that if they return to the ritual area they do so with respect. That can mean something as simple as opening and closing the door quietly.
   3. Self responsibility also extends to our emotions. Especially if I’m facilitating an intensive ritual, I offer that people are welcome to express emotions. Fear, rage, sadness. That if someone’s on the floor weeping in catharsis, I’m not going to come over and “fix” them, I’m going to trust that they are expressing an emotion and leave them to it. And, if they do need help, that they can ask for it. Or even if they need a hug. I’ll usually have my ritual team raise their hands, and I’ll also have people raise their hands that are happy to give comforting hugs if asked.
3. I give participatory ground rules. Because I facilitate ecstatic, participatory ritual, I usually need to make clear that people have an obligation to participate, and that can involve speaking, moving, and singing. That participating is important to the ritual, that the ritual won’t work without each person adding their energy. And yet, I also offer choice.
4. I also address safety. This can range from:
   1. Letting people know where the bathrooms are to letting people know how they can take care of needs like getting warmer, getting water, or sitting down.
   2. I make sure people understand they have a choice in how they participate in a ritual, and that even though I will be inviting them to stand, to dance, to sing, that they can stay seated if they need to, and they can ask for help bringing a chair closer to the center if they like.
   3. On my earlier ritual promotion emails and flyers I used to clarify “no drugs or alcohol” but I have found that it really doesn’t come up in the rituals I offer.
   4. I have also offered words like “all genders welcome at this ritual” which lets trans and genderfluid people know that they, too, are welcome. In essence, I let people know who is welcome and what kind of ritual work can be expected.

In essence, I let people know what behaviors are acceptable in as concise a way as I can. I don’t usually specify, “If you’re here, and that person you hate is here, don’t glare at them,” but I always say something about how I assume that everyone has come to the ritual in the spirit of mutual respect and to do spiritual work.

Ritual Space:
For me, a huge part of warding is the space the ritual is held in. When I facilitate rituals, there are usually three scenarios.

1. One is I’ve rented an inside venue in Chicago, so the ritual is held in a large room.
2. Or, I’m offering a ritual at a Pagan festival or conference.
3. The third is when I’m offering a ritual at a public park venue, such as for a Pagan Pride event.

Where the ritual is located, and how much privacy we have, is core to the concept of warding, safety, and boundaries. There’s an intimacy I can achieve in a group ritual where the doors close that I cannot get in a ritual hosted in a public park where people are standing around watching us. Four walls, or the privacy of a grove of trees at a retreat center, are almost the definition of boundaries. Boundaries are establishing a line, a space. For me, I don’t really cast a circle, it’s more that I acknowledge that the ritual is beginning, that we’ve chosen to be here and do this work, and we are moving into sacred work. Having a good physical space for the ritual where we won’t have interruptions is key.

For instance, the energetic scenario of doing a ritual at a public park for a Pagan Pride and we have people standing around watching us is completely different from an evening ritual after we’ve all been working together for one or two days in a retreat format.

Warding Gone Bad
I can honestly say that the only times I’ve ever had a problem are when I didn’t lay out (or properly uphold) the above group agreements. Typically I facilitate deep, intensive rituals with cathartic, transformative work. I use ecstatic techniques, and there’s often a significant part of the ritual where people are facing shadows or releasing wounds from their past, transforming their pain…really intensive work. In the Reclaiming tradition there’s a phrase for this, “Puking Cauldron” rituals, because sometimes the ritual gets “taken over” by the most overdramatic person who needs a lot of attention.

However, I don’t have this happen in my rituals, largely because I set up pretty clear agreements for behavior.

That being said…there was this one time where I had a guy in my ritual. We’ll call him Anger Management Guy. Without getting into too many details, I was asked to teach some classes on ritual technique and lead an Imbolc ritual for a midwestern Pagan group.

When I arrived, Anger Management Guy was the one who picked me up at the bus station. We had to stop off at his house so he could smoke pot before he took me to the venue where I was going to teach the Friday night class. The guy was very agitated, and he and his very pregnant wife seemed to have a strange dynamic that set off my red flags. But, I was a guest, so I brushed it off. The next day, during the Imbolc ritual, I had three people (including his wife) taking on the role of various Brigids during the ritual. I stood at the altar of Brigid of the Forge.

We were chanting as each ritual participant went to the different Brigid altars. When Anger Management Guy went over to his wife’s altar, he flaked out. He started actually seething, rocking back and forth, shaking, spouting out nonsense.

Now–I was able to manage it in the moment, however, this shouldn’t have ever happened because I should have trusted my instincts about this guy and not allowed him into the ritual. During the car ride from the bus stop, he had told me some things about his life, and he spoke in a way that seriously concerned me.

Warding 101: Before you even look at magical options, just look at logistics. Are you doing an intensive ritual? Is that person really a good fit for the ritual? You’re there to ensure the group’s safety, and each individual’s safety. Trust your instincts, and if you’ve established what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable, and someone crosses that line, that boundary, it’s your job to kick them out.

In fact, I’d offer that one of the most important warding jobs, particularly at a public ritual, is the person managing the door.

Warding and Psychic Attack
I’ll take that a little further and address the aspect of warding that is related to the function of group safety, and in specific, people who are worried about other people sending negative vibes from outside the ritual, or people who are inside of the ritual sending negative vibes at each other. Sometimes when people talk about warding they talk about psychic attack. A quote I often hear is, “Moonpie was at that ritual. He was psychically attacking me,” or, “Featherbottom was throwing off the energy of the whole working.”

In a purely psychic sense, I don’t really think it works like that.

One single person can throw off the energy of the room, but it usually requires action on their part. One person who keeps interrupting the facilitator, or who is sitting there glaring and being rude to people, one participant who is drunk and disorderly…there are a dozen scenarios where one participant can throw off the energy of a ritual, but simply thinking negative things at someone isn’t going to do a whole lot. It’s when people take concrete actions that things get wonky, like Anger Management Guy.

One negative participant can throw the energy off if everyone’s worried about that participant. That collective worry about aberrant behavior will throw things off. For instance, I led a ritual where one participant got more and more agitated until he left. Until he left, everyone kept glancing over at him. They weren’t paying attention to the rest of the ritual, they were worried about the guy because he’d been rude.

If the presence of an ex or someone you had a falling out with is going to throw you off as a facilitator, there’s an easy answer to the problem–that person shouldn’t be in the ritual. For instance, my ex isn’t welcome at any ritual I offer. I’m not worried he’ll send psychic energy at my ritual and throw it off from outside the ritual, because I personally don’t think energy works like that. I don’t need to protect against him because he’s not in the room.

That being said, I have twice now taken supporting ritual roles where my ex also had a ritual role. One time in specific, another ritual participant was the woman he had cheated on me with and a bunch of her friends who hated me. She literally stomped and pouted when I walked by her. If I’d been leading the ritual, she wouldn’t have been welcome, but that wasn’t my call. This basically breaks my cardinal rules of ritual facilitation, because there were enough people in the ritual who knew about the breakup with my ex, and about the cheating, and all the bad blood and drama. That many people who are aware of drama can, absolutely, throw the energy off.

And for certain, she was glaring daggers at me from across the room and wishing me ill.

In my case, I let it roll off of me because 1. I don’t believe her ill will can actually harm me, and 2. my focus was on the larger group and the integrity of the ritual. I was fully invested in helping to heal the rifts in the community that had sourced from the messy breakup, and so I was able to ignore her pouting and stomping. Ok, I admit, I laughed a little, and that helped.

Essentially, to psychically manage that ritual (since I was responsible for getting people chanting and raising energy), I had to completely, authentically, fully invest in the energy of community building and healing. I had to believe that this ritual would help that process, and that allowed me to move past any fears or nervousness I had about facilitating in a hostile environment. Because it mattered.

Part two will be posted tomorrow!

Pagan Infrastructure: Fundraising Challenges We Face

It’s probably pretty obvious that I’m in support of Pagan infrastructure, whether that’s seminary/clergy training, leadership training, physical sacred land, or other Pagan organizations.

My own 5-10-year plan is to have land of my own outside of Chicago; a seminary/monastery/temple/farm/cooperative living space. I want to help offer leadership training to Pagans who are looking for that, as well as have self-sustaining land.

But there’s a few challenges to building that infrastructure, and to fundraising for that. Some challenges are easier to overcome than others.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability in the past years as I’ve worked to create an organization focused on offering Pagan leadership training to bring forward what I learned at Diana’s Grove and other places.

As I post this, I’m in the final hours of my fundraiser on Indiegogo. I’ve become aware in the past months that I can’t keep going traveling and teaching the way that I have. It’s not financially sustainable for me. And yet, I feel strongly that Pagans need the infrastructure of more leadership training, Pagans need access to it, but therein lies one of the conundrums. There are many infrastructures that I think Pagans really want–and that our communities really need as we move forward–but there’s a few things in our way.

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First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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I’ve worked to observe the Pagan community and try to deconstruct some of the less-useful statements like “All Pagans are broke” and look at what’s going on beneath the surface. Here are some of the challenges in the way of building infrastructures for the Pagan community, and thus, challenges to fundraising.

1. Pagans are often anti-establishment and resistant to donating money, especially Pagans who converted from one of the dominant religions. (Though, Pagans are just as susceptible to capitalism as anyone else and will pay for “shiny” things/events.)
2. Pagans are often counterculture and creative types  which seems to result in less Pagans having higher-paying jobs, or, Pagans who are more adversely affected by the crappy economy. We have a lot of artists, creatives, and dreamers, and typically folks like this take lower-paying jobs or are more adversely affected by an economic downturn.
3. A lot of Pagan leaders and groups out there have screwed up with money in the past, making it difficult for Pagans to want to donate to them, or to other groups. A group in Michigan dissolved after decades of work raising 25K for land which was embezzled by a board member with catastrophic medical expenses.
4. Many Pagan leaders don’t have the business/not-for-profit management skills to manage an organization and make it financially sound. In fact those skills take money to gain, so it’s a catch-22. I’ll tell you this–if I had the money to go back to school, I’d finish up my bachelors and get a certificate in NFP management.
5. Numbers. We’re perhap 1/2 of 1% of the population or less. So the population size that many of the dominant religions pull get tithes/donations from for tithes isn’t feasible for a Pagan group just because of numbers.
6. Diverse traditions. Just because there are maybe a few thousand Pagans in all of Chicagoland, doesn’t mean all of them follow my tradition or your tradition or any of the traditions represented by a local group. In fact, there are dozens and dozens if not hundreds of specific traditions–someone might be the only Hellenic or Celtic Reconstructionist in a hundred miles.

All of these factors–and more–add up to why it’s difficult to build Pagan infrastructure. Not impossible, just an uphill struggle.

We can do it by solving problems on both ends of the spectrum–the problematic leadership issues, and, the Pagans who feel they shouldn’t have to pay for anything. I think there are a number of factors that could shift the balance in fundraising:

1. Strong, healthy organizations that are vocal–we need some organizations that don’t have a back history of disgruntlement to step forward and do great work and have clear, clean books. And, perhaps as well, longer-term orgs who may have made mistakes but who have worked to correct those, and there’s a few orgs that could fall into that category. Basically, we need some “poster” organizations, some flagships, to say, “See, an ethically-run NFP can do a good job with your money, and here’s how they did it.”
2. Continue developing Pagan interest in philanthropy. This one’s harder, and requires Pagans to see the value in donating to the orgs out there doing work. But, #1 helps with this. Focusing on the needs of Pagans is another way–ie, making a strong connection between, this is your money, and this is what your money buys in terms of Pagan services.

What does the future look like?
There are some really amazing possibilities and resources out there. There are some Pagans doing things that are already providing resources for our communities, like Circle Sanctuary, that does a lot of Pagan advocacy. Cherry Hill, that is a non-tradition-specific Pagan seminary providing tools and skills including pastoral counseling, among other things. There’s the new organization, the Pantheon Foundation, that launched at PantheaCon this year, that will offer fiscal sponsorship to smaller Pagan groups that don’t have the resources to get a 501C3 designation on their own, among other things. There’s The Wild Hunt blog, which is a news outlet for Pagans about news within the community, as well as an aggregator about Pagans in the news.

There are a lot of other resources out there. There are success stories and there are failures. There are many Pagans who have tried to create a local Pagan community center, or who have bought Pagan land. Some have been successful, some have not. Any group out there that organized a Pagan Pride event or other small festival probably had to raise money somehow to make that happen, or at least marshall volunteer forces.

The one thing that is consistent in all of this, however, is that these organizations need money to do the work they do. And that’s for various reasons and doesn’t at all have to do with largesse and mismanagement of resources. It takes money to build infrastructure. It takes volunteers to build infrastructure. It takes professionals to build infrastructure. 

We can have some amazing resources as a community if we work together. Some of the problems we face don’t have easy solutions, but if there is one strength to the Pagan community, it’s that we’ve always done a lot with a little. We know how to stretch our resources. We know how to be creative.

I’m an optimist. I’m excited for what we can do together. On Wednesday, I’ll be announcing a call for writing submissions on an anthology for Pagan leadership through Immanion Press, and I’d love to hear of some of the success stories out there. I’d love to be able to talk about the things we’ve done, and what we can do together if we put our collective brilliance to it.

Pagan Infrastructure: Fundraising Challenges We Face

It’s probably pretty obvious that I’m in support of Pagan infrastructure, whether that’s seminary/clergy training, leadership training, physical sacred land, or other Pagan organizations.

My own 5-10-year plan is to have land of my own outside of Chicago; a seminary/monastery/temple/farm/cooperative living space. I want to help offer leadership training to Pagans who are looking for that, as well as have self-sustaining land.

But there’s a few challenges to building that infrastructure, and to fundraising for that. Some challenges are easier to overcome than others.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability in the past years as I’ve worked to create an organization focused on offering Pagan leadership training to bring forward what I learned at Diana’s Grove and other places.

As I post this, I’m in the final hours of my fundraiser on Indiegogo. I’ve become aware in the past months that I can’t keep going traveling and teaching the way that I have. It’s not financially sustainable for me. And yet, I feel strongly that Pagans need the infrastructure of more leadership training, Pagans need access to it, but therein lies one of the conundrums. There are many infrastructures that I think Pagans really want–and that our communities really need as we move forward–but there’s a few things in our way.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

——————————————————————–

I’ve worked to observe the Pagan community and try to deconstruct some of the less-useful statements like “All Pagans are broke” and look at what’s going on beneath the surface. Here are some of the challenges in the way of building infrastructures for the Pagan community, and thus, challenges to fundraising.

1. Pagans are often anti-establishment and resistant to donating money, especially Pagans who converted from one of the dominant religions. (Though, Pagans are just as susceptible to capitalism as anyone else and will pay for “shiny” things/events.)
2. Pagans are often counterculture and creative types  which seems to result in less Pagans having higher-paying jobs, or, Pagans who are more adversely affected by the crappy economy. We have a lot of artists, creatives, and dreamers, and typically folks like this take lower-paying jobs or are more adversely affected by an economic downturn.
3. A lot of Pagan leaders and groups out there have screwed up with money in the past, making it difficult for Pagans to want to donate to them, or to other groups. A group in Michigan dissolved after decades of work raising 25K for land which was embezzled by a board member with catastrophic medical expenses.
4. Many Pagan leaders don’t have the business/not-for-profit management skills to manage an organization and make it financially sound. In fact those skills take money to gain, so it’s a catch-22. I’ll tell you this–if I had the money to go back to school, I’d finish up my bachelors and get a certificate in NFP management.
5. Numbers. We’re perhap 1/2 of 1% of the population or less. So the population size that many of the dominant religions pull get tithes/donations from for tithes isn’t feasible for a Pagan group just because of numbers.
6. Diverse traditions. Just because there are maybe a few thousand Pagans in all of Chicagoland, doesn’t mean all of them follow my tradition or your tradition or any of the traditions represented by a local group. In fact, there are dozens and dozens if not hundreds of specific traditions–someone might be the only Hellenic or Celtic Reconstructionist in a hundred miles.

All of these factors–and more–add up to why it’s difficult to build Pagan infrastructure. Not impossible, just an uphill struggle.

We can do it by solving problems on both ends of the spectrum–the problematic leadership issues, and, the Pagans who feel they shouldn’t have to pay for anything. I think there are a number of factors that could shift the balance in fundraising:

1. Strong, healthy organizations that are vocal–we need some organizations that don’t have a back history of disgruntlement to step forward and do great work and have clear, clean books. And, perhaps as well, longer-term orgs who may have made mistakes but who have worked to correct those, and there’s a few orgs that could fall into that category. Basically, we need some “poster” organizations, some flagships, to say, “See, an ethically-run NFP can do a good job with your money, and here’s how they did it.”
2. Continue developing Pagan interest in philanthropy. This one’s harder, and requires Pagans to see the value in donating to the orgs out there doing work. But, #1 helps with this. Focusing on the needs of Pagans is another way–ie, making a strong connection between, this is your money, and this is what your money buys in terms of Pagan services.

