For this month’s loft piece, volunteer business manager Spirit Joseph offers an overview of Earthdance’s financial outlook:

Earthdance Financial Overview:

Over the past few years I’ve been supporting Earthdance as a volunteer business manager and was asked to provide an overview of how Earthdance is doing financially. During the pandemic Earthdance was able to borrow a large amount of money on attractive terms through government programs. This gave us a lot of cash, and also substantially raised our debt. The cash was essential for Earthdance to weather the years of severely reduced income and recover our yearly operations. Our goal is to generate a profit each year that can be invested in future capital improvements, can reduce our debt, and can be invested to generate additional revenue or reduce costs. 

In 2023 our revenue rose to almost $494,000; close to our pre-covid income. Our operations for the year (including some one time non-recurring grants) resulted in an operating profit of about $36,000, compared to a loss of $23,000 the prior year.

We ended 2023 with $57,000 in cash in our operating checking and savings accounts. We also held $324,000 in interest bearing investment accounts with $70,000 already allocated to our roof and solar project and installation of a new well, and $50,000 allocated to future debt reduction. We have a total of $987,000 in two outstanding long-term loans.

The first 3 months of 2024 have been relatively slow for operations and events. The remainder of the year is looking stronger, and we are projecting to show a reasonable operating profit by the end of the year. Earthdance’s finances feel relatively healthy, and as always are reliant upon our community’s participation in events as well as donations both for operations and for capital improvements. Thank you so much to everyone who came to an event, to everyone who helped to produce, host, lead, or otherwise support an event, to everyone who made a financial donation, and to everyone who volunteered labor and expertise in some way to support Earthdance last year.

Spirit Joseph

Volunteer Business Manager

Garden Update From Neal Wecker

Spring is here, the garden is green, food is on the way.

Over the winter, I began referring to the garden here as “our little clearing in the forest.”  As the gardener working this land, cleared of its natural New England Arcadian forest biome well over a century ago, I spend these warming spring days digging, shaping, and amending the top 6-8 inches of topsoil. My efforts, asking our 1/3 acre clearing to produce plants and flowers, tells an ongoing story of human presence amidst a near 3000 acres of conservation held forest.

As our garden is sprouting with peas, radishes, beets, spinach, lettuce, turnips, parsley, and brassica greens, the surrounding forest blooms around us with ephemeral trilliums, trout lilies, Canadian mayflowers, toothwort, bloodroot and more. ‘Horticulture’, ‘agriculture’, even ‘permaculture’ cannot match the garden of the natural forest. It’s a natural, humbling and inspiring gift for me to feel the grandeur beyond my human tenacity to wield the spade, sow bred seeds and ‘weed, weed and weed!’  These days, while Tamara, the present ED work exchangers and myself work our little clearing to yield fresh veggies for the summer jam, we continue bowing each day to the grandeur of the depth and lessons of forest’s spring!

***These are Independent Events. Earthdance assumes no responsibilities for the activities of these programs as a renter of its facilities.***

Reflections on “cultivating curiosity amid our conflicts”

About 25 engaged people from the Earthdance community gathered on April 13 to practice dealing with conflicts and tensions as they come up in the Earthdance community.

The group chose to work on the following topics: 

• Can clear rules at Earthdance help to mitigate harm to marginalized groups?
• How can Earthdance live its principles without becoming a bubble of like-minded people?
• Does Earthdance need another structure to balance the role of the Board? 

The workshop was led by Ron Halbright, Tom Murray and Beth Dennison.

Our community experiences conflicts which can divide us or bring us closer as we grow and evolve. The group moved to chart our future as a collective by working together to integrate varied perspectives. Bridging the conflict comes when we can speak with passion, clarify the issues, and listen with skillful curiosity, which the group appreciated practicing together. Then we could understand and reflect accurately so people felt their voices were heard. Sometimes passion overrides curiosity. Both passion and skillful curiosity are important and we hope to build our skills further to be in choice and awareness around how these play out in our bodies and in our communication.

The attendees and the Earthdance board and staff seem interested in continuing these types of workshops that build community capacities and create spaces to inquire on specific issues.

Potential follow-up workshops could focus on "Handling incidents" or "Learning from past conflicts to move forward". Please send ideas or comments to ron.halbright@ncbi.ch.

Some sweet moments at Earthdance over the last month!

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