💚Spirit Bucket
What is the Spirit Bucket?
A pot of funds set aside from Greaterthan’s Commons Budget to provide money flow towards more ad-hoc activities that directly contribute to supporting GT as a human system; our relational fabric, our historical memory, our deepening of how we are together.
The funds in this bucket are “topped up” every 6 months alongside the Hike budgeting process.
A first version of this bucket (as a "Spirit Team") was set up during the first heartbeat experiment. When this evolved into the Hikes model, the Spirit Team budget evolved into a "Spirit Bucket". The below mechanism was decided upon in August 2022.
Who can make use of the funds in the bucket?
Greaterthan Partners and Associates can request funds from the bucket (although this may include requesting funds also for people beyond the member circle).
What can be paid for?
Please note that these are common examples for what it may cover, but this is a non exhaustive list.
Hosting important internal processes relating to how we are together, our culture and our organisational fabric (rather than our external offerings): this could be conflict resolution, reflective or sense-making meetings, guiding us on growth edges, responding to emergent needs outside of hikes in ways that contribute to a healthy human organisation.
On-boarding / Off-boarding & Care work: supporting humans as they move across the GT (eco)system and checking-in on wellbeing + needs.
Important: we do not necessarily want all spirit care work to become paid work, as there is also a lot of value in all of us members actively dedicating time and energy to stewarding our commons (incl. our relational commons). However, we want to have easy mechanisms in place for significant work to be acknowledged also through money flow.
How to claim funds from the bucket
Note: everyone in GT is free and encouraged to pursue activities that nourish our human system without checking with others. This is not required to “approve” work or energy that you want to put it - simply a mechanism to unlock money flows to support that work, so if you would like or need to get paid for it, then we recommend following the below process.
Step 1: Check what funds are currently available in the spirit bucket (in Open Books).
Step 2: Get in touch with the spirit bucket stewards (see below) via slack and discuss the work you would like to energise or have already started supporting. Assess together whether this work seems significant enough (in terms of time, importance and financial need) to access funds from the spirit bucket. At this stage, you might gather advice from other GT members to support your decision.
As our work is very emergent, funds may also be claimed retrospectively; however, as this cannot be guaranteed, if you know you will need some money flow to feel happy to engage in the work, then make sure to have this conversation before you get started!
Step 3: Decide together by consent with the spirit bucket stewards whether you will pursue this work with financial support from the spirit bucket or not. If the answer is yes, at this point, have a first conversation about what compensation would make you feel energized and supported to energise this work. This number will be revisited at the end, as described in the process below. Ensure the decision is transparently documented in a decision log.
Note: Depending on the opportunity, step 2 +3 may happen async, through a few slack messages. The objective is for this process to stay as light-touch as possible!
Step 4: Once the work is complete, circle back to the spirit bucket stewards to finalise the contribution from the spirit bucket, and invoice (following our invoicing guide and clearly naming the work you did and labelling it as 'spirit bucket', so this can be transparently tracked on Open Books).
Bucket Stewards
The Spirit Bucket must always have at least one, ideally 2 stewards (for resilience purposes), whose role it is to:
Keep an overview of the financial state of the bucket
Hold the above described process for drawing funds from it
Communicate to members if there are any issues, or a need to evolve its purpose or functioning
Who can be a steward and how to become one?
Spirit Bucket Steward is a persistent role (without fixed compensation), held by associates and partners. One of the two should be a partner. Stewards rotate on an annual basis (ideally with one steward staying while a new one joins).
Since the workload of the steward role is likely to be very light touch, there will be a quarterly happy money “check-in” between the stewards to determine if any compensation is needed from the Spirit Bucket to support their work. This approach may change as we learn more about this work in practice.
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