What does the future look like?
There are some really amazing possibilities and resources out there. There are some Pagans doing things that are already providing resources for our communities, like Circle Sanctuary, that does a lot of Pagan advocacy. Cherry Hill, that is a non-tradition-specific Pagan seminary providing tools and skills including pastoral counseling, among other things. There’s the new organization, the Pantheon Foundation, that launched at PantheaCon this year, that will offer fiscal sponsorship to smaller Pagan groups that don’t have the resources to get a 501C3 designation on their own, among other things. There’s The Wild Hunt blog, which is a news outlet for Pagans about news within the community, as well as an aggregator about Pagans in the news.

There are a lot of other resources out there. There are success stories and there are failures. There are many Pagans who have tried to create a local Pagan community center, or who have bought Pagan land. Some have been successful, some have not. Any group out there that organized a Pagan Pride event or other small festival probably had to raise money somehow to make that happen, or at least marshall volunteer forces.

The one thing that is consistent in all of this, however, is that these organizations need money to do the work they do. And that’s for various reasons and doesn’t at all have to do with largesse and mismanagement of resources. It takes money to build infrastructure. It takes volunteers to build infrastructure. It takes professionals to build infrastructure. 

We can have some amazing resources as a community if we work together. Some of the problems we face don’t have easy solutions, but if there is one strength to the Pagan community, it’s that we’ve always done a lot with a little. We know how to stretch our resources. We know how to be creative.

I’m an optimist. I’m excited for what we can do together. On Wednesday, I’ll be announcing a call for writing submissions on an anthology for Pagan leadership through Immanion Press, and I’d love to hear of some of the success stories out there. I’d love to be able to talk about the things we’ve done, and what we can do together if we put our collective brilliance to it.

Fundraising 4: Free Services for Pagan Events

One of my great regrets as a Pagan organizer is that when I run an event, I’m often asking people to present or perform for free. Granted–I’m often presenting for free myself. But I still feel that people offering up a professional skill should be paid for their work.

Yet, I know how much most regular Pagan events pull in financially. I know that an event without a big name will probably bring in just enough to pay expenses.

On the other hand, I meet a lot of people, including Pagan organizers, that assume that any Pagan should offer their skills and talents for free, and I’m not ok with that. But how do we negotiate the gray area on this?

Some readers, performers, and presenters are happy to donate their time. Many of them can’t contribute financially to the event, but they can donate their time. In fact, several members of my own community in Chicago can’t afford to donate financially toward an event, however, they come early to help me set up, and stay late to help me clean up.

I think as members of a community that that is a fair contract–people offer their time and services, and help build a stronger community that they themselves are invested in, and that in term serves them. I’ve traveled and taught for free, and I’ve paid out of pocket for gas money, plus car repairs. I’ve paid out of pocket to teach at Pagan Pride events, I pay to travel to Pagan conferences, I pay for hotel out of pocket. As I’ve mentioned in past articles, even when I travel and teach for the cost of gas, there’s the “cost” of car maintenance.

And over time, I’ve gotten to a place where I cannot teach for free. If it’s local and there’s no big travel cost, and I want to support a community initiative–sure. I can do that. But, I can’t afford to drive a few hours and eat the cost of gas and car maintenance. I wish I could, but I can’t.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

——————————————————————–

Free isn’t Free
So I think that the first thing an event coordinator needs to be aware of is that free isn’t free. If a band comes and plays at your event, there’s the cost of travel, the hassle of moving equipment, dozens of other factors. I’ve seen a few great memes on Facebook about how many venues will tell a band, “Oh, you should do my bar for $0 or for $__ pittance, because it’ll get you great exposure.”

That band is still racking up a cost by playing, particularly if any travel is involved. For many living the “starving artist” lifestyle, that’s really not too far from the truth. That $5 or $10 (or $100) in gas money is more than their monthly budget allows for.

I have people all the time say, “Oh, my event is just over in ___, and it’s a free event so I can’t pay you, but it’ll be good exposure.” Well…it is good exposure. Maybe. But I may literally not have the $30 to get there and back.

So when you’re considering asking someone to offer their services at your event for free, first take into account what they might be paying out of pocket. And, perhaps that’s an area of negotiation; maybe they would be able to play your event (or take pictures, or read cards) if you were able to provide them travel money. Also consider proactive ways that you can promote that professional and their work to help make the event worth their while.

It’s at least a place to start.

Reasons to do an Event for Free
There are certainly times when it does make sense for someone to do an event for free, whether that’s a band, a reader, a photographer, or a presenter like myself.

1. If it’s a really great promotional opportunity for me as a band/writer/artist/teacher that will ultimately bring me paid income
2. If I have a significant investment in a particular community and that’s a way that I can donate my energy. Perhaps a group where I wish I could tithe money to but instead I can offer my services.

When to Ask for People to Donate Their Time
There are times when I ask people if they are willing to do readings at fundraiser events. Or when I ask people to perform as dancers or musicians for free, or to teach workshops for free. I only do this if it’s not going to be a significant outlay of money for them, and if they are willing, and if they have at least some investment in the community. I also may have to squeeze a little money out of the event budget to at least cover their costs.

**As a quick aside, I’m operating under the assumption that I’m talking about presenters, bands, performers, readers, or other professionals who would not necessarily be headliners. If we’re talking about a person or group that are a big draw on their own, that’s a different  contract entirely.

It’s possible that a professional or group might be willing to donate their time for a local cause, but probably only if they have a significant investment in that local community. As an event organizer, I really do hate asking people to donate their time when they are doing work that they should be getting paid for. But then, I hate asking people to pay for classes I teach. I value my time and my work, and yet I know times are tough and I want everyone to have the opportunity to take workshops and attend events.

All I can say is that I’ve been on both sides of it, and it’s walking a tightrope. I wish there was some other financial model that allowed for enough abundance, but sometimes it’s just a numbers game. There needs to be enough people in a community to support an event or a class, and for so many Pagans, there just isn’t.

Entertainment and Big Names
On the other hand, in some areas, a big entertainment-focused event can work as an effective fundraiser. There’s that saying that you have to spend money to make money, and it really is true. When you can afford a better venue, and when you can afford a good DJ or a good band, or a burlesque troop, and afford a good graphic designer to make your promotional materials promoting event…when you have a few thousand dollars to actually put on a big event, you can actually draw in a nice profit and use that to fund future activities.

Similarly, bringing in a bigger name presenter can be a big draw. I’ve worked with a few pretty big names, and for some of them I was convinced that there was no way we were going to be able to pay their fee and travel expenses and the venue. However, for the big names, miraculously people find that $25 or $100 or $200 to attend the event.

Now–I’m not going to get into the angst some Pagans have around the idea of “big name Pagans.” All I will say is, there are some big names that have earned that status because they are freaking amazing teachers, and having the opportunity to take a class with them is more than worth it. These teachers are finite resources–they can only travel so much, and, they will only live so long.

There are other big names that are not worth the time or the money. Figuring that out can be tricky, however, that’s part of why I recommend that any local organizer looking to bring in big names should go to some of the big Pagan conferences to get a feel for what some of those big names offer as far as their skill leading workshops and rituals.

When you are promoting an event to your local community and you are able to say, “I’ve seen Starhawk present in the past and she does amazing work,” that personal testimonial will make people stop and think about it, vs. just, “Oh, another workshop.”

I find that it’s very important to be able to get behind the presenters I’m bringing into town and be able to personally recommend them. I’m not going to bring in a big name just to bring in a lot of money.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that when you bring in a big name band or a presenter for either something like a concert or a witches ball, or for a weekend class, you have to charge more because the band/teacher has a cost. And thus, many of the people in your community who are low income will not be able to afford to attend.

In my case, I generally try to balance this out by offering entertainment events that have a firm cost, and educational events that have scholarships or sliding scale. But sometimes, I just have to charge a flat fee.

This is a difficulty that can better be negotiated through fundraising–if our group has a “kitty” of money and we can pay out of that fund to offer a few scholarships for 2-3 people who are highly active volunteers, that negotiates that pretty well, if I’m able to do something like that. Or, I can negotiate for a few work-exchange slots for people to help out with an event by taking volunteering roles.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve heard of numerous examples of events that went out of their way to offer work exchange for volunteers where the volunteers didn’t actually do any work, but still got to attend the class or event.

At some point I’ll probably do a longer post on negotiating work exchange, because it really does need to be contracted out.

And ultimately, as an event coordinator, you’re still left with the struggle of paying your professionals–whether they are a big name or not–and getting enough money in the door to make the event financially sustainable.

Breaking Even
At most Pagan events that I run (ie, small classes and sabbats), it’s been my experience that I’m usually barely able to break even past my rental expenses. I usually have a little bit of money for event food, ritual supplies, Meetup.com costs. Sometimes not.

I’ve found that concerts with more well-known Pagan musicians seem to bring in far more money. There, I make enough money to pay my venue rental, pay my musicians, and put a little in the kitty. The surplus from having SJ Tucker and Sharon Knight in Chicago for Lughnassadh paid for my venue rental for the Samhain ritual, which did not, unfortunately, break even.

And while there are some general event planning patterns that can help any Pagan out there looking to offer events that bring in enough money, a lot of it depends greatly on the region. In some areas, it’s nothing to have to drive an hour or even two hours to get to a Pagan event and people are used to it. In Chicago, if that sabbat ritual isn’t on someone’s train line, it’s unlikely they’re going to attend.

Theoretically in Chicago there are thousands of Pagans, and yet I often get far better attendance when I travel to a rural area. So some of this is knowing about event planning and what will bring in revenue–and some of it is knowing your local community. How far will people travel? How much are they willing to pay for a class? How much are they willing to pay for a concert or ball?

Ultimately my goal is for Pagans to have access to more financial resources. It takes money to make money, and some of the resources we want in our communities have a cost associated. If we have access to more money as a community, we can afford some of those resources, like training for Pagan clergy, or general Pagan education, or dedicated Pagan community centers, or Pagan advocacy groups.

And what is also important is paying our professionals for their time, instead of asking them to offer their skills for free.

When someone donates their time to an event/cause, it’s exactly that–it’s a donation, it’s an offering. It’s an exchange. Maybe an event coordinator is asking me to donate my time. Or, maybe I’m asking them to donate their time.

Any time you’re asking someone to donate their time it should not be an expectation. I would say that as a Pagan teacher, what has upset me the most is the expectation that not only will I teach for free, but when someone assumes I’ll pay out of pocket to travel to XYZ event for free.

It should never be an expectation. I donate my time to events and causes I believe in and want to support, even though I can’t do so financially. For instance, I pay to attend Pagan Spirit Gathering, even though I teach there, because that is my “tithe” to Circle. PSG is a fundraiser that raises money for Circle’s operating costs for the year.

But, any Pagan organizer asking for something like that should understand that that is what they are asking for, not that performers “should” just perform for free, or that readers should automatically donate their time.

Ultimately, this is why a lot of Pagan organizers burn out–negotiating all that is a lot of work. Typically, it’s a lot of unpaid work. Most people only have so much juice for it until they get sick of the endless tightrope walking. Similarly most Pagan performers get pretty sick of being asked to perform for free.

I don’t know the answers for how to bring more revenue into the Pagan community. It sure as heck isn’t bake sales. It’s something I think about a lot, because, if we had a little bit more money to work with, we’d be able to pay more of our professionals and have event budgets that were actually viable. And the more events that we can offer to our communities, the stronger our communities will be.

Fundraising 4: Free Services for Pagan Events

One of my great regrets as a Pagan organizer is that when I run an event, I’m often asking people to present or perform for free. Granted–I’m often presenting for free myself. But I still feel that people offering up a professional skill should be paid for their work.

Yet, I know how much most regular Pagan events pull in financially. I know that an event without a big name will probably bring in just enough to pay expenses.

On the other hand, I meet a lot of people, including Pagan organizers, that assume that any Pagan should offer their skills and talents for free, and I’m not ok with that. But how do we negotiate the gray area on this?

Some readers, performers, and presenters are happy to donate their time. Many of them can’t contribute financially to the event, but they can donate their time. In fact, several members of my own community in Chicago can’t afford to donate financially toward an event, however, they come early to help me set up, and stay late to help me clean up.

I think as members of a community that that is a fair contract–people offer their time and services, and help build a stronger community that they themselves are invested in, and that in term serves them. I’ve traveled and taught for free, and I’ve paid out of pocket for gas money, plus car repairs. I’ve paid out of pocket to teach at Pagan Pride events, I pay to travel to Pagan conferences, I pay for hotel out of pocket. As I’ve mentioned in past articles, even when I travel and teach for the cost of gas, there’s the “cost” of car maintenance.

And over time, I’ve gotten to a place where I cannot teach for free. If it’s local and there’s no big travel cost, and I want to support a community initiative–sure. I can do that. But, I can’t afford to drive a few hours and eat the cost of gas and car maintenance. I wish I could, but I can’t.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

——————————————————————–

Free isn’t Free
So I think that the first thing an event coordinator needs to be aware of is that free isn’t free. If a band comes and plays at your event, there’s the cost of travel, the hassle of moving equipment, dozens of other factors. I’ve seen a few great memes on Facebook about how many venues will tell a band, “Oh, you should do my bar for $0 or for $__ pittance, because it’ll get you great exposure.”

That band is still racking up a cost by playing, particularly if any travel is involved. For many living the “starving artist” lifestyle, that’s really not too far from the truth. That $5 or $10 (or $100) in gas money is more than their monthly budget allows for.

I have people all the time say, “Oh, my event is just over in ___, and it’s a free event so I can’t pay you, but it’ll be good exposure.” Well…it is good exposure. Maybe. But I may literally not have the $30 to get there and back.

So when you’re considering asking someone to offer their services at your event for free, first take into account what they might be paying out of pocket. And, perhaps that’s an area of negotiation; maybe they would be able to play your event (or take pictures, or read cards) if you were able to provide them travel money. Also consider proactive ways that you can promote that professional and their work to help make the event worth their while.

It’s at least a place to start.

Reasons to do an Event for Free
There are certainly times when it does make sense for someone to do an event for free, whether that’s a band, a reader, a photographer, or a presenter like myself.

1. If it’s a really great promotional opportunity for me as a band/writer/artist/teacher that will ultimately bring me paid income
2. If I have a significant investment in a particular community and that’s a way that I can donate my energy. Perhaps a group where I wish I could tithe money to but instead I can offer my services.

When to Ask for People to Donate Their Time
There are times when I ask people if they are willing to do readings at fundraiser events. Or when I ask people to perform as dancers or musicians for free, or to teach workshops for free. I only do this if it’s not going to be a significant outlay of money for them, and if they are willing, and if they have at least some investment in the community. I also may have to squeeze a little money out of the event budget to at least cover their costs.

**As a quick aside, I’m operating under the assumption that I’m talking about presenters, bands, performers, readers, or other professionals who would not necessarily be headliners. If we’re talking about a person or group that are a big draw on their own, that’s a different  contract entirely.

It’s possible that a professional or group might be willing to donate their time for a local cause, but probably only if they have a significant investment in that local community. As an event organizer, I really do hate asking people to donate their time when they are doing work that they should be getting paid for. But then, I hate asking people to pay for classes I teach. I value my time and my work, and yet I know times are tough and I want everyone to have the opportunity to take workshops and attend events.

All I can say is that I’ve been on both sides of it, and it’s walking a tightrope. I wish there was some other financial model that allowed for enough abundance, but sometimes it’s just a numbers game. There needs to be enough people in a community to support an event or a class, and for so many Pagans, there just isn’t.

Entertainment and Big Names
On the other hand, in some areas, a big entertainment-focused event can work as an effective fundraiser. There’s that saying that you have to spend money to make money, and it really is true. When you can afford a better venue, and when you can afford a good DJ or a good band, or a burlesque troop, and afford a good graphic designer to make your promotional materials promoting event…when you have a few thousand dollars to actually put on a big event, you can actually draw in a nice profit and use that to fund future activities.

Similarly, bringing in a bigger name presenter can be a big draw. I’ve worked with a few pretty big names, and for some of them I was convinced that there was no way we were going to be able to pay their fee and travel expenses and the venue. However, for the big names, miraculously people find that $25 or $100 or $200 to attend the event.

Now–I’m not going to get into the angst some Pagans have around the idea of “big name Pagans.” All I will say is, there are some big names that have earned that status because they are freaking amazing teachers, and having the opportunity to take a class with them is more than worth it. These teachers are finite resources–they can only travel so much, and, they will only live so long.

There are other big names that are not worth the time or the money. Figuring that out can be tricky, however, that’s part of why I recommend that any local organizer looking to bring in big names should go to some of the big Pagan conferences to get a feel for what some of those big names offer as far as their skill leading workshops and rituals.

When you are promoting an event to your local community and you are able to say, “I’ve seen Starhawk present in the past and she does amazing work,” that personal testimonial will make people stop and think about it, vs. just, “Oh, another workshop.”

I find that it’s very important to be able to get behind the presenters I’m bringing into town and be able to personally recommend them. I’m not going to bring in a big name just to bring in a lot of money.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that when you bring in a big name band or a presenter for either something like a concert or a witches ball, or for a weekend class, you have to charge more because the band/teacher has a cost. And thus, many of the people in your community who are low income will not be able to afford to attend.

