Today was ‘one of those days.’ I was just a mess. I had to borrow my son’s overaized crocs and ride my daughters friend’s little-kid bike to work. I’m sure I looked silly, going as fast as I could with my knees practically bumping my chin. It was a disorganized, running late morning to say the least for this one-car family. I was short on resources - Time, memory, car, proper shoes, etc.
Don’t get the wrong idea. No need to rescue me from my ineptness. I am actually very fortunate and well resourced. Even on a bad day, I’m so lucky. Rich and deep with physical, emotional, mental and spiritual reserves. Relatively speaking anyway. There are always people that have more and people that have less.
How about you? Would you consider yourself well resourced? Do you have health, home, financial stability, community, love, purpose, access to more resources, wise council? Maybe you are in one area, but not so much another?
In this 5th chronicle, we’ll explore our Resource Division of Sol Center and how we are reorganizing to provide a mutually supportive healing community striving towards better living.
We are somewhere between a large family and a small business. And in fact, a large family is a small business. It requires management and resources and work and participation. We are wealthy in some areas and malnourished in others.
So, this large-family-small business is undergoing a transformation, a resource re-organization.
As mentioned in the third chronicle, we are fueled by volunteer workers. Or what we refer to as our work-exchange crew. This has been an ever -present part of our structure. And since this reorganization began this past spring, I am thrilled to report they our work exchange crew has been rebuilt and is stronger and more organized than ever. We have well over 20 active crew members that are working in exchange for classes or trainings. You can see them teaming about all over the studio when you come these days. Almost every class has a support person and we gather together often to do larger projects.
The universe provided us with a real heavy hitter that has helped pull this together in the past couple of months. A young woman by the name of Caroline seemed to have dropped out of the sky and into our community. We could not have recruited a better match for what we needed. Caroline worked in a large yoga studio during her college years and has direct experience in all the things that we needed. The cherry on top is that she is the most down to earth, light filled hard-working, efficient, compassionate and fun people I know. And she loves and teaches yoga too! She and Annabelle Thunderbird have worked very closely and very hard with all of the many members of the exchange crew for numerous deep cleans, tons and tons of organization around the studio, writing letters, community care and so much more.
I’m so happy to report that we are rich with the resource of human help and caring, compassionate team oriented energy. And the best part about it is that it is a rewarding experience for those involved as well. A real win-win. If you would like to be involved in a part of our work exchange crew, please send an email to info@solyoga.org. We would love your help.
While we are rich, we are also a little bit poor. We have never been been a high profit margin, family, or business. I think we had one year where we had a 2 to 3% profit margin, but the rest of the years we break even or carry a loss. I’m not sure if this is a surprise to you or not, but we keep the lights on in quite a few spaces and have far more expenses than we do direct income. Because we are a small business and I file our taxes in conjunction with my personal taxes I have always been able to offset any loss with my other jobs or personal investments, including real estate.
Our bookkeeper, Shanna, once asked me: “Dorcas, do you want to make money or not?” it was followed by a conversation about how I keep giving stuff away. I have a hard time not being generous.
I also have a hard tome comodifying and making transactional this offering of healing, recovery and ‘connection.’
Which is why we need your help.
As a community, I know that there is enough resource to support anything and everything that we need to do.
At present, we are also rich in wonderful gathering spaces. Thanks to our wonderful, late landlord Tom Macintosh and my early forays in real estate with my former husband, we have wonderful real estate and buildings and spaces in which we can be together. So I’ll continue to provide the spaces for us to gather, the housing and the studios, the buildings, utilities, the props, the grass underneath your feet in the yard. I’ll take responsibility for the infrastructure, including paying for MIND BODY ONLINE to hold our schedule and process transactions. I’ll pay the teachers and manage the HR. And cover lots of other expenses we have.
If you love this community and the energy and services we offer, you can help support our resource division in the following ways:
by showing up to participate. Your presence is the best gift.
2. If you are financially resourced, we would absolutely welcome your financial support. Either in exchange for services or even as a donation.
3. Another way you can contribute is by sharing your experience and inviting others to join. We primarily operate by word-of-mouth and rely on a good reputation and the practice of invitation to keep our community welcoming new people. If you have influence and abroad, or even small circle of influence, or perhaps you are well-versed in social media promotion or have a following, we would appreciate a shout out.
