 I have a reading, I'm going to do the reading and then pass it on to Tim and I love this reading partly because of who wrote it and how it connects with last week's sermon. And also because it talks about gardens and people and we're looking at spring and I'm going to read this and you can just listen very carefully to see who you are in this garden that we have together. The title is Let Us Give Thanks. Let us give thanks for a bounty of people. For children who are second planting and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away may we for may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are. Let us give thanks for generous friends with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms. For feisty friends as tart as apples. For continuous friends who like scallions and cucumbers keep reminding us that we've had them. For crotchety friends as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible. For handsome friends who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn. And the others as plain as potatoes and good for you. For funny friends who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes and serious friends as complex as cauliflower and as intricate as onions. For friends as unpretentious as cabbages as subtle as summer squash as persistent as parsley as delightful as dill as endless as zucchini and who like parsnips can be counted on to see you throughout the winter. For old friends nodding like sunflowers in the evening time and young friends coming on as fast as radishes. For loving friends who wind around us like tendrils and hold us despite our blights wit wilts and witherings. And finally for those friends now gone like gardens past that have been harvested and who fed us in their times that we might have life together. For all these we give thanks. And this reflection was written by our esteemed former member, Max Coots. Thank you, Lorna. That was excellent. And Max, I want to say first of all welcome and good morning. My name is Tim Conroy. I'm the Chair of the Personnel Committee, which is a committee of the Board of Trustees. I am not a member of the Board of Trustees, but we have members of the Board on our committee. I've been an FUS member for about seven years. I want to talk about some of the points that we've talked about. You may have heard these if you were at the parish meeting a few weeks ago, but I will kind of go through them briefly again. And then we will go into more of a breakout session. So if you've been on a Zoom meeting before with breakout rooms, we'll have small rooms where we will address two questions. And there'll be a representative from the Board or the Personnel Committee in each breakout room just to take notes. We will not be able to answer a lot of questions today because we're trying to develop a lot of the questions and want to make sure that we are answering things that we hear. We have already had a staff meeting where we did a listening session earlier this week, Lorna and I, with the staff. And they brought up some excellent points. We noted those, and then we'll do the same thing with you today. And we've also heard from some members as well. So we will do a lot of work on this because it's extremely important. I want to just start out saying that we are taking a thoughtful and systematic approach to compensation. And we're keeping the values of equity, economic justice and integrity at the heart of our deliberations. So over the last 15 years, there has been a desire from the members in the congregation to get to fair compensation for all employees. And the leadership team assessed that eight of our 17 staff are paid below UUA minimum for their positions. And including payroll taxes, it would require about $63,000 annually to bring everyone to the minimum. If we want to look at length of service, then it would be closer to $114,000 to bring everyone to the staff recommendations. So how do we do that? We either can increase revenue, which comes from pledges or we could cut expenses, which unfortunately comes from staff and or combine both where we cut some expense and we raise revenue. It's bare bones our budget right now. And it has been and we don't have a lot of areas to cut besides personnel costs, which for most companies labor and FUS, you know, if you look at it, it's a company. It's labor and that's people and that makes things extremely hard. So that's why we want to spend so much time talking about this and hearing what people have to say about it. Over the past eight years, FUS has significantly shrunk its staff. So it is not it's not new, but we need to wrestle with a dilemma. And the best way to do it and the preferred way to do it is increased revenue. So we need to look at it as a congregation that is our mission to in our value values to pay people wages that address equity and fairness with fewer staff members or have more staff members and have people that are not paid fairly. And we need to decide that as a congregation. We, as I said, we had the parish meeting, we had the staff meeting and today we have the listening session. And all this will feed into the stewardship drive, which is ongoing right now. And we'll work for the next two years, which is what we've asked people to pledge. We also know that this is a tough year to ask people to increase their pledge in a pandemic still. And the downturn economically has affected some people. And it has not affected other people. And we understand that some people need to cut their pledges. And that is that is fine. We also ask people who may have the funds available to increase their pledge. And you have heard this in the services, and we will continue to talk about this. But we want to make sure that we have the input from the congregation and thank you to the 42 people who are here to do that. And we're going to find out what to do after all these sessions are done. The board of trustees will make the decision about whether to prioritize a larger staff or go to a smaller staff that's fairly compensated. The leadership team, which is the ministers in Monica are working with the personnel committee and the finance committee and will follow the board directive to make the budget for 21-22 and 22-23. And then we'll act as a congregation on those budgets in June of this year and then June of 2022. That's where we are at the moment. And we will work on getting these questions in. So right now, Lorna, if you have anything to add, please do. I think that, no, I think if I think of anything toward the end, I will. Thanks. We can go into breakout. Okay. So we Monica, are you able to put the breakouts together for us? Yes. Give me 15 seconds. I just want to make sure there's a facilitator in each room. In the meantime, would you guys mention that we're recording? I kind of just did. But if anybody is uncomfortable with that, please just let us know. The breakout rooms themselves won't be, but just be well aware that this is going to be on our website. And then the questions will be, I think we're going to send them out to everyone. There's a way that in the breakout rooms, the questions can come in. So you'll see that with both