In my case, I generally try to balance this out by offering entertainment events that have a firm cost, and educational events that have scholarships or sliding scale. But sometimes, I just have to charge a flat fee.

This is a difficulty that can better be negotiated through fundraising–if our group has a “kitty” of money and we can pay out of that fund to offer a few scholarships for 2-3 people who are highly active volunteers, that negotiates that pretty well, if I’m able to do something like that. Or, I can negotiate for a few work-exchange slots for people to help out with an event by taking volunteering roles.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve heard of numerous examples of events that went out of their way to offer work exchange for volunteers where the volunteers didn’t actually do any work, but still got to attend the class or event.

At some point I’ll probably do a longer post on negotiating work exchange, because it really does need to be contracted out.

And ultimately, as an event coordinator, you’re still left with the struggle of paying your professionals–whether they are a big name or not–and getting enough money in the door to make the event financially sustainable.

Breaking Even
At most Pagan events that I run (ie, small classes and sabbats), it’s been my experience that I’m usually barely able to break even past my rental expenses. I usually have a little bit of money for event food, ritual supplies, Meetup.com costs. Sometimes not.

I’ve found that concerts with more well-known Pagan musicians seem to bring in far more money. There, I make enough money to pay my venue rental, pay my musicians, and put a little in the kitty. The surplus from having SJ Tucker and Sharon Knight in Chicago for Lughnassadh paid for my venue rental for the Samhain ritual, which did not, unfortunately, break even.

And while there are some general event planning patterns that can help any Pagan out there looking to offer events that bring in enough money, a lot of it depends greatly on the region. In some areas, it’s nothing to have to drive an hour or even two hours to get to a Pagan event and people are used to it. In Chicago, if that sabbat ritual isn’t on someone’s train line, it’s unlikely they’re going to attend.

Theoretically in Chicago there are thousands of Pagans, and yet I often get far better attendance when I travel to a rural area. So some of this is knowing about event planning and what will bring in revenue–and some of it is knowing your local community. How far will people travel? How much are they willing to pay for a class? How much are they willing to pay for a concert or ball?

Ultimately my goal is for Pagans to have access to more financial resources. It takes money to make money, and some of the resources we want in our communities have a cost associated. If we have access to more money as a community, we can afford some of those resources, like training for Pagan clergy, or general Pagan education, or dedicated Pagan community centers, or Pagan advocacy groups.

And what is also important is paying our professionals for their time, instead of asking them to offer their skills for free.

When someone donates their time to an event/cause, it’s exactly that–it’s a donation, it’s an offering. It’s an exchange. Maybe an event coordinator is asking me to donate my time. Or, maybe I’m asking them to donate their time.

Any time you’re asking someone to donate their time it should not be an expectation. I would say that as a Pagan teacher, what has upset me the most is the expectation that not only will I teach for free, but when someone assumes I’ll pay out of pocket to travel to XYZ event for free.

It should never be an expectation. I donate my time to events and causes I believe in and want to support, even though I can’t do so financially. For instance, I pay to attend Pagan Spirit Gathering, even though I teach there, because that is my “tithe” to Circle. PSG is a fundraiser that raises money for Circle’s operating costs for the year.

But, any Pagan organizer asking for something like that should understand that that is what they are asking for, not that performers “should” just perform for free, or that readers should automatically donate their time.

Ultimately, this is why a lot of Pagan organizers burn out–negotiating all that is a lot of work. Typically, it’s a lot of unpaid work. Most people only have so much juice for it until they get sick of the endless tightrope walking. Similarly most Pagan performers get pretty sick of being asked to perform for free.

I don’t know the answers for how to bring more revenue into the Pagan community. It sure as heck isn’t bake sales. It’s something I think about a lot, because, if we had a little bit more money to work with, we’d be able to pay more of our professionals and have event budgets that were actually viable. And the more events that we can offer to our communities, the stronger our communities will be.

Fundraising 3: Methods to Raise Funds

I thought it might be useful to collect some fundraising strategies that have worked for Pagan and small groups. This list isn’t comprehensive, but it can give a small organization a place to start.

I’d be very interested in hearing about other fundraising options that have worked for you and your group in the past–perhaps I’ll feature those ideas in a future blog post.

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First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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Potluck
What does food have to do with fundraising? If your group is totally against any money changing hands, you can work to build a solid culture of potluckers. This can take time to build up, and sometimes it takes a few really anemic potlucks to be able to point out to folks, “If you want good food to celebrate the sabbat, you all have to bring it.” I have found that it especially helps to address this to the group directly, without blame, but definitely specifically pointing it out vs. being passive aggressive and fuming about it. Encouraging potlucking models co-creation and energetic sharing, and is a good pre-step to fundraising.

Anecdote: In Chicago for the public events I offer, fewer people bring potluck but more are willing to donate cash, and I believe this is 1. Because people are busy, and 2. Because it’s hard to bring potluck on the bus. In this case, I’ve given myself over to just buying some supplementary food out of the event budget, and things work out ok. It’s worth noting that (in Chicago) some small groups with a longstanding culture of potluck will turn out some amazing spreads. It’s also worth noting that groups that start out by running events and almost “catering” the events by bringing a lot of food to them will, in fact, reduce how much potluck others bring, since attendees will perceive that they are being fed and that they don’t need to bring anything.

***If you’re having any kind of food, catered or potluck, please be earth conscious. Don’t buy styrofoam plates that are toxic to you, that have toxic byproducts, and that aren’t going to decompose. If you have to use plastic plates, please find a way to wash and reuse them. Paper plates contribute to clearcutting and deforestation. I recommend setting up a “Green dish station,” though this certainly takes volunteers. But it’s a good place to put volunteers who can’t afford to financially contribute. Contact me if you want more info on what a Green dish station might entail.

Love Offerings Jar/Basket
I find this a good place to start, especially in a group that has a few strong voices against any Pagan classes/events making money. Making 100% transparent the actual cost of venue, candles, and other supplies can help with this. If you’re looking to start somewhere, this is a fairly nonthreatening place to begin.

Energetically, there are some similarities with donations and potluck. If you’ve been offering events where you (the organizers) cater them, you set up the expectation that your participants/attendees don’t need to bring anything. You’re energetically ensuring your audience is passive, that you will take care of their needs for them, and that can become an ingrained, systemic pattern if you’re not careful.

If you’ve been running events for a while, or if your local Pagan culture does not typically ask for donations, it will take some time to build up a culture of attendees willing to donate. Whatever you do at your events sets a tone, an expectation. If you’re moving from events that have been free and you haven’t mentioned all the money you’re putting into things, this is a good transition move. If you’re just starting up events, but aren’t comfortable passing the basket or charging admission, at least have a donation jar of some kind because otherwise, your participants may never even consider that it costs money to run an event like a ritual or classes.

Note: If you’ve been paying out of pocket for months, and find yourself making snippy comments like, “Well, I’m the one who paid for the last 12 events and somehow no one else is stepping up and helping,” or if you have blown up (or feel like you’ll blow up) at the next participant who complains about your event by screaming something like, “You can complain about this event when you’re the one paying for it,” you may want to have someone else on your team explain to people why you’re asking for money.

I’ve been there, and I get it–but blowing up at people does not build a healthy and sustainable structure of raising funds for future event. You’ll have some folks leave the group, you’ll have a bunch of folks give you guilt money, and within a year, a lot of people in your group will mysteriously have drifted away. If you’re that pissed off, find a safe place to vent, so that you can calmly educate people in a non-explosive, non-condescending way, about why funds are being collected.

Pass the Basket
This is a little more aggressive than the love offerings jar. You’re likely to get more donations, but, this is in part because many people will feel (whether or not it’s true) the social pressure of eyes boring into the back of their heads if they don’t drop some money in. For folks who have $5 or $20 on them and no problems donating, this method works, but for folks who really can’t afford to donate, they might feel really uncomfortable having their inability to pay being put out in front of the whole group.

I have never used this model because I have felt put on the spot by it. Similar to the above, guilt isn’t the most long-term sustainable way to get money, even if it raises more funds in the short term. I’ve had members of my team do something similar to this by passing a box around after a class, but I felt that that really put pressure on people to donate, and the newer folks are often skittish, even if they do have money to pay.

I’d rather invest in a long-term relationship rather than get someone’s $20 for that event, since my goal is spiritual community, education, and other services that will help that person on their journey, not just making the money for that event. If your goal is to serve everyone, regardless of ability to pay, I recommend the sliding scale donation which can be paid in more privacy.

Suggested donation/sliding scale
This is the model I use for almost all the classes, rituals, and events I offer. I find that, with few exceptions, this model works the best as a bridge between capitalism and a more communal/tithing model. I have various language I use, and I’m happy to forward you some of that language via email or Facebook. For a ritual or short class (2-4 hours) it’s typically:

Admission: $5-$25 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. Your donation goes toward space rental, etc. etc.

It takes people a while to “get” the sliding scale/no one turned away model. Many people RSVP “No”for events saying, ‘No, I can’t attend, I don’t have the money,” and so I find a lot of education is necessary to communicate that people are welcome at the event, it’s a donation, and if they can’t pay now but they can pay later, that they’re welcome to pay it forward, or stay and help out with cleanup, or volunteer for other work exchange.

Auctions
This can be a great way to raise funds because people are so much more willing to part with money when they are getting something out of it. It’s a win for the whole community when you do it right–your auction items/services get donated from local artisans and healers, and this gains them exposure and business. It also solidifies your community together in a common cause. Auctions work best when:

1. You involve the broader community in acquiring donations,
2. You have a fun event around the auction,
3. You have a good auctioneer,
4. You have people willing to spend money on things not just for themselves, but for others,
5. Well organized auction table with nice bid sheets,
6. Have some silent auction, and only big ticket items go for voice auction before the group, so that the auction doesn’t drag on forever, which is a big buzzkill
7. Break up auctioning with some kind of entertainment (engaging local musicians or entertainers works well)

When I haven’t done this, proceeds are lower, or people get bored and drift away. For small auctions I’ve brought in $100-$200, for “big” causes I’ve brought in $1500-$2000, even in places where the local Pagans told me they’d never raised more than $50 at an event before.

Donations for Charities:
Everything I’ve mentioned thus far is ways to raise money for groups, regardless of the purpose of the money. My assumption here is that you’re looking for ways to raise funds for the operating costs of your group, space rental, or saving up for future events and endeavors. However, it’s worth mentioning that these are methods often employed for raising money for charities and other causes.

In fact, most of the time when I see Pagan groups (or organizations like Pagan Pride) using these methods, it’s to raise funds for local charities. That’s never a bad thing, and it’s good to give back to the needy. However, I would offer the caution that some groups get into the trap where they are told (or other local groups or individuals loudly proclaim) that it’s only ok to fundraise for a charity, not for the group itself.

Similar to this, I’ve seen groups offering Pagan Pride-like events that put all the money raised into charity donations for something like a women’s shelter, and then when they start organizing next year’s event, they have no seed money at all to rent a venue.

If you’re fundraising for charity, I recommend keeping some of the money for group activities, and making that transparent. Or, as I like to call it, putting your own oxygen mask on first. If you have a great event planned, but none of your vendors have pre-registered and you can’t secure the space and have to cancel the event, then you don’t get to raise any money for the charity of your choice.

Vendors & Advertisers
A tried and true way many Pagan organizers pay for larger events like a Pagan Pride is by selling vendor slots. Each vendor or reader pays a flat fee, say $25 or $50 or $100 for their 10×10 booth area. Sometimes advertising is offered, if it’s a larger event like a Pagan festival that will be doing a lot of pre-promotion, and a program book. For most medium/large Pagan events, having vendors is one of the only ways you can guarantee you’ll cover your costs.

But here are a few things to consider. If you’re looking to keep the focus of your work on spirituality and education, lots of tables with mass produced bling may not be what you want. While I’m all for supporting our local Pagan/New Age bookstores, I also can’t ethically tell participants at my event that yes, they really need that Tarot deck and wand to be a real Pagan. As an event organizer, that puts me into a moral conflict, because the contract I’m entering into with my vendors is essentially, “You have agreed to give me $50 and I am putting my name behind the stuff you are selling, and encouraging people to buy from you,” because the way vendors and advertisers make money is when people buy from them.

When I’m in a position of needing to support an event with vendors, I try hard to ensure that most of the vendors are local artisans and readers who are also a part of the community, that they have unique offerings that I can truly say, “Yes, this is a good product, these are good people to support with your money.” If a vendor is just there to make a buck, I’m likely to turn down their application rather than compromise my ethics. I wouldn’t turn away a vendor just for selling something mass produced–like books or jewelry–but I’d want to check out the vendor first and see what they’re doing in the community.

I invite Occult Bookstore in Chicago to vend at Ringing Anvil events because they do a tremendous amount of education to the folks who walk into their store, they are upstanding folks, and they make their classroom available for diverse classes and education.

Indiegogo/Kickstarter/Gofundme
These are some of the more successful fundraising efforts I’ve seen in the Pagan community, though I should point out that they seem to be the most effective for artistic endeavors like Pagan musicians, though the Wild Hunt has funded their own costs in this way. In fact, I’m trying this method out myself at the moment.

Tithing/Memberships
The word tithe actually comes from “tenth,” with the idea that each person would put 10% of their income and assets back to the Church (or other body that required it). Given that it’s unlikely many folks are likely to put in 10%, the word “tithe” might be a little misleading, though I’ve heard a more modern connotation of tithe used to mean, donating back based on income, without specifying a percentage.

In past Pagan groups, I’ve seen resistance to an annual membership unless people are “getting” something. The group that I was a co-organizer for, Earth Spiritualists of Chicago, had a failed attempt at a membership fee. People didn’t feel the need to spend $25 on an annual membership because, they were already on our Meetup site, and they already attended events, why pay more? We tried luring people with package deals–free tarot readings, and we talked about t-shirts for members, but it never took off.

On the other hand, groups like the (now gone) Diana’s Grove or the group that formed out of the ashes, The Grove, that are offering a specific educational program have had a bit more success with an annual membership to register with their Mystery School. However, with that we’re talking about people buying a service, and not necessarily gaining buy-in into the organization as co-creators. Some are–staffers might pay the annual registration fee the same as the other students do. But it isn’t exactly the model that’s transferable for many local community groups. I think that this area is a growing edge for many groups. 

Events, Items, Services
In a workshop at Pagan Spirit Gathering led by Florence, editor of Circle Magazine and a woman with considerable experience in the field of not for profit fundraising, I learned that there’s basically two types of fundraising for a not for profit. One is money that is a gift, and the other is money that is earned through the activities of the not for profit. Some people form not for profits imagining that all of this grant money will suddenly flow their way, or that people–lured by the tax deduction–will suddenly begin just donating to their organization.

The truth is that most money is raised through events, services, or products related to the not for profit. An event like a masquerade ball where the money–after event expenses–goes toward the operation of the not for profit. Another example is Pagan Spirit Gathering itself, where–after event expenses–the profits go to support Circle’s operational costs for the next year.

Other examples of this might be selling particular items or services that are in line with the organization’s mission, like t-shirts, bake sales, tarot readings.

It’s worth pointing out that this is a very successful fundraising model likely because, like an auction/raffle, it’s pretty darn close to the capitalism that people are used to. People are buying an item or service that they value. They feel good about the purchase because it supports a group.

What should be obvious to anyone organizing a fundraiser like this is if it costs you $15 for a T-shirt you’re making $5 off of, or $2,000 to run an event, and you make $3,000 and put in months of time organizing the event just to get $1000, wouldn’t it be more efficient for people to just donate the $1,000? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. People want something for their money that’s tangible, or the experience of an event.

I’d also offer that fundraising events tend to work better when they are entertainment focused, like a concert or ball. What I’ve noticed  in my recent experience of running Pagan concerts is that plenty of people are willing to pay $20-$25 for a concert ticket, and then another $20 on CDs. Many of these are folks that have no interest in attending a ritual or a class.

Fundraising 3: Methods to Raise Funds

I thought it might be useful to collect some fundraising strategies that have worked for Pagan and small groups. This list isn’t comprehensive, but it can give a small organization a place to start.

I’d be very interested in hearing about other fundraising options that have worked for you and your group in the past–perhaps I’ll feature those ideas in a future blog post.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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Potluck
What does food have to do with fundraising? If your group is totally against any money changing hands, you can work to build a solid culture of potluckers. This can take time to build up, and sometimes it takes a few really anemic potlucks to be able to point out to folks, “If you want good food to celebrate the sabbat, you all have to bring it.” I have found that it especially helps to address this to the group directly, without blame, but definitely specifically pointing it out vs. being passive aggressive and fuming about it. Encouraging potlucking models co-creation and energetic sharing, and is a good pre-step to fundraising.

Anecdote: In Chicago for the public events I offer, fewer people bring potluck but more are willing to donate cash, and I believe this is 1. Because people are busy, and 2. Because it’s hard to bring potluck on the bus. In this case, I’ve given myself over to just buying some supplementary food out of the event budget, and things work out ok. It’s worth noting that (in Chicago) some small groups with a longstanding culture of potluck will turn out some amazing spreads. It’s also worth noting that groups that start out by running events and almost “catering” the events by bringing a lot of food to them will, in fact, reduce how much potluck others bring, since attendees will perceive that they are being fed and that they don’t need to bring anything.

