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SCA participation (ramble)
It's hard to balance SCA events and being a somewhat-observant Jew -- a fact I knew intellectually for a long time, but that's not the same as living it. I now go to very few non-local events, because it usually means taking Friday off from work to arrive at a hotel (with food) before sundown Friday, and I use enough vacation days for holidays and Pennsic that I'm not going to do that unless the event is very special. All events now get evaluated through the "is this worth sacrificing some of Shabbat?" filter, with the schedules of local events being compared to service times. I find that even for "just Shabbat", as opposed to a holiday, I'm reluctant to miss services. (I will still ride in a car on Shabbat if the car was going there anyway, in case you're wondering, but I am hesitant to drive. So a corrollary is that I'm not just going to drive to the event after services; Dani also has to be willing to follow that schedule.)
Shabbat restricts some activities that occur at events. An upcoming event is, essentially, a shopping event -- something I can't do on Shabbat. Since the event otherwise has little of interest for me (it's also a children's event, not my thing at all), I'm going to skip it. That means I'm skipping a choir performance, but it's just not worth $15 or so to show up just for that. It's not the money; it's the cost-benefit analysis.
And then there's the part that has nothing to do with Judaism: the SCA, institutionally, has gotten much less friendly and flexible over the years. We have a burgeoning bureaucracy filled with make-work. We have more and more objectionable rules coming down from On High. And we have fewer people willing to actually think about these issues and question them. We're getting awfully close to "how high?" as the response to "jump!", and that's not the SCA I knew 20 years ago.
I live in the home group of the "three bad peers" (so dubbed by the then-president of the corporation). We were some of the prominent folks who challenged the corporation to open its books during a period of questionable financial dealings. (And yeah, that's a personal "we"; I'm one of the three.) When the corporation made a particularly annoying rule, we were among those who found legal ways to dodge the issue. (We did not simply say "shove off"; we worked within the system.)
About a year ago the corporation reinstituted the same rule. This time, they even provided the workaround. (It's the same workaround we used before.) They have said explicitly that it's ok to structure events to avoid the new rule, using this workaround.
I expected to see lots of events take advantage of that. Instead, prominent people in the SCA argue that it is "dishonorable" to do that, and several autocrats within my own group have declined to consider structuring events this way. So far, only one autocrat has done an event that way, and she had implementation problems that had nothing to do with the policy itself.
I'm not saying all of this to start an argument over this policy. Rather, I'm disappointed by how much my local group has changed in the last ten years. I sometimes think that I'm the only person living here who actually cares about the larger picture. I know that's not true, but that's how it feels sometimes.
I don't work on events much any more. Autocratting poses Shabbat challenges (and I got a little crispy before that), but I would like to cook another feast if anyone were interested in planning a Sunday event (a rare thing, but not unheard-of). But there's another complication, too: I feel that I cannot do anything to actively support an event that follows this new rule, because I think the rule is that wrong, and as I've said, the trend in my group seems to be in favor of the objectionable policy. So while I used to show up at events and help out for part of the day, now I just show up. That should make things easier -- more time to have fun and less time to work -- except that I have a strong-enough work ethic that it's hard to just sit there and not help.
But I like the society part of the SCA, even if the bureaucracy gets annoying. I really enjoy Pennsic. I enjoy most events. I enjoy singing, and dancing, and other activities that are best done in connection with events. A lot of my friends are in the SCA.
I'm not going anywhere, but my participation is definitely changing and I'm not sure where things will end up when everything settles.
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There is a "finance" or "budget compliance" committee (name varies) that reports to the board, but last I heard, its members couldn't get useful information either. They do get larger data dumps, but they're confusing and no one seems to be willing or able to answer questions about them, even when those questions come from the chair of the committee. There's a larger problem there, and that's that the board of directors is unwilling to hold its employees accountable. They are so afraid that the "indispensible" person who runs the office will quit that they won't press her to do stuff. Bizarre. No real-world company would be able to operate that way for years on end.
The employees are not, in practice, accountable to the board. The board is not accountable in any way to the membership. And the board makes rules that amount to "give us money", and the membership goes along with it. This boggles my mind. Some of these are no doubt the same people who vocally stopped supporting, e.g., United Way because of irresponsible financial matters, and yet with the SCA it's not only ok but somehow "patriotic".
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$219K for salaries??!?!
$187K for corporate offices?!?
err...
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Last I heard, the office had something like 6 employees (not all full-time). And I presume that benefits, to the extent they apply, are part of that figure. But yes, that's an awful lot of money to be spending on the function (as I understand it) performed by that office.
I believe the corporation has a regular accountant and a lawyer on retainer. And probably some computer consultants, because I don't think the folks in the office are technophiles. I don't know where they budget professional services; these people aren't on staff so it's probably not salaries. But I'm just guessing based on the data that's available.