Hey friends, as y'all probably know we announced a rate increase beginning Jan 1. We started mentioning this in our live stream intros a few months back but I understand it surprised some of you. I want to give a little more detail on that decision here and invite your thoughts. Since we began this project two years ago it has been on a volunteer basis for most of us, including myself. Member fees have gone exclusively to cover locals overhead and reimburse one admin position (constituting a very low hourly wage). We always intended to raise the rates but have had little time for planning and logistics meetings, so it just kept getting pushed down the road.

When Jen got divorced a few months back she could no longer afford to give the volunteer time. I am also stretched thin with my work and parenting (homeschooling etc) and having difficulty justifying the volunteer hours. For instance, I almost never have time to check in here on locals, and I am sorry about that. Just to give you a behind the scenes for myself, between YouTube/spotify/SG/Substack I usually earn a total of about $80/mo, of which SG constitutes $0. Just me personally, but I need to cut back some unpaid work in order to save my sanity.

Early talks about SG involved a lot of discussion of rates etc. All of the things that were floated seemed unrealistic to me and I argued in favor of keeping it very low in order to serve members without capitalizing on them. Realistically, though, this has to be balanced by paying something to the people who put in the time to maintain the project. We've lost two of our original founders, and will continue toward entropy if we can't make the project sustainable.

No one here is looking to make a lot of money on this project, but I realized a few months ago that we are at the point where we are going to have to make a decision to try to sustain or grow it, or just let it go. I've been trying to recruit more facilitators, (including a male facilitator!) and thinking of new types of meetings we could add as recources (book club/reading group/specific groups for parents, etc) but it's difficult to spend more time or get more help when it's all on a volunteer basis. When Christine came on recently she generously offered to volunteer her time without compensation, as well.

So the options seem to be: let the project go and leave it up to members to choose to keep meeting; keep the price super low ($5-$10/mo) and scale back (Jen's group is paused indefinitely, and I can reduce to hosting once or twice a month still on a volunteer basis for a while and see how that works for now); or we can raise prices and put more work into the project by being able to offer something in return for hosting groups.

$20 is a lot more than $5, it's true. My hope was that members would realize that $5/mo was really an intro rate that was never sustainable, and increasing that to $5/week wouldn't sound like too much in order to access what works out to about 6 hours of live meetings. We always intended to step it up, and the fact that it was left there for two whole years is testament to the little time we've been able to contribute to this really beautiful group.

Thank you all for being a part of this group. I hope you've found it valuable and look forward to reading your responses to this.