***If you’re having any kind of food, catered or potluck, please be earth conscious. Don’t buy styrofoam plates that are toxic to you, that have toxic byproducts, and that aren’t going to decompose. If you have to use plastic plates, please find a way to wash and reuse them. Paper plates contribute to clearcutting and deforestation. I recommend setting up a “Green dish station,” though this certainly takes volunteers. But it’s a good place to put volunteers who can’t afford to financially contribute. Contact me if you want more info on what a Green dish station might entail.

Love Offerings Jar/Basket
I find this a good place to start, especially in a group that has a few strong voices against any Pagan classes/events making money. Making 100% transparent the actual cost of venue, candles, and other supplies can help with this. If you’re looking to start somewhere, this is a fairly nonthreatening place to begin.

Energetically, there are some similarities with donations and potluck. If you’ve been offering events where you (the organizers) cater them, you set up the expectation that your participants/attendees don’t need to bring anything. You’re energetically ensuring your audience is passive, that you will take care of their needs for them, and that can become an ingrained, systemic pattern if you’re not careful.

If you’ve been running events for a while, or if your local Pagan culture does not typically ask for donations, it will take some time to build up a culture of attendees willing to donate. Whatever you do at your events sets a tone, an expectation. If you’re moving from events that have been free and you haven’t mentioned all the money you’re putting into things, this is a good transition move. If you’re just starting up events, but aren’t comfortable passing the basket or charging admission, at least have a donation jar of some kind because otherwise, your participants may never even consider that it costs money to run an event like a ritual or classes.

Note: If you’ve been paying out of pocket for months, and find yourself making snippy comments like, “Well, I’m the one who paid for the last 12 events and somehow no one else is stepping up and helping,” or if you have blown up (or feel like you’ll blow up) at the next participant who complains about your event by screaming something like, “You can complain about this event when you’re the one paying for it,” you may want to have someone else on your team explain to people why you’re asking for money.

I’ve been there, and I get it–but blowing up at people does not build a healthy and sustainable structure of raising funds for future event. You’ll have some folks leave the group, you’ll have a bunch of folks give you guilt money, and within a year, a lot of people in your group will mysteriously have drifted away. If you’re that pissed off, find a safe place to vent, so that you can calmly educate people in a non-explosive, non-condescending way, about why funds are being collected.

Pass the Basket
This is a little more aggressive than the love offerings jar. You’re likely to get more donations, but, this is in part because many people will feel (whether or not it’s true) the social pressure of eyes boring into the back of their heads if they don’t drop some money in. For folks who have $5 or $20 on them and no problems donating, this method works, but for folks who really can’t afford to donate, they might feel really uncomfortable having their inability to pay being put out in front of the whole group.

I have never used this model because I have felt put on the spot by it. Similar to the above, guilt isn’t the most long-term sustainable way to get money, even if it raises more funds in the short term. I’ve had members of my team do something similar to this by passing a box around after a class, but I felt that that really put pressure on people to donate, and the newer folks are often skittish, even if they do have money to pay.

I’d rather invest in a long-term relationship rather than get someone’s $20 for that event, since my goal is spiritual community, education, and other services that will help that person on their journey, not just making the money for that event. If your goal is to serve everyone, regardless of ability to pay, I recommend the sliding scale donation which can be paid in more privacy.

Suggested donation/sliding scale
This is the model I use for almost all the classes, rituals, and events I offer. I find that, with few exceptions, this model works the best as a bridge between capitalism and a more communal/tithing model. I have various language I use, and I’m happy to forward you some of that language via email or Facebook. For a ritual or short class (2-4 hours) it’s typically:

Admission: $5-$25 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds. Your donation goes toward space rental, etc. etc.

It takes people a while to “get” the sliding scale/no one turned away model. Many people RSVP “No”for events saying, ‘No, I can’t attend, I don’t have the money,” and so I find a lot of education is necessary to communicate that people are welcome at the event, it’s a donation, and if they can’t pay now but they can pay later, that they’re welcome to pay it forward, or stay and help out with cleanup, or volunteer for other work exchange.

Auctions
This can be a great way to raise funds because people are so much more willing to part with money when they are getting something out of it. It’s a win for the whole community when you do it right–your auction items/services get donated from local artisans and healers, and this gains them exposure and business. It also solidifies your community together in a common cause. Auctions work best when:

1. You involve the broader community in acquiring donations,
2. You have a fun event around the auction,
3. You have a good auctioneer,
4. You have people willing to spend money on things not just for themselves, but for others,
5. Well organized auction table with nice bid sheets,
6. Have some silent auction, and only big ticket items go for voice auction before the group, so that the auction doesn’t drag on forever, which is a big buzzkill
7. Break up auctioning with some kind of entertainment (engaging local musicians or entertainers works well)

When I haven’t done this, proceeds are lower, or people get bored and drift away. For small auctions I’ve brought in $100-$200, for “big” causes I’ve brought in $1500-$2000, even in places where the local Pagans told me they’d never raised more than $50 at an event before.

Donations for Charities:
Everything I’ve mentioned thus far is ways to raise money for groups, regardless of the purpose of the money. My assumption here is that you’re looking for ways to raise funds for the operating costs of your group, space rental, or saving up for future events and endeavors. However, it’s worth mentioning that these are methods often employed for raising money for charities and other causes.

In fact, most of the time when I see Pagan groups (or organizations like Pagan Pride) using these methods, it’s to raise funds for local charities. That’s never a bad thing, and it’s good to give back to the needy. However, I would offer the caution that some groups get into the trap where they are told (or other local groups or individuals loudly proclaim) that it’s only ok to fundraise for a charity, not for the group itself.

Similar to this, I’ve seen groups offering Pagan Pride-like events that put all the money raised into charity donations for something like a women’s shelter, and then when they start organizing next year’s event, they have no seed money at all to rent a venue.

If you’re fundraising for charity, I recommend keeping some of the money for group activities, and making that transparent. Or, as I like to call it, putting your own oxygen mask on first. If you have a great event planned, but none of your vendors have pre-registered and you can’t secure the space and have to cancel the event, then you don’t get to raise any money for the charity of your choice.

Vendors & Advertisers
A tried and true way many Pagan organizers pay for larger events like a Pagan Pride is by selling vendor slots. Each vendor or reader pays a flat fee, say $25 or $50 or $100 for their 10×10 booth area. Sometimes advertising is offered, if it’s a larger event like a Pagan festival that will be doing a lot of pre-promotion, and a program book. For most medium/large Pagan events, having vendors is one of the only ways you can guarantee you’ll cover your costs.

But here are a few things to consider. If you’re looking to keep the focus of your work on spirituality and education, lots of tables with mass produced bling may not be what you want. While I’m all for supporting our local Pagan/New Age bookstores, I also can’t ethically tell participants at my event that yes, they really need that Tarot deck and wand to be a real Pagan. As an event organizer, that puts me into a moral conflict, because the contract I’m entering into with my vendors is essentially, “You have agreed to give me $50 and I am putting my name behind the stuff you are selling, and encouraging people to buy from you,” because the way vendors and advertisers make money is when people buy from them.

When I’m in a position of needing to support an event with vendors, I try hard to ensure that most of the vendors are local artisans and readers who are also a part of the community, that they have unique offerings that I can truly say, “Yes, this is a good product, these are good people to support with your money.” If a vendor is just there to make a buck, I’m likely to turn down their application rather than compromise my ethics. I wouldn’t turn away a vendor just for selling something mass produced–like books or jewelry–but I’d want to check out the vendor first and see what they’re doing in the community.

I invite Occult Bookstore in Chicago to vend at Ringing Anvil events because they do a tremendous amount of education to the folks who walk into their store, they are upstanding folks, and they make their classroom available for diverse classes and education.

Indiegogo/Kickstarter/Gofundme
These are some of the more successful fundraising efforts I’ve seen in the Pagan community, though I should point out that they seem to be the most effective for artistic endeavors like Pagan musicians, though the Wild Hunt has funded their own costs in this way. In fact, I’m trying this method out myself at the moment.

Tithing/Memberships
The word tithe actually comes from “tenth,” with the idea that each person would put 10% of their income and assets back to the Church (or other body that required it). Given that it’s unlikely many folks are likely to put in 10%, the word “tithe” might be a little misleading, though I’ve heard a more modern connotation of tithe used to mean, donating back based on income, without specifying a percentage.

In past Pagan groups, I’ve seen resistance to an annual membership unless people are “getting” something. The group that I was a co-organizer for, Earth Spiritualists of Chicago, had a failed attempt at a membership fee. People didn’t feel the need to spend $25 on an annual membership because, they were already on our Meetup site, and they already attended events, why pay more? We tried luring people with package deals–free tarot readings, and we talked about t-shirts for members, but it never took off.

On the other hand, groups like the (now gone) Diana’s Grove or the group that formed out of the ashes, The Grove, that are offering a specific educational program have had a bit more success with an annual membership to register with their Mystery School. However, with that we’re talking about people buying a service, and not necessarily gaining buy-in into the organization as co-creators. Some are–staffers might pay the annual registration fee the same as the other students do. But it isn’t exactly the model that’s transferable for many local community groups. I think that this area is a growing edge for many groups. 

Events, Items, Services
In a workshop at Pagan Spirit Gathering led by Florence, editor of Circle Magazine and a woman with considerable experience in the field of not for profit fundraising, I learned that there’s basically two types of fundraising for a not for profit. One is money that is a gift, and the other is money that is earned through the activities of the not for profit. Some people form not for profits imagining that all of this grant money will suddenly flow their way, or that people–lured by the tax deduction–will suddenly begin just donating to their organization.

The truth is that most money is raised through events, services, or products related to the not for profit. An event like a masquerade ball where the money–after event expenses–goes toward the operation of the not for profit. Another example is Pagan Spirit Gathering itself, where–after event expenses–the profits go to support Circle’s operational costs for the next year.

Other examples of this might be selling particular items or services that are in line with the organization’s mission, like t-shirts, bake sales, tarot readings.

It’s worth pointing out that this is a very successful fundraising model likely because, like an auction/raffle, it’s pretty darn close to the capitalism that people are used to. People are buying an item or service that they value. They feel good about the purchase because it supports a group.

What should be obvious to anyone organizing a fundraiser like this is if it costs you $15 for a T-shirt you’re making $5 off of, or $2,000 to run an event, and you make $3,000 and put in months of time organizing the event just to get $1000, wouldn’t it be more efficient for people to just donate the $1,000? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. People want something for their money that’s tangible, or the experience of an event.

I’d also offer that fundraising events tend to work better when they are entertainment focused, like a concert or ball. What I’ve noticed  in my recent experience of running Pagan concerts is that plenty of people are willing to pay $20-$25 for a concert ticket, and then another $20 on CDs. Many of these are folks that have no interest in attending a ritual or a class.

Fundraising in the Pagan Community Part 2

Should Pagan teachers charge? How are we going to pay for all the Pagan events and initiatives out there? I see those questions come up a lot. I also see some Pagans viciously attack anyone who charges for classes or events.

Context is important, and I’d offer that there’s a range of what we mean when we say, charging for classes and services.

I charge for what I do. I travel and teach, I host events. There’s a cost–a hard cost (venue rental, gas money) and a soft cost (time).

I charge for readings too. But, I also do rather a lot for free. In fact, most of the time even when I’m charging, I’d say I ultimately end up at a financial loss.

I think it would be useful to look at the range of contexts. In fact, let’s also just look at the math.

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First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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Let’s look at a priest/ess hosting coven classes and rituals out of their home. Small group, let’s say there’s 5-15 people. I think most of the time folks like this are not charging hard cash for their classes and rituals. However, let’s look at the costs they are incurring, both hard costs and soft costs.

Hard costs: Any ritual supplies. Candles. Food, if they are hosting. Printouts of class materials. Possibly gas money for going out to buy supplies.
Soft costs: The time spent preparing their space for guests, doing dishes and cleaning up after. Event hosting out of your home may be free, but it can take a lot of time to prepare for. There’s also the impact on the host house’s family; if members of the family have to stay out of the living room, or leave the house entirely, there’s an emotional and time cost there too. There’s also the additional time incurred running errands.

Additional soft costs: the time it takes to prepare the lessons and rituals, as well as the inevitable pastoral counseling. If you’re working with a small group of people and you are the designated leader, eventually people are going to come to you for advice on their problems in their lives. Depending on the people and the group, this might be just a little time out of your day, or it might be multiple hours-long counseling sessions each week.

A member of the ADF clergy once said this very succinctly. “I don’t want to charge for my services, however, this is taking more and more of my time. If I’m cleaning my house after a gathering and spending several hours a week counseling people, I don’t have time to do my normal work. This is cutting into time I need to work my full time job. Something has to give. If you’re not going to pay me so I can work less hours, are you going to come over and do my dishes for me after a gathering here? Are you going to help me with the cleaning I don’t get done because I’m doing free counseling? Are you going to bring candles? Are you going to bring food?”

But Real Witches Never Charged
That’s not true at all. I think if we look back to our ancestors, the Witch/Shaman/Druid/Priest/Healer of the tribe was getting paid, in the form of a tithe from the tribe for their upkeep. It might be in the form of a chicken or a fur or a seat at the dinner table, or help building their home, but it was still payment.

Money is not a dirty thing. Money represents your time that you spent laboring. It represents energy. So, a small group clergy leader like this might need to take donations to help with hard costs like supplies, but they also might need to ask for help with some of the things that they don’t have time for if they’re prepping lessons and doing one-on-one counseling.

I don’t think it’s at all out of bounds for a coven leader to ask group members to help them with light cleaning and dishes, or, with the occasional larger house project like painting a living room. It’s an energy exchange. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that some group leaders can become highly unethical about this. In a more unethical, cult-like group, the group leader might demand service, monetary donations, or even sexual favors. And I think that’s a little bit of why Pagans end up with such a squick about asking for help with cleaning, or asking for money…because some people do abuse this.

Costs of Running Public Events
The next level up in expenses is more along the lines of what I do–running public rituals/larger group events. This one is pretty easy to outline.

Hard costs:
Venue Rental: Some groups are able to use parks or forest preserves for free, that doesn’t really work for where I’m doing rituals. When I host a public ritual in Chicago, it can cost me rather a lot of money. And I’ve lost my shirt on event space rental fees when I didn’t get enough donations. Right now my venue rental is about $300 a day.

Ritual supplies: Candles, rubbing alcohol and Epsom salts for a cauldron fire (or firewood)

Longer term ritual supplies: Fabric for the tables, ritual decorations, extra ritual wear for people taking roles. These are things I’ve paid for out of pocket and “loan” to the group/event.

Web site: Meetup.com costs something like $15 or so a month, and web hosting can cost $50 or more a year. I finally dumped Meetup.com just this past year, but it was a consistent expense.

Potluck food: If I’m hosting a potluck, I still need to bring a few core offerings. Some events, the donations to the potlucks have been pretty sparse.

What do I Charge?
What I typically do for my public events is ask for a sliding scale donation, $5-$25, no one turned away for lack of funds. I’m offering one of the only public rituals in Chicagoland, so I feel it’s important to keep making these available no matter what people can pay. At the same time, I can’t afford to lose money on an event.

It’s utterly and completely unfair to ask clergy that have been putting in hours and hours to plan an event, and then host it, and clean it up, to also spend money to cover the costs. And yet, when I teach Pagan leadership workshops, so many leaders fess up to me that they not only put in the time, but they float the venue rental costs and other costs because when they ask for donations, “People bitch, they complain, they throw big drama fits, and then nobody comes to the events.”

I admire the folks who do this–even while I lament and regret that they continue supporting and enabling a dysfunctional pattern in our community. I myself am not in a financial position to do this. If my events don’t break even, I will have to stop doing them.

Readings:
Yup, I charge for these. Why? Tarot readings, or when I facilitate shamanic/trance journeys for people, are a lot of work. Whether I’m traveling to do this at someone’s home, or getting my own home ready for them, that’s work too. I could be spending my time working on other projects on my endless to do list. It takes a lot of my personal energy to do reading work. So yeah, I charge. I also charge for my artwork, and I enjoy painting a lot more than I enjoy doing readings.

Pastoral counseling or emergency leadership assistance and mediations:
Well, no, I don’t charge for that. Someone asks me for help, I will do my best to help them. People ask me some crazy questions, and sometimes it’s way beyond my ability to help them. But all of that still takes my time away from things that could bring in money. If someone has a leadership disaster, I’m going to give them my time. But that might take 1-2 hours out of my working day, and that’s time I won’t get to spend working on other projects that might bring in income.

Mediation:
I’ll do a mediation for free, but again, I can’t pay the gas money out of pocket. And while I wouldn’t demand a payment, I also wouldn’t refuse it, because it’s taking my time to do that. I’ve driven 4-5 hours for mediation work, which meant I was gone for 2 days. That 2 days has an impact on my life. Even 2 hours has an impact on my life.

