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| ISSUE NO. 596 |
| THESE LAST TWO YEARS . . . have been, for many of us, a meditation on the bottom line. What exactly is the bottom line? It's commonly thought of in terms of budget - profit margins, income, the balance sheet, etc. But another bottom line exists, one that is defined by non-monetary values. The intersection of the pandemic and the fight to uphold the humanity of Black lives brought us to a place where we were more collectively focused on what our priorities are, and what truly matters to us. How our day to day values impact our broader goals, and vice versa. But something is wrong when the bottom line of budget is so often used as an excuse to ignore values. When profits and/or spending are used as an excuse to justify ignoring or discounting the things we care most about. I had the opportunity to be in conversation last week with the team behind Drive Change, an organization that is hard at work on advancing workplace equity for formerly incarcerated youth who are disproportionately Black and Brown. CEO Kim DiPalo shared these words, which have echoed through my mind ever since: "Budgets are value statements." We have heard this idea more commonly as "you are what you do." In other words, the things we spend our time on are the things that matter most to us. Our behaviors, habits, and actions signal what we care about. Why does this suddenly fall by the wayside when we're talking about money? One reason is because racism was historically justified as a zero sum game, as Heather McGhee writes about in her incredible book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. The bottom line is: if you make a commitment to equity, you have to assess how your budget will reflect that, where you feel resistance, and why. Aligning your values with your budget may be a challenge, but one that is relatively simple on an individual level, because you're in charge of the decision-making. On a broader level, it is more complicated. There are many businesses working on the unsustainable model of free or low-wage labor. This is justified through a common argument: that the threat to the bottom line of the business itself is a threat to the well-being of those who rely on that business - the employees that have jobs, the customers that they serve, and the communities that benefit from their presence. This same case has been made to us, over and over again, by some farm owners in response to our $15/minimum wage policy. The threat to viability of small farms is seen as a de facto upholding of government-subsidized factory farms. We are here to point out that the expectation that farms can only exist when paying lower wages is not a sustainable one - and the more that we all rally around this idea (us, farmers, farm workers, the general public), the more likely we will be to find effective solutions that uplift farmers and the important work that they do. Because if small farms fold, it will be a loss for everyone. But that burden cannot be placed on farmers and farm workers alone. It will take a lot of people making noise to push the needle. When we put our values where our money is, we made a change to our minimum wage policy for all Good Food Jobs, and it's left us with a lot of questions. But one thing we're sure of is that it's the right move for our small business. Next week, we'll share more about how this decision impacted our bottom line, and what we're doing about it.
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tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . |
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