4. we need caretakers, people that love to love, people that are willing to support those that need support or a handhold or just to be listened to. There is a chronic shortage of empathy and tireless unreciprocated generosity for the suffering. For example, We have some residents and members that could use rides to work. We have people that need to learn how to budget.
5. We also need professional support. We are looking for a new accountant that has a broad range of capacity for small business and nonprofit services. We can always use skilled labor to fix our roof and our old plumbing.
6. We could use new supplies. Our bolsters are old and weathered. Our studio mats are low quality and fall apart easily. $2500 sounds like a lot, but good bolsters alone are $50-$100 each
7. We could really use a private donation or grant. We do not have money for salaries. So we rely on our work exchange community. It’s beautiful and we also really need about $50,000 to pay a yearly salary for full-time community administrator.
8. We need people who are willing to plan, prepare and organize food and community meals.
9. We have everything we need to run a small thrift/retail shop with proceeds going to the nonprofit. We need someone interested in taking on this project.
10. Come spring, we will need gardeners and people willing to take weekly shifts at our farmhouse garden and in our downtown community backyard
11. We need healers. Massage therapists, trauma therapists alternative medicine specialists. Anyone outside of the insurance system that would be willing to donate their time and care to our community and residents or at least offer discounted services.
12. We’d welcome collaborations with other service providers. Is there something you offer that might benefit our community? Would you like to offer a program or a workshop in our space? Might be able to promote your service to our community and vice versa.
Twelve suggestions might be enough. I think you get the idea. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have more ideas or are interested in supporting any of the ones mentioned.
Before I turned my attention away from our resource division, I want to also celebrate another area of richness. Collectively, we have a deep pool of wisdom and a lot of spirit. I was substitute teaching yesterday for Jan Faulkner’s Tuesday noon class. And as I looked out over the sea of students, I saw so many devoted long time daily practitioners. People who have been practicing yoga diligently and allowing it to transform their lives for years and for some people, even decades. And it’s not just the wisdom in our student body. It is the students who have also become teachers and our wealth of educators and healers who make up our teaching staff and teacher training staff. And even the ones who aren’t currently present, but are practicing on thier own and undergoing their own transformation. All of these people contribute to the essence and the light and the energy that is the Sol community. It’s palpable when you walk in the doors. This is the thing that is not a commodity that cannot be formally packaged. It’s free for the taking when you show up and do the work. And we are blessed with a strong contingent of people that hold the light and give it so freely.
It reminds me of the quote “if you build it, he will come” from the movie field of dreams.
We are a spirit led, open minded collaborative, community oriented, large family – small business. How can we work together? How can we help one another thrive outside of the context of the typical consumer model?
How can we share resources and defy the limited resource-scarcity-minded, one-for -themselves self oriented systems that ultimately separate and divide us, leaving us pray to the devastation of isolation.
2025 will be Sol Yoga‘s 20th year. This will be a year of giving back to the community, connecting with our alumnae, cleverly and philanthropically building a deep and sustainable resource division and celebrating along the way.
Soon, we’ll be releasing the date for our grand 20 year celebration weekend!
But first, we have to figure out how to best communicate. I’ve saved the most challenging division for last. I’ll be diving into that in the next Chronicle. But I will say that in 20 years communication systems have evolved and we are having a hard time keeping up with the changes. Pretty flexible as yogis, but we are also kind of slow and old-fashioned. So please bear with us. These modern day hurdles are teaching us lots of patience and compassion and contentment and surrender, all tenants of the first two limbs of Yoga.
Stay tuned for the next Chronicle.
And in the meantime, happiest of holidays to all. Whether you celebrate the winter solstice or Hanukkah or Christmas or nothing at all, please be gentle with yourself.
We will be sending out a Christmas E news message with our special promotions, and some of the special events we will be holding. But because of our problematic communication issues, it is likely that you won’t receive this in your inbox.
So we are trying to make sure that information is available in the studio, on Facebook, on Instagram, and that we are available for Q&A via info@solyoga.org or the Studio Phone 301-620-0027. Remembering, that we are humans navigating an overwhelming time and may not be able to get back to you as promptly as we would ideally like. Please be gracious with us as we continue to reorganize .
Warmly,
Dorcas