Teaching:
I charge for this too. However, it’s not really very lucrative. At least, not yet. Even so, bringing me into town is something that’s barely at or beyond the financial abilities of most groups. Here’s some examples:

I used to travel and teach at festivals and events for free. Ie, I’d drive from Chicago to Madison or Indianapolis and I’d eat the cost of gas, in order to teach free workshops. But as more and more people asked me to teach for them, I had to start asking at least for gas money. It added up really quickly.

Nowadays, if I’m teaching at a festival, I typically get in for free, I get a place to stay, I get gas money, and the ability to vend for free.

However, what doesn’t that pay for? It doesn’t pay for my oil change. Or for the $500 repairing breaks and other wear and tear. It doesn’t pay for my handouts or my time. I get a little money from vending my artwork, but not a lot. In other words–I’m still operating at a loss, technically.

When teaching a weekend intensive, here are the financial terms I’ve laid out in the past, though I’m finding that I have to reconsider the numbers because I’m still operating at a loss. I’ve worked hard to make my work affordable for local organizers. In the past, I’ve said, I need gas money and a place for stay, and if I can make $200 beyond that for the weekend, that would be great. But, most of the places that I teach, aren’t able to afford that.

And given my experiences of how much car repairs have cost me and that 75% or more of my car use is for traveling and teaching, that’s no longer enough money for a weekend class to “break even.”

Balancing the Scales
I value teaching and sharing my knowledge. I’d do it for free if I could. But I can’t. This is my calling, my life’s work. I love doing this work. But it means I live off of almost nothing.

Yes, I’m (now) a published author, but that has not yet begun to supplement my income. I won’t get into the complexities of publishing, royalties, or how long it takes to actually make money as an author. Most Pagan authors aren’t making as much as you think, and even my fiction books are just going to take a while to gain an audience because of how publishing works these days.

There are Pagan teachers who charge $1,500 a weekend plus travel. There’s teachers that charge more. Truthfully, I can see why that’s a reasonable fee now that I’m doing that, because that income would pay for all the other work that I do that’s unpaid.

Pastoral counseling is unpaid. Writing educational blog posts is unpaid. Writing articles is (usually) unpaid. Running rituals is unpaid. Writing books is…a little paid. But when you look at how much work goes into writing and editing a book, much less promoting it…you’re getting pennies for your time.

I wish there was a better way. Truly I do. I like the old-fashioned tithing model, where those that can afford to pay more do so, so that those who can’t can still get spiritual services. But it’s a tricky balance, and there’s a lot of factors.

Challenges with Money
One challenge is, the unethical leaders/teachers charging for their work are really, really visible, and that leaves a sour taste in people’s mouths. There’s also just a numbers game; there’s simply not enough Pagans in any one region to support full-time paid clergy. Keep in mind that it takes all the annual fundraising efforts of Circle Sanctuary and Pagan Spirit Gathering to pay for 2 staff members, among their other annual expenses to maintain their property.

I think about all the good work Circle is doing, and how much more they could do with more paid staff or more financial resources for other projects. And I suppose that’s one of the core issues here–more and more Pagans want the benefits of an infrastructure. And infrastructure requires money. There’s no way around it.

Something else to consider is the cost of clergy training. More and more Pagans are finding themselves called to get training as ritual leaders, prison ministers, pastoral counselors, death midwives. Which is good, because we’ve had hordes of Pagan leaders doing pastoral counseling for decades without any training and that’s a bad idea.

But that training has a cost. Ministerial training has a cost, mediation training has a cost. There’s time, and there’s the cost of the classes, the cost of the textbooks. So you pay for all that training, and then you can’t charge for the work you do to recoup your cost.

A Unitarian Universalist minister can go to seminary, get student loans, and then has a job when they leave the ministry so they can pay back any student loans and have a viable income. Paid clergy does not equal largesse and abuse. But, the Pagan community just can’t really support it. Not yet. Not til we have larger numbers, or, more concentrated communities like a communal living arrangement.

Similarly why we can’t have community centers/physical churches/temple spaces. There’s just not enough numbers to support it yet.

However, I think there’s also a deeper issue of values.

Do Pagans Value Events and Education?
By values, I don’t mean, I value world peace. By values, I mean, what I value–what I am willing to pay for through money, or time and work. And money is time. Money represents time I spent doing work.

Going out on a limb, I wonder about one of the imperatives in some religions to:

1. Procreate, and
2. Evangelize

What if those imperatives were largely to speed up the process by which that religious traditions had enough numbers to gain political strength and build infrastructure. Seriously. If you look at it sociologically, there’s just some things you can’t do until you have a big enough population base in an area.

That being said, one of the challenges in Pagan community is that many Pagans seem to value that $5 cup of coffee more than making sure local rituals happen, or that there is access to more in-depth classes. There’s a big difference between someone who is barely making it financially who really cannot afford to pay, and someone who could, but doesn’t value paying.

For that matter, because Pagan communities don’t have great infrastructure, we also don’t really have good support structures for the people who are dead broke and who need help. I’ve heard of a number of Pagans who have gone back to the religion of their youth specifically because their church had services and assistance to help them get out of the financial situation they were in.

Where do we go?
I don’t have the answers here, I just have more questions. I’m always asking, how can I get Pagans to value ritual, to value education, to value personal growth work, to value leaders getting leadership training?  Or, is it something that my community really actually just doesn’t value, and I should quit trying to offer such work in the form of classes and community rituals? How often can Pagan leaders and organizers and teachers keep barking up the wrong tree before we give up? Or do we really just need to wait a few generations to have enough numbers?

For further exploration on this topic, below is a longer article I wrote several years ago on a potential model for Pagan community fundraising. http://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/how-do-we-pay-for-all-this-memberships-tithing-and-pagans/

Tomorrow I’ll post a Part 3 in this series on a few fundraising methods that I’ve seen work.

Fundraising in the Pagan Community Part 2

Should Pagan teachers charge? How are we going to pay for all the Pagan events and initiatives out there? I see those questions come up a lot. I also see some Pagans viciously attack anyone who charges for classes or events.

Context is important, and I’d offer that there’s a range of what we mean when we say, charging for classes and services.

I charge for what I do. I travel and teach, I host events. There’s a cost–a hard cost (venue rental, gas money) and a soft cost (time).

I charge for readings too. But, I also do rather a lot for free. In fact, most of the time even when I’m charging, I’d say I ultimately end up at a financial loss.

I think it would be useful to look at the range of contexts. In fact, let’s also just look at the math.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

——————————————————————–

Let’s look at a priest/ess hosting coven classes and rituals out of their home. Small group, let’s say there’s 5-15 people. I think most of the time folks like this are not charging hard cash for their classes and rituals. However, let’s look at the costs they are incurring, both hard costs and soft costs.

Hard costs: Any ritual supplies. Candles. Food, if they are hosting. Printouts of class materials. Possibly gas money for going out to buy supplies.
Soft costs: The time spent preparing their space for guests, doing dishes and cleaning up after. Event hosting out of your home may be free, but it can take a lot of time to prepare for. There’s also the impact on the host house’s family; if members of the family have to stay out of the living room, or leave the house entirely, there’s an emotional and time cost there too. There’s also the additional time incurred running errands.

Additional soft costs: the time it takes to prepare the lessons and rituals, as well as the inevitable pastoral counseling. If you’re working with a small group of people and you are the designated leader, eventually people are going to come to you for advice on their problems in their lives. Depending on the people and the group, this might be just a little time out of your day, or it might be multiple hours-long counseling sessions each week.

A member of the ADF clergy once said this very succinctly. “I don’t want to charge for my services, however, this is taking more and more of my time. If I’m cleaning my house after a gathering and spending several hours a week counseling people, I don’t have time to do my normal work. This is cutting into time I need to work my full time job. Something has to give. If you’re not going to pay me so I can work less hours, are you going to come over and do my dishes for me after a gathering here? Are you going to help me with the cleaning I don’t get done because I’m doing free counseling? Are you going to bring candles? Are you going to bring food?”

But Real Witches Never Charged
That’s not true at all. I think if we look back to our ancestors, the Witch/Shaman/Druid/Priest/Healer of the tribe was getting paid, in the form of a tithe from the tribe for their upkeep. It might be in the form of a chicken or a fur or a seat at the dinner table, or help building their home, but it was still payment.

Money is not a dirty thing. Money represents your time that you spent laboring. It represents energy. So, a small group clergy leader like this might need to take donations to help with hard costs like supplies, but they also might need to ask for help with some of the things that they don’t have time for if they’re prepping lessons and doing one-on-one counseling.

I don’t think it’s at all out of bounds for a coven leader to ask group members to help them with light cleaning and dishes, or, with the occasional larger house project like painting a living room. It’s an energy exchange. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that some group leaders can become highly unethical about this. In a more unethical, cult-like group, the group leader might demand service, monetary donations, or even sexual favors. And I think that’s a little bit of why Pagans end up with such a squick about asking for help with cleaning, or asking for money…because some people do abuse this.

Costs of Running Public Events
The next level up in expenses is more along the lines of what I do–running public rituals/larger group events. This one is pretty easy to outline.

Hard costs:
Venue Rental: Some groups are able to use parks or forest preserves for free, that doesn’t really work for where I’m doing rituals. When I host a public ritual in Chicago, it can cost me rather a lot of money. And I’ve lost my shirt on event space rental fees when I didn’t get enough donations. Right now my venue rental is about $300 a day.

Ritual supplies: Candles, rubbing alcohol and Epsom salts for a cauldron fire (or firewood)

Longer term ritual supplies: Fabric for the tables, ritual decorations, extra ritual wear for people taking roles. These are things I’ve paid for out of pocket and “loan” to the group/event.

Web site: Meetup.com costs something like $15 or so a month, and web hosting can cost $50 or more a year. I finally dumped Meetup.com just this past year, but it was a consistent expense.

Potluck food: If I’m hosting a potluck, I still need to bring a few core offerings. Some events, the donations to the potlucks have been pretty sparse.

What do I Charge?
What I typically do for my public events is ask for a sliding scale donation, $5-$25, no one turned away for lack of funds. I’m offering one of the only public rituals in Chicagoland, so I feel it’s important to keep making these available no matter what people can pay. At the same time, I can’t afford to lose money on an event.

It’s utterly and completely unfair to ask clergy that have been putting in hours and hours to plan an event, and then host it, and clean it up, to also spend money to cover the costs. And yet, when I teach Pagan leadership workshops, so many leaders fess up to me that they not only put in the time, but they float the venue rental costs and other costs because when they ask for donations, “People bitch, they complain, they throw big drama fits, and then nobody comes to the events.”

I admire the folks who do this–even while I lament and regret that they continue supporting and enabling a dysfunctional pattern in our community. I myself am not in a financial position to do this. If my events don’t break even, I will have to stop doing them.

Readings:
Yup, I charge for these. Why? Tarot readings, or when I facilitate shamanic/trance journeys for people, are a lot of work. Whether I’m traveling to do this at someone’s home, or getting my own home ready for them, that’s work too. I could be spending my time working on other projects on my endless to do list. It takes a lot of my personal energy to do reading work. So yeah, I charge. I also charge for my artwork, and I enjoy painting a lot more than I enjoy doing readings.

Pastoral counseling or emergency leadership assistance and mediations:
Well, no, I don’t charge for that. Someone asks me for help, I will do my best to help them. People ask me some crazy questions, and sometimes it’s way beyond my ability to help them. But all of that still takes my time away from things that could bring in money. If someone has a leadership disaster, I’m going to give them my time. But that might take 1-2 hours out of my working day, and that’s time I won’t get to spend working on other projects that might bring in income.

Mediation:
I’ll do a mediation for free, but again, I can’t pay the gas money out of pocket. And while I wouldn’t demand a payment, I also wouldn’t refuse it, because it’s taking my time to do that. I’ve driven 4-5 hours for mediation work, which meant I was gone for 2 days. That 2 days has an impact on my life. Even 2 hours has an impact on my life.

Teaching:
I charge for this too. However, it’s not really very lucrative. At least, not yet. Even so, bringing me into town is something that’s barely at or beyond the financial abilities of most groups. Here’s some examples:

I used to travel and teach at festivals and events for free. Ie, I’d drive from Chicago to Madison or Indianapolis and I’d eat the cost of gas, in order to teach free workshops. But as more and more people asked me to teach for them, I had to start asking at least for gas money. It added up really quickly.

Nowadays, if I’m teaching at a festival, I typically get in for free, I get a place to stay, I get gas money, and the ability to vend for free.

However, what doesn’t that pay for? It doesn’t pay for my oil change. Or for the $500 repairing breaks and other wear and tear. It doesn’t pay for my handouts or my time. I get a little money from vending my artwork, but not a lot. In other words–I’m still operating at a loss, technically.

When teaching a weekend intensive, here are the financial terms I’ve laid out in the past, though I’m finding that I have to reconsider the numbers because I’m still operating at a loss. I’ve worked hard to make my work affordable for local organizers. In the past, I’ve said, I need gas money and a place for stay, and if I can make $200 beyond that for the weekend, that would be great. But, most of the places that I teach, aren’t able to afford that.

And given my experiences of how much car repairs have cost me and that 75% or more of my car use is for traveling and teaching, that’s no longer enough money for a weekend class to “break even.”

Balancing the Scales
I value teaching and sharing my knowledge. I’d do it for free if I could. But I can’t. This is my calling, my life’s work. I love doing this work. But it means I live off of almost nothing.

Yes, I’m (now) a published author, but that has not yet begun to supplement my income. I won’t get into the complexities of publishing, royalties, or how long it takes to actually make money as an author. Most Pagan authors aren’t making as much as you think, and even my fiction books are just going to take a while to gain an audience because of how publishing works these days.

There are Pagan teachers who charge $1,500 a weekend plus travel. There’s teachers that charge more. Truthfully, I can see why that’s a reasonable fee now that I’m doing that, because that income would pay for all the other work that I do that’s unpaid.

Pastoral counseling is unpaid. Writing educational blog posts is unpaid. Writing articles is (usually) unpaid. Running rituals is unpaid. Writing books is…a little paid. But when you look at how much work goes into writing and editing a book, much less promoting it…you’re getting pennies for your time.

I wish there was a better way. Truly I do. I like the old-fashioned tithing model, where those that can afford to pay more do so, so that those who can’t can still get spiritual services. But it’s a tricky balance, and there’s a lot of factors.

Challenges with Money
One challenge is, the unethical leaders/teachers charging for their work are really, really visible, and that leaves a sour taste in people’s mouths. There’s also just a numbers game; there’s simply not enough Pagans in any one region to support full-time paid clergy. Keep in mind that it takes all the annual fundraising efforts of Circle Sanctuary and Pagan Spirit Gathering to pay for 2 staff members, among their other annual expenses to maintain their property.

I think about all the good work Circle is doing, and how much more they could do with more paid staff or more financial resources for other projects. And I suppose that’s one of the core issues here–more and more Pagans want the benefits of an infrastructure. And infrastructure requires money. There’s no way around it.

Something else to consider is the cost of clergy training. More and more Pagans are finding themselves called to get training as ritual leaders, prison ministers, pastoral counselors, death midwives. Which is good, because we’ve had hordes of Pagan leaders doing pastoral counseling for decades without any training and that’s a bad idea.

But that training has a cost. Ministerial training has a cost, mediation training has a cost. There’s time, and there’s the cost of the classes, the cost of the textbooks. So you pay for all that training, and then you can’t charge for the work you do to recoup your cost.

A Unitarian Universalist minister can go to seminary, get student loans, and then has a job when they leave the ministry so they can pay back any student loans and have a viable income. Paid clergy does not equal largesse and abuse. But, the Pagan community just can’t really support it. Not yet. Not til we have larger numbers, or, more concentrated communities like a communal living arrangement.

Similarly why we can’t have community centers/physical churches/temple spaces. There’s just not enough numbers to support it yet.

However, I think there’s also a deeper issue of values.

Do Pagans Value Events and Education?
By values, I don’t mean, I value world peace. By values, I mean, what I value–what I am willing to pay for through money, or time and work. And money is time. Money represents time I spent doing work.

Going out on a limb, I wonder about one of the imperatives in some religions to:

1. Procreate, and
2. Evangelize

What if those imperatives were largely to speed up the process by which that religious traditions had enough numbers to gain political strength and build infrastructure. Seriously. If you look at it sociologically, there’s just some things you can’t do until you have a big enough population base in an area.

That being said, one of the challenges in Pagan community is that many Pagans seem to value that $5 cup of coffee more than making sure local rituals happen, or that there is access to more in-depth classes. There’s a big difference between someone who is barely making it financially who really cannot afford to pay, and someone who could, but doesn’t value paying.

For that matter, because Pagan communities don’t have great infrastructure, we also don’t really have good support structures for the people who are dead broke and who need help. I’ve heard of a number of Pagans who have gone back to the religion of their youth specifically because their church had services and assistance to help them get out of the financial situation they were in.

Where do we go?
I don’t have the answers here, I just have more questions. I’m always asking, how can I get Pagans to value ritual, to value education, to value personal growth work, to value leaders getting leadership training?  Or, is it something that my community really actually just doesn’t value, and I should quit trying to offer such work in the form of classes and community rituals? How often can Pagan leaders and organizers and teachers keep barking up the wrong tree before we give up? Or do we really just need to wait a few generations to have enough numbers?

For further exploration on this topic, below is a longer article I wrote several years ago on a potential model for Pagan community fundraising. https://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/how-do-we-pay-for-all-this-memberships-tithing-and-pagans/

Tomorrow I’ll post a Part 3 in this series on a few fundraising methods that I’ve seen work.

Fundraising in the Pagan Community Part 1

Many Pagan groups have a story, a myth. “Pagans are broke,” Pagans will tell me sagely. And…they are right and they are wrong. I’ve run Pagan events that make money. And, I’ve run Pagan events that didn’t break even.

I’ve posted about Pagans, money, and paying for community events before, but it’s a topic that begs further exploration. As an event planner, and as a traveling teacher, this is quite honestly a maddening process.

There’s various methods of fundraising involved in the Pagan community. Some are purely donation based, but many are capitalistic, ie, charging for a class or a festival. My experience of Pagan fundraising is that most groups have raised funds by charging for classes and events, or by selling items.

In many groups, the leaders cover the cost of supplies and venue rental out of their own pockets. I’ve heard a number of group leaders tell me, “If we charge for our events nobody will come, so we just donate the money out of pocket or the group will disappear.”

There are some not for profit groups that have done larger fundraising efforts over the years accepting donations and larger gifts for their efforts, and many groups (like Pagan musicians, the Wild Hunt blog, and myself) have done fundraisers through Kickstarter or Indiegogo to fund their efforts. But most of the folks out there trying to raise money are probably doing it on a fairly small scale—but even that scale is sometimes more than they can raise money for.

For some groups, raising $200 to rent a venue is more than they can manage.

Fear of Charging
I find that when I travel and teach, so many group leaders don’t want to charge their attendees for the class. Some are afraid to even ask for a sliding scale donation (ie, “Sliding scale $5-$25, no one turned away for lack of funds.” What they tell me is,”People won’t pay,” and asking people to pay will mean that people won’t come.

In fact, several group leaders I’ve talked to preferred to just pay my travel/teaching fee out of pocket rather than charge for it so that they wouldn’t alienate their group.

I know that in my case, I worked (in several groups/cities) to build a culture of donations on a sliding scale. It took years, and, it doesn’t always work, but raising $300 at an event is better than raising $50, or $0. I don’t always break even on my events that I host in Chicago, but I almost always do.

However, I have noticed in the past years that far less people seem willing or able to donate for a class. I used to regularly see sliding scale weekend intensives ask for $75-$150 sliding scale, and offer some scholarships, and the classes would fill with 15, 20 people without a problem and have no problem paying for the teacher fees or the venue. Of late, I’ve seen far less people able or willing to make the time for a weekend class, and of those who attend, far less are willing to pay even at the middle of the scale. Many pay at the $5-$25 level, or need to attend on a complete scholarship.

I think that that is partially the recession, and also partially because people are busier, but I also wonder what else is a factor. Friends of mine with not for profit fundraising experience suggest that the current generations have the least interest in philanthropy.

What Encourages Donations?
I wonder what would help events to raise more money. Is it the language? I know when I suggest a range of fees on a sliding scale, I get more than when I just put out a donation jar. However, I know of some Pagan teachers who charge a flat fee in a more capitalist model (only those who can afford to attend get to attend) and their following will pay that fee.

It’s also worth exploring what types of events make more money, and also what other methods of fundraising can work to boost revenues, such as raffle/auction, readers donating their time, vendors, etc.

Though I admit, what I see over time is that the successful classes and events seem to be hosted by teachers with a big name. Also, the classes and books that sell well are typically focusing on intro and mid level topics, as well as what we’ll call “sexier” topics. Classes that promise phenomenal magical power sell better. The classes  that seem to make money aren’t the intensive, advanced, deep exploration classes…they are the ones that sound “cool” and like you’re going to learn magic spells to get what you want.

How Much do Events Cost?
Different events have different costs. It depends on where you’re running the event. Some Pagans are able to secure free venues. Others have to pay for the venue. Some Pagan presenters and authors charge more than others. And then there’s performers like musicians. Bringing a Pagan band into town, or a Pagan author, can be a very expensive prospect.

However, they can be a big draw.

There’s a big difference between doing a workshop out of your house and running a day-long festival. And there’s also what people value and are willing to pay for. I’ve noticed that many Pagans will pay for trinkets before they pay for a class. And many Pagans will come out for a Pagan band, for entertainment, who won’t come out for a community event or a ritual.

Honestly, every time I plan an event I’m nervous. I never know if it’s going to break even until the event is done and we count the donations. And I can’t continue under that process, I really can’t. It’s too stressful.

Add to that the complexities of running an event, and working with a lot of local presenters and performers who–by all rights–should be paid for their time. Except,running a small scale Pagan event with no headline (famous) presenter, and no headline musical act, doesn’t bring in a lot of money most of the time. Not unless there’s additional fundraising. Some of the challenges are:

1. It’s hard to get people to actually come out to an event. People have busy lives and not everyone prioritizes Pagan events. Low attendance means less money. 50 people paying even just $5 means $250, and that almost covers my venue cost in Chicago for a day-long rental. But if only 30 show, I might not cover the costs.
2. Getting people to actually donate. Some just don’t have the money–times are tough. Others don’t value spending money on a Pagan event. They’ll leave the event and go out for drinks, drop $20 on dinner, $5 on coffee, and not think twice. Ask them to drop $25 on a ritual and they think you are scamming them.

But Paying for Events is Bad!
I’m not out there to shake anyone down for money. I’m not promising salvation. I’d just love to get paid a reasonable full time wage to do the work that I love–organizing events, teaching workshops, writing blog posts like this and writing books.

However, in my experience, there are only a few Pagans out there who are making (any) income off of their Pagan work. They fit into 3 main categories that I’ve seen

1. Leaders of a large institutions or owners of Pagan lands (and we have precious few of these)
2. Authors and Teachers
3. Vendors, store owners, and readers

Now…in any of these categories, you can have the ethical folks who are doing good work, and you can have the people who are just trying to make a buck.

People charging for services is not bad. People charging for events is not bad.

Embezzled money? Bad. Expensive sweat lodges that kill participants? Bad. Pagans are so gun shy about donating and it doesn’t serve us. However, there’s a reason–without controls and accountability, you have no idea where your money is going. And, with the epidemic of bad and unstable leaders out there, no wonder Pagans are gun-shy. Yet, unless we Pagans culturally drop our fear of donating to Pagan teachers and organizations doing good work, those organizations won’t survive, those teachers will give up.

I’m on the edge of that myself, as I’ve posted before. I’ve paid out of pocket to teach for years. We’re talking infrastructure problems here…and this is the reason we don’t have more leadership classes and advanced classes out there.

I suppose some organizations and teachers just need to hang in there and prove that they are one of the good guys…but goodness, is it a rocky road to get there.

Doesn’t Money Corrupt?
Again, money isn’t bad. We (humans) have a lot of cultural shame biases that get in the way. Money is a Pagan shame bias. Anyone who wants to make a living doing this kind of work must be “bad.” Money isn’t bad–money is energy. Money represents time and work. You can volunteer to help a group with your time and energy, or you can donate money. It’s the same thing, and Pagan groups need both.

But when someone is making a living doing work like this, there can be challenges holding a balance. I saw some of my own mentors having this challenge; they were forced to focus on what would pay the bills. They would often allow people to continue coming to events who were disruptive…but those folks were paying to attend, and they needed the money. In fact, that organization and retreat center no longer exists because it wasn’t financially sustainable. And it’s hard for any Pagan organization to reach financial sustainability.

I have focused mostly on the work that called to me–ie, teaching leadership and rituals, and leading rituals. I certainly could make a lot more money as a Pagan author and teacher if I catered to the Pagan-101-Teach-Me-Spellwork crowd. If I was willing to be a guru and subtly imply to people that they can become way powerful witches and spellworkers and get phenomenal cosmic power but only if they pay me a low-low fee….But that’s not who I am.

Money does always raise the huge question of authenticity. Yes, I need an event I’m running to make money or I can’t keep running them…but once I start compromising my authenticity to run events or teach classes just to make money, that’s where it starts to enter the gray area.

I’ve heard Pagans suggest that “true teachers” shouldn’t do it for the money. They should do it because they are called, they should do it whether or not they are getting paid. Well–I’m here as a teacher and leader who has done that. I taught because I was called. Where did it leave me? Financially destitute, to be honest. Yes, I made those choices, so I bear that responsibility. But to answer the question, would I do this work without pay?

Obviously yes, because I have. But the consequences to my life and health have been significant. I’ve found myself as a Pagan organizer and teacher at a crux, a crossroads. I have a choice to continue doing this work and finding a way to get paid for it, or to significantly downscale the work that I do for the Pagan community and focus on work that brings in more income.

Money and leadership and raising funds is a big topic! Part 2 will explore more of the issues of Pagans and Fundraising, and I’ll post that tomorrow.

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First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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Assumptions, Expectations, and Boundaries

If you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. But asking is sometimes the hard part.

“Let’s meet at ___ location at about 6pm.” What does “about” mean here? Does “about” mean, “I want you to meet me exactly at 6pm?” Does it mean that we might be there by 5:45, but that it also is acceptable if we aren’t there until 6:15?

“I like it when someone else takes the trash out.” What does that mean? Does that mean the person is hinting that I should take the trash out?

“Someone needs to design a flyer.” What does that mean? Is someone being asked to design a flyer?

“We need to clear the debris out of that room.” Who’s being asked to do this? What’s the plan? Am I being asked to help, or is this just a statement about the need to clear the debris?

“I have a train that is leaving at 6:30 am.” Is this even a question? If my intent is to procure a ride to the train station for myself, shouldn’t I be asking a specific question of someone? Something more like, “Hey, I have a train leaving at 6:30 am, would you be willing to give me a ride to the train station?”

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First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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Back to the article….I experience that many people are afraid to ask direct questions, particularly when they are asking people to do something–or worse, to do something for them. It’s part of this whole cultural passive aggressive baggage that really hinders communication efforts.

Why are we afraid to ask for help?
I can speak for myself on this one—I’m afraid that if I ask for help that someone might say no. That someone might resent me or judge me for asking for help. That I will then be stuck owing that person or be labeled as needy. There’s a whole host of reasons. Every once in a while, my deeply-hidden people-pleaser rears its ugly head. People who ask for help are judged as needy and helpless, I think. People will resent me for asking for help.

Energetically, it feels better if I hint and then they offer. That way I’m not owing them, right? Or at least, it feels more that way. Many communications lack the specifics that would actually get us what we want.

“Let’s meet up at 6pm” is at least somewhat specific. However, if Person A said “Let’s meet around 6,” and then Person A gets pissed off that Person B didn’t show up until 6:15, that really isn’t fair. “About” is a pretty vague word. If Person A needs something to happen by no later than 6pm–such as a departure–what would work better is, “I need for us to leave no later than 6pm, so please be there by 5:45.” It’s more clear and puts their needs forward. They are setting themselves up for someone to fail them if they are vague.

Why might they be vague? Well, let’s face it, being that specific and clear can be taken as being confrontational in our culture.

Here’s something that makes it more difficult is when someone asks a question when they already know an answer. Here’s an example. Let’s say Person A knows they want to leave by no later than 6pm to get somewhere else by 7pm. But they first ask Person B, “What time do you want to leave?” If Person A already knows they want to leave by 6pm, why bother asking?

And yet, we learn how to do these polite things that actually get in the way and cause micro conflicts and set us up for frustration.

Similarly, we learn that to be clear and to hold boundaries is to sound controlling and bitchy. “We need to leave at no later than 6pm, so be there at 5:45, please,” can come across as sounding harsh and unyielding.

And yet, it puts forth a clear need. If it’s actually going to tick you off to leave at 6:05, or, cause you to risk being late, it’s really your responsibility to communicate that up front.

“Let’s meet around 6ish” is something we learn to say, but it isn’t really what we want. I experience that people get really ticked off at people who don’t do what they wanted.

However, you can’t know what someone wants unless they tell you.

Expectations Uncommunicated
In fact, I notice this a lot in relationships when one partner has an expectation of another partner but never communicates it. One partner I was with expected that if someone didn’t jump up to take care of a problem that was hinted at, that that person didn’t love him. We finally came to be able to talk about this after therapy. It was an expectation he’d learned from a family member. His frustration could be anything from, the laundry pile was too full, to, he wanted to go out to dinner.

He just held the expectation that if there was something he wanted me to help with, that I’d somehow telepathically know. And when I, of course, did not read his mind to know what he wanted help with, he’d get increasingly frustrated but not tell me that he was frustrated until he exploded in anger.

You can probably start to see how something that’s really fairly miniscule like doing laundry becomes a major conflict. We’d end up in this cyclical argument where ultimately he’d say, “If you really loved me you’d just know, I wouldn’t have to ask.”

Perhaps you too have had relationship arguments that just ran around and around the barn like this.

Expectations in Groups and Leadership
The point is–you can’t expect something of someone if you haven’t asked them or told them what you want. I’m using an example from friendships and romantic relationships, however, this happens in a group setting just as easily.

“Someone needs to design the flyer” is not asking anyone to actually do that work–but you can bet that the group leader who mentioned this is going to get upset when nobody reads their mind and creates the flyer. Or the silent expectation that everyone knows they need to be at the venue 2 hours early for setup.

If you don’t ask people to do something specific, you can’t expect them to know you needed the help. I talk to a lot of group leaders who get frustrated with people in their groups who aren’t stepping up to do the work. And yes–volunteers often drop the ball, it’s the nature of the beast. However, many of these group leaders are not properly articulating the question, they are not asking people to do a task.

Here’s a mistake I’ve made in the past–I’ve put out the email to “everyone” listing the things that need to be done for XYZ event, or the Facebook post saying, “Can anyone do XYZ?” And then I get no responses. What gets a better response is, “Hey Pat, I know you’re really a great graphic designer, would you be willing to design a flyer for the event? I understand if you are busy.” When you actually ask people for help, you might get it–and you might get the help you are actually asking for.

But if I sit there and angrily stew that nobody is helping me with tasks–and I never asked them explicitly to do those tasks–that one’s on me.

Sometimes the Answer is No
Going further, you can’t really expect someone to act in a way that goes against their nature, against their values. I’m not talking about high-minded values, I’m talking about, what you value in the sense of, where you are willing to spend your time, energy, and money.

I value having time to spend working on writing, artwork, and community building. I’ve simplified my life in order to reflect those values. I don’t value expensive food, going out for dinner, or drinking, for instance. A former partner of mine was an extrovert (I’m an introvert) and greatly valued hanging out with people, going out for dinner. He was a foodie, I wasn’t. He liked to drink, I didn’t. He would get mad at me for not caving to his wishes and coming out with him to social events that I didn’t want to spend the money on. They were events that I wasn’t going to enjoy, and I didn’t value spending my time or my money on them.

“If you really loved me you’d do things you don’t want to do because I want you to do them,” was among his ways of trying to manipulate me.

And here’s the thing–group leaders sometimes do this. Visionaries, stubborn group leaders, we do this, and we don’t mean to. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past and I’ve worked to correct that. I’ve tried to pressure people into going against their nature, guilting people into doing something “for the event” or “for the group.”

Sometimes, when I ask someone for help, the answer is no. And as a group leader, I have to be ok with that, I have to respect someone’s “no.”

Manipulation and Expectations
Let me take a moment to step back and point out how putting pressure on people to do what you want them to do can be incredibly manipulative whether it’s a friend, lover, or someone in your group. The person who is trying to hold a boundary and say, “No, I don’t value that,” is made to feel horrible by the guilting.

When my own former partner tried to get me to do what he wanted, I began to  doubt myself. I was pretty clear at first that I was just holding a boundary. After a while, I began to wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Am I really that terrible?” Sometimes, my partner’s words led me to going against what I knew was good for me. In the context of a relationship, this can end up into a very abusive, codependent spiral. In my case, this exacerbated my existing depression and made it worse.

However, group dynamics and relationships are very similar, and a leader who is pressuring people to do things in a group–even for altruistic reasons–is still sliding on that slippery slope into an abusive dynamic. Pressuring people to taking on event planning roles might get your event done, but it’s ultimately not going to build a healthy group. I’ve learned that the hard way.

Groups are a Relationship
So when the group leader (Person A) really wants people in the group to volunteer to take ritual roles but nobody does, Person A is going to get frustrated. However, Person A didn’t communicate their need clearly, and then usually ends up browbeating people for not volunteering.

If they set up the expectation up front–or better yet, walked through what they need, and listened to their group members who might not want to take ritual roles–there would be less frustration all around.

Nobody likes the abusive dynamic of waiting for the group leader/parent to blow up at them. If the group leader puts out there, “We put on 8 sabbats, and I need at least 5 people to step in and take ritual roles each time or I won’t be able to facilitate the sabbat, how many of you are interested in volunteering?” and then perhaps also asks, “Are there any of you who really don’t want to ever take ritual roles?” and then listens to those folks share why, a conversation can happen. Negotiation can happen.

Maybe some of the folks don’t want to take roles because they are shy, but would be willing to take really small roles and learn to get better at public speaking work, but they are afraid to take on the bigger roles that the group leader is offering. Maybe some of the folks just have absolutely zero interest in facilitating.

Help people in your group build healthier boundaries–a healthier sense of self, and the ability to say no to you, the leader. And yeah, as a visionary, sometimes that sucks. Sometimes it means the event isn’t going to be as grand as your vision. I’ve been there. I have another T-shirt.

Organizing Events
Pagan Pride or another local festival is a great example. I hear from a lot of PPD organizers that they have a hard time getting volunteers, and have a hard time getting local people involved. They get frustrated when their local community doesn’t even show up for an event, or when local community leaders don’t take an active part.

But I wonder, how many PPD and festival coordinators actually work to establish relationships with local community and leaders by going to other folks’ events? Some do. Some don’t. How many festival organizers actually make the time to research local groups and go and introduce themselves? How many ask for specific help? Putting out a post, “I need help with XYZ day-long festival, I need volunteers,” is vague. “I need 10 people for 2-hour shifts at the info table greeting people” is specific.

I’ll be clear–volunteer management is not my strength. If I’m working with a skilled volunteer coordinator I can help break tasks down simply like that, but it’s not an area where I have as much skill. However, it’s an important factor in breaking down tasks because volunteers are much more likely to help when you outline exactly what you need.

Getting Other Groups Involved
Many Pagan organizers find it challenging to get other groups involved. One thing that I can say–and I’ve worked with a lot of groups in a lot of regions–is that most groups tend to get tunnel vision.

Now–sometimes this is just boundaries and focus. People only have so many hours in the day, and when you are running a small group or an activity as a volunteer, you may not have time or resources to do more. Remember–sometimes the answer is “no.” No is the answer you are giving when someone asks you to help with their project and you just never get back to them, it’s just an indirectly communicated no.

Event organizers and visionaries also get the tunnel vision of “I want everyone to like my project! I want everyone to want to donate time to this cool thing that I’m doing!” I see a lot of Pagan leaders do this. I’ve done it myself. What happens is, a leader gets a great idea for something, and gets upset that everyone is not as excited as they are, and that their requests for help aren’t met with overwhelming enthusiasm. Much less people jumping on board to read the organizer’s mind and take on tasks like vendor coordination and fundraising and programming.

However, the truth is, that not everyone is as excited about that thing as the person/group that came up with it. And other groups have other focuses. What’s also ironic–and this is something that I see a lot too–is that the folks organizing a bigger cool event, like a Pagan Pride or other day-long festival, get upset when more local leaders and groups don’t get involved, but then those organizers themselves don’t reciprocate and support what other groups are doing.

I have seen local event organizers get snippy when more people don’t support their event, and then they themselves plan fundraising and other events and other events right over the top of what other groups are doing. They don’t do it out of malice, just carelessness.

But what it can look like to a local Pagan leader is something like, “So you want me to donate my time and energy to your event, and then you just scheduled a fundraiser at the same time as my open ritual/class/event/thing and you never come to my events. Nope, not going to support your event.”

Which…is part of why we have so many petty conflicts, because scheduling accidents happen and people take things personally, but a lot of it boils down to awareness. Keeping track of what other groups are doing is a mighty challenge, and we have little infrastructure for it.

Assumptions
There’s that old saying about assumptions, and it really is true. Whenever we have an expectation or assumption about someone else–an assumption about their motivation..”They are doing this because they hate me, they are out to get me,” or an expectation, “Why aren’t they doing this thing that I need them to do for this event?” In these instances, we’re setting ourselves up for conflict and failure.

So what can we do? First is strengthening our own healthy boundaries as leaders, and working to help members of our groups strengthen their boundaries. Then there’s checking our assumptions. Is that true? Or are we just pissed off? There’s our expectations; did someone fail to live up to your expectation? Did they betray you? Or, did you never effectively communicate your expectations to your group members?

What we can do is work to be better. Notice the places where we’ve been hitting our heads against the wall and are frustrated, and work to change things so that it’s better next time. For an excellent resource on boundaries, I recommend the book “Where You End and I Begin.”

If you want things to happen, begin by asking for them. Clearly, and without ambiguity. You might get a yes, you might get a no. But at least you’ll know, and you aren’t setting yourself to be ticked off at someone later for dropping the ball. When a volunteer drops the ball, it often means that they should have said “no,” but they felt pressured to say “yes.”

That Festival has an Orgy Cabin!

I admit it. The first times I’ve heard about an “orgy cabin” at particular Pagan festivals or gatherings, my hackles went up. “Eeew,” I thought. “That can’t be ethical, can it?”

Yes. I’m actually talking about an orgy cabin. A cabin (or tent, or room) at a Pagan (or other) event where people are free to express various kinds of sexual touch and sexual contact. Yes, these things happen.

No, I’ve never been invited to one. (We can laugh about that part later.)

When hearing about group leaders being participants in the orgy cabin, I thought, “Whoa. No way that can be appropriate for a leader, right?” But then I put on my sex positive hat and think about it. If everyone in there is of age and consenting, is freely expressing sexuality inherently wrong?

I think a key problem comes in with consent. Specifically, with the peer and leader pressuring that can occur–even unintentionally. Just because a group leader doesn’t intend to pressure a newer/younger/more shy person, doesn’t mean they aren’t pressuring them. And, just because that’s happening, doesn’t mean that leader is a bad person or a predator.

To sum up–it’s complicated.

My first question for any event hosting such a thing is, how is it managed? How are minors kept out? And if leaders are involved, what safeguards are in place to ensure that no group member feels coerced to be sexual with a group leader?

I’m also curious how sexual contact is kept safe. Are condoms and dental dams provided? Does everyone there have to previously agree to safer sex or receive any sexual education? Is there any educational process around consent and agreements and ensuring that it’s enthusiastic consent, not “iffy” consent? Is alcohol present, and are there any safeties there to ensure that someone who might be too drunk to consent is taken somewhere to sleep it off?

Sex Positive Vs. Dominant Culture
My gut reaction to an orgy cabin is definitely rooted in the dominant culture, but when I think about it, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it if it’s handled ethically. Of course, handling it ethically is the challenge.

How do you invite people without pressuring them? How is a safe space maintained? What agreements are in place around safe sex and appropriate touch? And of course, who pays for the Crisco? (Kidding, kidding. Crisco is gross.)

I can’t really speak to the specifics of how you might ethically run an orgy cabin, or any other kind of venue where people can freely explore their sexuality in a safe space that isn’t constrained by the dominant culture norms, as this isn’t something I myself have experienced. But, like anything else, there are agreements, there are boundaries.

Someone has to hold those boundaries–free isn’t really free.

What Does Ethical Look Like?
For my part, and I’ve said this in other posts, I generally tend to lean toward the ethic that leaders should not engage in sexual contact with group members and students. Even if that leader isn’t intending it, there’s too much potential for there to be a subtext of a power dynamic where the student/group member feels they have to say yes to things in order to not get kicked out of the group.

I do think that it’s understandable that relationships grow over time between group members and leaders, but it’s important to be on a peer dynamic as friends and to be on equal footing before beginning a romantic or sexual relationship.

There’s just too much potential for one party to feel powerless in a situation and later regret it.

Some groups ban any type of sexual relationship between any group members. While I don’t think this is feasible long-term, because people are going to develop feelings and then you’re just setting them up to betray a promise to the group, I do think that it’s generally useful to employ caution. Sex, relationships, even friendships among group members can cause difficult group dynamics.

And, something that might seem like a really good idea often ends badly. Something that might seem really sexually freeing can end up being an ego-maniacal manipulation.

Normal Group Turns into Sex Cult
Here’s an example I’ve heard of (or witnessed) in different forms. Person A joins a group. She’s older than some of the other group members, more worldly, more experienced. She’s very friendly, takes people out to lunch, eventually starts taking some of the women out to a spa or to get their nails done or for makeovers. She is very generous.

She then begins to flirt with them. It turns out she and her husband are swingers. Eventually (and you can probably see this one coming) she starts bringing some of these women home with her for herself and her husband to play with. Some of the young women are married, so she invites the husbands over too.

The group begins to instantly shift. The young women begin flirting with other group members. There’s more sexual touching at events, enough that it makes the people not involved in the sexual relationship uncomfortable. This continues for months, and some of the group members begin to leave.

The people involved with Person A and her husband feel sexually free, empowered, liberated. That is, until they aren’t the focus of attention any longer. Once Person A begins seducing someone new, they get jealous. Factions form. Person A plays the group like a finely-tuned instrument, pitting people against each other. She has essentially manipulated the group into her becoming the center of attention.

Women who were previously excited and empowered are now angry at each other. Some begin to leave the group after the backstabbing and gossip get to them. Some feel used. A few hang on, loving that feeling of having Person A’s attention–when they can get it.

Once the process has begun, there’s no way to remove Person A without losing at least some group members. The group will eventually blow up, it just depends if there are enough group members left who want to keep going. If the leadership of the group tells Person A to leave earlier on, Person A’s devotees get irate and threaten to leave too. If the leadership lets this continue on, it’ll destroy their group anyways. Most of the people won’t even realize how Person A manipulated them.

And, don’t I wish that it didn’t play out like this. But, it can and it does.

What’s the Answer?
The answer is not being totally prudish and saying “no sex.” That’s what we call, “Setting ourselves up for failure.” But neither is the answer to pressure people into sex all the time.

What About That Orgy Cabin?
Well…I think it’s possible to handle it in a mature, ethical way. I think it would be a lot of work. It would require boundaries, agreements…possibly the most ethical way to handle it would be as part of a weekend-long workshop on sexual intimacy and boundaries. Freedom to express sensuality and sexuality is a beautiful thing, but packaged with that freedom is recognizing that everyone else in the room also is free to choose what touch they want, and don’t want.

If you’re participating in something like this, you might consider all the agreements and boundaries and ethics. You might look at how people might be feeling pressured to participate. Perhaps your Orgy Cabin may need a rehab with some refreshed agreements and education. Or perhaps you have a healthy dynamic going, in which case, good for you.

If not, think about adding in some layers of safety for all the participants there.

It’s true, thinking about things like safe sex, boundaries, agreements, and ethics might take some of the fun out of a more spontaneous Orgy Cabin. And yes–I probably did just manage to take most of the fun and sexiness out of the idea. However, things could be worse. I’d rather have the agreements and safeties than deal with the consequences of a group member who felt pressured into having sex.

What you really don’t ever, ever want is someone who felt empowered by being singled out to join the Orgy Cabin and was nervous but consented, and later feels that Group Leader A pressured them into sex. Or, everyone got really drunk and Group Leader raped them; they said no, but Group Leader A didn’t stop. And I’ve heard of situations like that.

As with anything, you have to look at the long-term sustainability of your group and your community. You have to think beyond the short term, “This would be sexually satisfying and fun and freeing,” into the longer term effects of how this will impact your group. A bunch of people who get trashed and screw around one night might be embarrassed later on and leave the group. However, if this is part of a longer-term commitment of group members to explore sensuality and boundaries with intention, and is coupled with intensive personal work, that could be a very different situation.

For further reading:
I have more thoughts on Sex, Ethics, and Community, as well as an earlier post detailing more on the process of how group members can be groomed and pressured into having sex with group leaders.

Pagan Leadership: Dissent, Feedback, and Group Leaders

In the previous posts in this series, we’ve talked a bit about the challenge when you have issue with a leader. I’ve focused primarily on leaders who are in the level of incurable jerk, in other words, folks who aren’t going to listen to any feedback.

Dissent is part of a healthy group. There’s a difference between dissent and dissension–dissent is a disagreement, dissension is a quarrel. The problem in our communities is twofold; leaders don’t always provide a way to offer feedback about their leadership. So people gossip behind their backs. Feedback happens. But, how can we make it more constructive?

My mentors had a rule of thumb, that if people don’t have a way to complain about leadership, a way to offer feedback, they’ll find one. And this is where we cross over into that realm of the conflicts that rip a group apart, or, spread out amongst many smaller groups within a local community. If there is a local leader who’s acting in an unethical way, or even just making some mistakes, but if that leader is coming from a place of egotism and arrogance and isn’t willing to listen to feedback, it’s a powder keg waiting for a spark to explode it.

Thus, a pretty simple piece of advice for any group leader is, if you want a healthy group, provide a method by which people can offer feedback. Feedback about your leadership, feedback about the ritual you facilitated. Often it’s as simple as being open, honest, and approachable. But the second part is, you really have to be willing to hear that feedback and not jump down someone’s throat for it.

As soon as you’ve done that, you’ve told them that you’re not actually open to that feedback.

Now–This is easily said, not so easily done. Many of us taking on leadership roles are putting our blood, sweat, and tears in, and we can be really emotionally raw sometimes about hearing how we screwed something up. Or even just hearing that someone didn’t like the ritual we did, even if we didn’t do anything wrong. I sometimes have a hard time hearing negative feedback about events I’ve hosted. So this is a piece that can take rather a lot of personal work. My article on Hypersensitivity might be of value to those of you who value hearing people’s feedback, but who also feel like negative feedback is a kick to the gut every time.

It’s a tough balance. Some feedback isn’t really useful. “You can’t host a picnic in that park, it’s in a bad neighborhood.” Yeah, sorry, I hosted a Pagan Mabon picnic in my neighborhood where there are people of color, so automatically it must be a bad neighborhood. “Why don’t you host events out in XYZ suburb where I live?” Because…I don’t live an hour and a half away in your suburb. Some feedback you can easily discard. Other feedback is useful, if painful to listen to. And a lot sits in that gray area between. On the one hand you have the advice, “Don’t let the haters get you down,” on the other hand, you as a leader do need to be able to hear genuine constructive feedback. It’s a tightrope, I won’t lie.

Leaders
Then there are those situations where there is a leader who may or may not have one of the major personality disorders, or who is just completely unreasonable. Some group leaders seem to genuinely have no idea how destructive they are, but my goodness. You try to give them negative feedback and they will singe your ears back. They tend to lean mostly on the “Don’t let the haters get you down” side of the spectrum…but the truth is, some of these leaders really are making big mistakes that are harming their group, or even the broader Pagan community.

Sometimes a local group leader doesn’t just affect their own group, they affect their whole region because they are involved in every single local Pagan thing. I’ve been asked before how you “stop” a leader like this who is really harming the local community by their actions. If you’ve read the previous articles In the Pagan leadership series, you know there aren’t a lot of great answers on this one.

Some very few of these leaders can be reasoned with. Let’s use the Pareto principle and say 20% of them. The rest may simply not budge. Some of them may have severe and untreated mental illness. Whatever the reason, you have to make a judgment call about how to engage this person. Often the only tool you have at your disposal is to simply not engage that person, to not support their events, to not send people their way.

In some cases, however, the most damaging leaders are the ones who are convinced that they are doing amazing work and that they need to be involved in everything. And here’s the sad thing–they may have initially built something really incredible. They may have started a local Pagan festival, a temple, a church, a Pagan pride.

In many instances, over time that leader’s behavior has a consistent negative impact not just on their own group, but on the rest of the community. Other community members and leaders feel the need to respond, to decry them and speak out. And this is where you end up with one of those untenable “witch war” conflicts that has no end. There is no solution.

Remember–you cannot make anyone stop. You have no power to do so, except in the rarest of circumstances.

In some rare instances, particularly when there are multiple witnesses to (and victims of) of poor behavior on the part of that group leader, it’s possible that raising all the voices together can have some impact. But again, you can’t stop their inner circle from following them–even if you know the likelihood of that inner circle eventually getting betrayed by that leader. You can’t take away their title, you can’t make them stop running a Meetup, or take down their web site. The only exception to any of this would be collecting evidence of illegal behavior.

It should be pretty clear at this point that we’re not talking about dissent any longer, because there’s no viable way to voice that dissent in a way that it’s going to be heard. We’re talking about dissension, a quarrel that really has no winners.

In some cases, I’ve seen a local community gang up on a particular leader to the point that that leader’s will broke and they retired from community leadership. However, there’s two sides to that. Often the times that this tactic is the most successful is when it’s employed by relentless bullies, not by the community members who are on the right side of that conflict. Very rarely do I ever see this tactic work on a community leader who is clearly engaging in harmful behavior.

There is always a line. There’s always a time when an abuse becomes so extreme that you (and others) may have to stand up or you can’t look at yourselves in the mirror. But understand that there’s really no way to actually make that group leader stop.

Just because you stand up and speak out doesn’t mean it’ll have an impact. And, that sucks.

Once things get to the point of dissension the conflict, by its nature, spills outside of appropriate borders and boundaries. Well–given the Pagan community’s structure and lack of structure, it’s useful to look at it as “when” that happens, not “if” and thus, how to handle it when it does.

Dissent and Group Structure
Ideally, each group creates a strong group structure with very clear agreements about how things are to be handled, and builds a group culture that’s in alignment with that, so that when something like that comes up it can be handled in-house. Not so much a sweeping under the rug, but more of a, this is the most effective way to handle this. I look at that as compassion and effectiveness rather than secrecy.

Once a conflict spills out beyond the boundaries of one group, it becomes more problematic and more damaging as more gossip and more hearsay enters the fray.

Here’s an example of how a group leader is accountable not just to their own group, but to their local community.

I lead public rituals in Chicago, and slowly over time my leadership team and committed group members are beginning to form what I suppose you could call an inner court, or rather, a more stable group that could become a working group. I’m not teaching any one tradition, so that becomes a bit more challenging to define.

However, I take a lot of interest in the local Chicagoland Pagan community, I’m a resource for other groups, and I also teach and travel nationally. I do consider myself a servant of the broader Chicagoland community, and thus if people would have challenges with something I did, I feel that I’m accountable beyond just my own small group.

If someone’s in a position like I am, where I’m often a more broad resource, there’s even less of a specific way to offer feedback because the further out from me you go, the less people know me and the less they might feel comfortable offering me negative feedback.

Thus, we have the situation where people get so mightily pissed off that they use the only avenue they feel they have a voice on–they post publicly on Facebook, Yahoo groups, or talk loudly at events, because they feel powerless. They feel they have no recourse.

However, going back to feedback…when I get hatemail about my Environmental blog posts, it’s certainly not going to stop me from writing them. That’s feedback that I dismiss most of the time. If I had feedback about my leadership, I’d take it more to heart.

However, because of the lack of structure in the broader Pagan community or in a regional Pagan community, you basically have the passive aggressive problem where 1. people hate to offer small negative feedback, they only offer feedback when they are pissed, and 2. people offering me feedback would ultimately have to trust that I’m not going to come down on them like a ton of bricks and “excommunicate” them. The only way they can know that is if they get to know me and my ethics and my integrity.

Most of the time when I experience folks who are really frustrated, it’s because they either
1. have no method of offering feedback, or
2. feedback has been consistently discounted.

As I posted in previous blogs on this series, there isn’t really a good way to remove a leader who has acted consistently in a way that is detrimental. One exception within a group that has a legalized Not-For-Profit structure is if the bylaws provides for removing a group leader or group member for specific misconduct.

People in a local community might get really frustrated by the actions of one leader. However, there’s a fallacy that crops up. Let’s use the example of a Yahoo group or a Facebook group. People there will begin referring to the Chicago Pagan community, or whatever region.

And here’s the challenge–here is no such thing. There’s the hundreds of people on a Yahoo list or FB group. And there’s the vocal 10-20 people on any of those kinds of lists. But, those people do not comprise the whole of the community. There is no central place where that entire community gathers. Those vocal few are but a subset of a local community, but when those vocal few start butting heads, the quiet masses retreat. People say, “The ___ community is just a wreck, it’s terrible.” No, it’s not terrible, it’s just that the really vocal 10 people are being upsetting. You could do your own thing. But, those fisticuffs tend to neutralize any desire to build community because they are seen as “the” community.

There is no one community. There’s individual groups, and there are leaders, and cliques, and popular people. There are vocal people. But don’t ever mistake a group of vocal or popular people on FB for “the” community. There’s the idea of “Trial by Facebook” to get rid of a group leader, but there are hundreds of people who will never see it, never hear about that. Or, see it and never speak up. There is no community, there are communities. One of the great sins of FB and Yahoo groups is the illusion that the internet group IS the community. It isn’t. It just tends to be the vocal people who spend time on FB.

I have seen the several Pagan communities (ie, the interconnected individuals and groups) basically shatter because the primary local FB group had massive fighting on it, and many of the solitaries went back undercover, and several of the long-running groups stopped organizing because they couldn’t take the drama. Nobody’s willing to step in and do anything new, no individual is inclined to get involved, because of the explosion on a FB group of 10, maybe 20 people at most.

In a word, the verbal asshats demonstrate to all the people on the edges that drama and arguing is what community will ultimately lead to. The vocal people are seen as leaders, whether or not they are. And here’s the thing–sometimes the vocal people are genuinely pissed off for good reason. Maybe they’ve been seriously wronged. But in coming out in that forum, it’s not like a court of law where some judge will come down from on high and say, “Hmmm, yes, your Facebook post is more valid than Fred’s, you are right and this leader shall be taken down from their pedestal and banned.”

What happens is the urge of the truly wronged butts up against the urge of the egotists and narcissists and the “I cannot cope with being wrong or being shamed even if they are right” folks.

And there’s no way for someone on the edges to know the difference.

Thusly why trial-by-Facebook usually fails. There are only specific instances where it can work, and that’s rare. And typically requires people who have been egregiously harmed to stand together and tell their story truthfully. When that kind of evidence is seen as being consistent, and when the people telling the story have nothing to gain from a power play, that can change the situation.

It’s the deep need of the wronged to have their pain heard and witnessed, to have justice served, to offer feedback, that is why many Pagan groups blow up particularly online. This is very common in Pagan communities where there are a number of people frustrated with a situation where they feel they have no control.

One of the most common questions that I get when I teach Pagan leadership, involves people dealing with a local situation where someone’s doing something that they morally object to, or something similar, and they want that situation to stop, but they have no control over that other person.

We want to talk about the thing we didn’t like. We want to be heard. We want to be able to effect a change. And when we can’t, our frustrations mount.

The answer is pretty clear. If you want to have your own group be healthy, spend the hours it’ll take to set up a process of feedback. Find a way to accept anonymous feedback if need be. And find a way to deal with hearing that feedback. In my case, that’s exploring techniques of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy so that I can separate “You did this thing I don’t like” with “You suck and I hate you forever and I want you to die.”

Learn how to give effective feedback. And then, teach your group members what effective feedback looks like. I’ll likely do more articles on that in the future, but a good place to start is the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Conflict Resolution Part 6: Red Flags

Here are the red flags that I observed about the problematic person I mentioned in Part 5 (and others in similar situations) that allowed me to paint a fairly accurate profile of how they were going to behave. You’ll really want to read at least Part 5 in the Conflict Resolution series, if not the whole set of articles, to get context for the profile of behaviors below.

Complaining
There’s a difference between offering a different opinion, and whining all the time. And then, when people offer that they are frustrated about the whining, backpedaling and profusely apologizing and making it about yourself. Sometimes there are people with that engineering mindset that challenge a group’s ideas about how to do something, and that doesn’t make them a bad person. Those folks can generally learn how to phrase things in a way that doesn’t come across as “You’re wrong” all the time. A constant whiner, or someone who never likes the group leader’s ideas but who never has any useful ideas to offer of their own. The pattern’s easiest to observe if the person is constantly tearing down the group leader’s ideas. If so, it’s possibly a power play, even if it’s unconscious.

Always Having Problems
The problematic individual in the group is always having problems. Now–it’s not to say that many people don’t go through struggles. However, this person never has gas money, never has time, computer is broken, is always sick. I’m not saying that someone who is broke and sick is always a red flag. Think of this as a mosaic; it’s one piece in the pattern. If the group leader points out, “If you’re sick, you don’t have to attend the meeting,” or “We can have you phone in if you can’t afford to drive,” and their response is either a swift turnaround, “No! Of course I’ll come,” or hostile, “Why do we always have to meet where you want to?” Those are both serious red flags.

It’s All About Them
This individual can make any conversation about them. Usually about their problems. Or, about how nobody listens to them. Or about how the group always goes with someone else’s idea. In particular, they will lay blame and ascribe particular motivations to people. “You guys don’t really care about my opinion, you always go with what ___ says.” They are willing to entertain any notion that it’s someone else’s fault, not that 1. their idea might be bad, or 2. the group decided to do something based upon the needs of the rest of the group without any malice toward this individual.

Victim Mentality
This person also typically approaches everything with a victim mentality. People are out to get them. In fact, they usually come into a group with stories about how they got kicked out of previous groups by jerky leaders. Do yourself a favor and check out their story, even if you don’t know those other group leaders yet. These folks will also frequently be cursed, hexed, under psychic attack, their boss is out to get them, their mother in law hates them, the man is always trying to stick it to them…you get the drift.

Pathetic Underdog
The goal of being pathetic is to get attention. People aren’t stupid, and we learn pretty quickly that there’s different ways to get attention, and one is to be pathetic. People like to caretake an underdog. The problematic individual in a group works to be so pathetic that they get their way. The group may come up with an idea ABC for an event, and the problematic individual hems and haws, and talks about how broke they are and can’t do it, or, about how nobody listens to them, or some other sob story. They work to be so pathetic that they not only get time and attention and cosseting from the codependent caretakers in the group, but, people go with their ideas.

Very Important Magical People
This person may pendulum swing from being the most pathetic person in the group who is always having problems, to a very powerful Witch. Either they know a lot about spellwork and hexing, or, they are desperate to learn powerful magic to control others. Often these are folks who have amazingly gained the skills to harm others with magic, or to psychically attack others. Also, they were powerful people in a past life. Or, they are a reincarnated Babylonian God. They can sink into a trance and get possessed by a deity without any effort, in fact, sometimes it causes them, you know, severe problems because the Gods are always trying to get into them. They aren’t responsible for it, it just happens, and then they aren’t responsible for their actions, of course.

No Therapy
When they are in victim mode talking about all their problems, some well-meaning person might suggest therapy to this person. “My therapist was trying to kill me,” they might say. Or, “My therapist wanted to commit me. I had to get away.” Some version of therapist/psychiatrist conspiracy theory conveniently leads to why this person is no longer on their medication. Now–here’s the challenge on this one. Certainly Pagans, as members of a minority spirituality, face discrimination including discrimination from psychological professionals.

Talking to gods and spirits, casting spells, sounds like a bunch of superstitious nonsense and for a therapist, that can be a red flag for schizophrenia, among other things.So certainly it’s possible, however, these days I don’t really hear many first-hand stories of Pagans who have had issues with therapists. I have heard of medical doctors and therapists trying to scare their patients who had chosen a polyamorous/ethical non-monogamous lifestyle, but no direct discrimination against Pagans.

The actual red flags in this are the paranoia of the psychological professionals being out to get the person, and the big red flag is “I’m not on my meds, I didn’t need them.” Again–none of these on their own are a reason to kick someone out of a group. But taken in concert, they paint a larger picture of someone who is going to consistently cause conflict in your group unless they get help. And–as I’ve pointed out over and over, you can’t fix anyone. You can take them to the door and offer to help, you can’t make them go through it.

Backstabbing and Gossip
This one probably is no surprise; this person is going to feel threatened by anyone in power, and they will either charge at them head on in meetings or online discussions to try and discredit them, but more commonly they will work behind the scenes to gain a coalition of people onto their side. They will trashtalk anyone to make themselves sound better.

Grandiose
This person also is usually the first to volunteer. If they have money, they often put forth money into the group, but it’s a donation with a catch. They donate money, and what they want is power and especially attention. There was one person I worked with who volunteered to bring in an expensive band from out of town for an event, but it had to be a band of her choosing, and she later used the band as a way to take the group hostage and to get people to do things the way she wanted. If the person is not financially abundant, they might take on a lot of volunteering roles.

An experienced group leader will see someone taking on a lot of volunteering not as a positive thing but as a red flag; very often, this is a sign that someone is trying to have attention paid to them. Because, 1. Volunteers are “good.” They are loved. And given that the problematic person has a huge core of self esteem issues, they need all the external love that they can get. 2. Their ideas get used. Nothing feels better to a person with poor self esteem than the illusion that people love them, and seeing their ideas take shape and the group working to make them happen can be a balm onto that gaping wound of self loathing. But it never lasts, because they aren’t healing that wound, just numbing it for a time.

Dropping the Ball
We all have things coming up in our lives, and sometimes we can’t meet the obligations we agreed to, and volunteer tasks usually get trumped by paid work, family, and health. However, someone who consistently drops the ball is a red flag. In fact, the Grandiose Volunteering is so very often followed by Dropping the Ball. It’s a one-two punch.

I should point out that I personally have been guilty of a number of these in my life. I used to volunteer to help out groups as a web designer and graphic designer. People didn’t like me, of course, I knew that. Nobody liked me, I was the outcast, the reject, the unpopular one. But they liked my artwork, they liked my web design. They liked that I helped.

Of course, I had said “yes” to way too many projects and got overwhelmed and dropped the ball. In fact, that’s something I still struggle with. But that’s the core difference here–the problem person we’re talking about is largely unaware that they are doing all of this. I’m here to tell you that some people, when made aware, can work to change their behavior. Relentless personal work and some therapy can go a long way.

Other folks, however, are not going to change. Or, not easily change.

Big Emotions and Oversensitivity
I posted a couple of blogs and links to articles about hypersensitivity. The problem person will typically have emotional reactions that are a few orders of magnitude outside of what is appropriate or reasonable. Again, they are always the victim, so they are always going to see that people are out to get them. So when someone suggests something that opposes what this person wants in the group, they are going to throw a big drama fit about it.

It’s emotional hostage taking, and it works. The codepedent members of the group will want to “fix” the agitated individual by caving to what they want. Codependent folks cannot stand big emotions. And that’s a whole separate set of dysfunctions, but you can begin to see the interplay of group dynamics and how someone as problematic as this type of individual can survive and thrive in a group even when they are causing so many obvious problems. People hate to kick out the underdog.

Sometimes you can catch this red flag early on by watching this person’s Facebook and Twitter posts or their blog entries. I know a few folks that, after reading their LiveJournal, I realized I would never, ever want to work with them, because they laid out enough red flags right there that I was pretty clear that working with them would be impossible.

This person is hypersensitive, defensive, and always has to be right. They can’t cope with being wrong and will either bully people into their point of view, or cry and be pathetic to “win” the argument.

Highly Creative and Disorganized
You are probably asking how this is bad. And–again, like any of these red flags, it’s not the whole picture. However, someone who constantly has big ideas, but is completely disorganized and cannot realize any of them, may not be the influence you want in your group, particularly if your group function is planning a festival or Pride event. This person tends to come up with huge ideas and start them, but not finish them. Their big ideas leave messes in other people’s laps.

Here’s where this flag becomes more obvious. This person gets kicked out of a local group, or gets dissatisfied. So they create their own group. Now–this could be a physical local group, or a Facebook group. Sometimes it’s a grandiose vision to create their own tradition, other times it’s a plan to create their own event. But then they vanish; they get sick, or are dealing with a chronic illness, or their computer broke, or…or….something always comes up.

Spiteful
The person tries to hide under the veneer of pathetic, but they actually come across as pretty spiteful if you watch. They will rarely have anything good to say about people with more power or creativity than them. They betray jealousy and anger in their comments about others. They gossip. They tear others down. Why? Well–let’s remember, these people have terrible self esteem. Tearing down is easier than stepping into responsibility for themselves and becoming the person they dream of being, the person who could lead a group and be successful and manifest their dreams. Instead, it’s easier to blame everyone else.

One-on-One Time
The problematic individual will take more of your time than every other member of your group. They will be hurt or upset by something someone said and need to be talked down a wall. Or they will message you all the time wanting to know what’s up, wanting to connect to you socially even though they don’t hold that role in your life. They will take umbrage at something you said and cry on the phone with you for hours while you comfort them. Or they will want to bounce some ideas off of you and take up still more of your time while they are looking for validation.

Summary, and Personal Growth
I’m going to let you in on a little secret; and, if you regularly read my blog, it probably won’t be much of a surprise. I, personally, have done many of the bad behaviors that I listed above. I’ve been a problem person in groups before, although it wasn’t my intention. I can honestly say that I wasn’t usually belligerent or spiteful, nor was I throwing big drama fits. I was never claiming to be a reincarnated Babylonian god. However, I was often the person who got heard by complaining. I’m the eager volunteer who dropped the ball.

Why? well, I had the worst self esteem you can imagine.

I came out of the public school system a suicidal self-hating mess. I was fat with acne and so stressed out that when I was 12 I pulled out half the hair on my head. It’s called Trichotillomania, and it’s a behavior that emerges as a coping mechanism for extreme stress. It took me years and years of personal growth work to get past a lot of these things. And, the old wounds don’t ever fully heal, in the sense that, I can’t go back in time and undo what happened to me. What I can do is decide that my life is going to be different going forward.

I’m really good at picking up these red flags because that’s how shadow works–we see the dark mirror of ourselves and our own bad behaviors in others. In fact, one of the best lessons (if painful) in personal growth is to observe the people around you and what annoys you about them. And then ask yourself, “Do I do that?”

Often enough, the things that annoy you in others are actually things you do that you secretly fear will annoy others.

Only once you acknowledge these things by looking in the mirror can you even begin to address those shadows. And I cannot encompass the entire process of shadow work here in these articles, though I can offer beginnings. T. Thorn Coyle writes eloquently about working to embrace and integrate our shadows. Or you can find a good Jungian therapist.

I often say that the secret to leadership–and to conflict resolution–is relentless personal work. I’m the poster child for it. I have worked to become a more whole person. Is my work done? Heck no. I have tons of issues. But I have come a long way. So I’m here to say that people who are engaging in the above harmful behaviors can change. It’s not pretty, and it takes a long time.

And many won’t. You can’t fix them. And if someone is engaging in consistent behaviors that is going to harm your group, you may have to ask them to leave, because otherwise, in a year you won’t have a group to build, it’ll implode or explode. And then you can’t help anyone.

More articles coming up in the leadership series, so stay tuned.