questions that we're asking people. And we did receive two questions in the chat and we will note those down as questions that were asked. Again, it's a listening session today. We don't have all the answers for this stuff. That sounds like a John voice. It sure is. Hi, John. There you are. So many beautiful faces to look at. Monica, I apologize. I don't recall. Were we going to do a slight sharing of themes we heard coming out of this? Yeah. One thing I heard brainstormed was facilitators sharing things that stood out for them or highlighting some of the questions that they'd like to see the Board of Trustees and the Personnel Committee speak to in the faxing questions that's going to be distributed later. Does that sound good? That rings a bell. Good. Yes. I feel like I have jet lag for my daylight savings. I'll blame it on that. Jet lag. I didn't go anywhere. Yeah, I could start with my group. Some of the themes we heard, just what benefits do we offer and are those above standard? Can we get the rationale behind the UUA guidelines? How are they made? Do they account for geographic areas? Another topic was not comfortable asking staff to leave, but if people left through a tradition and we didn't fill that spot, more comfortable doing that, what are the different ways we can bring in more revenue? Parking, the nursery school, letting people in the congregation that, hey, we have a revenue hole right now and this is what the result could be. We need you to help fill it, which is some of what we're trying to do now. Charging people way more money for tours because it costs 75 bucks to tell yes, and then we can charge more than 10. Then do we charge more for RE classes or do we not charge at all for RE classes? How do we keep the people that came RA, went through the whole program, and then leave when their kids are done? How do we tap into those people? Those are some of the main themes. I have more detailed notes that we're going to compile at the end. Is there another group? I'll jump in. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, and just to acknowledge, we missed getting that question to you before you went to your groups in the chat, which would have been worked better. So thanks for bearing with us on this Zoom. The group that I was part of talked quite a bit about the amount that the staff does at FUS and that it's difficult to think about having fewer staff with the remaining staff picking up stuff that the other staff did. It may be an opportunity for more volunteer involvement, and that's challenging, too, that FUS is a complicated building and a complicated organization, and it can be different to volunteer at FUS versus a congregation of 100 that's less complicated. There were, let's see, one of the things that was lifted up is how the lay ministry program is so vibrant and extends the work of the paid staff in the area of pastoral care. And perhaps there's a model there. There was a wanting to look at questions, like if we do need, if the congregation decides to have fewer staff to look at things like having three services, are there programs that staff are leading that would either go away or other people would lead them? And then some of the questions that came up, question about the, is there a geographic component to the UUA guidelines, as we already heard, wondering about more transparency around what the salaries are, wondering how FUS does in comparison to other congregations, its size in terms of the UUA guidelines, and wondering if sort of the staff heavy nature of FUS is typical of a large congregation. And I saw that Creel suggested people in her group, if they had something they didn't share but wanted to, to private message her, and I'll say the same, I think, for any of our group facilitators would welcome that. Next for my group, really, really great discussion. So some of the same, same types of themes of just really interested in the development of the UUA guidelines or churches similar to us. And, and I think really wanting a little bit more context to whether these are aspirational, if these are reflective of congregations actual salaries to their staff. And kind of how, how that fits in with benefits provided and UUA guidelines. Another interesting thing I thought that was brought up was, how do our salaries compare to other churches in the Madison area that are comparable in size when we're looking, not just at an equity lens for our own staff, but for kind of our own community and whether that resonates. Wanted some additional clarification on, you know, when, when the decision was made to have co-equal ministers that are paid at the same level, how that kind of affects this and impacts this and, and, you know, what, how that fits into the decisions around additional staff salaries. We acknowledge that there's been a drop in membership and that there may not be as much of a need for a large staff. So kind of wondering if the staff has dropped proportionately to membership and how that fits in. Same thing that you mentioned, Roger, with volunteerism was noted that Mary Ann Macklin said the most important role in a church is a volunteer coordinator and sort of like what, what that means for, for us, what kind of church do we want to be. Really great points around long term planning, mission and vision. So making sure that our staff positions and where we're putting resources, including financial resources to, to additional staff are aligning with what our mission and vision is and the, the acknowledgement that there's some work to do on that in the coming months and years. You know, some discussion about bring, how to bring in more revenue. We jokingly said that maybe we need a football team like the UW to bring in some more revenue. Probably not an option we want to pursue, but just throwing that out there. And we also, there was also some history it sounded like potentially that we thought at one point we had maybe calibrated against like UW professor salaries to have to have that kind of be equal to some kind of aggregate of professor salaries. And lastly, really important to have gender equity in our salaries, which we acknowledge that hasn't happened in the past. You know, we did actually have a couple of teams. You probably, I don't know how long, but we had the really bad golfers that raised a lot of money to be a really bad golfer at Cabaret and a really bad volleyball team. So, you know, we've tried that. I don't, I hate to be one of those people saying we tried that and it didn't work, but we actually did try that. I will, I'm going to just bring up a couple of things from my group that haven't been mentioned directly. One is a very strong sense of wanting to separate out decisions related to Kelly's salary as compared with the rest of the staff that it is a distinct and separate entity to bring Kelly along in terms of a professional ministerial level staff. One notion that came up in our group was that we talk about there having been a drop in membership, but in fact the drop in membership is less than it would first appear because what it is is really greater attention to what our membership actually is and that we hadn't done a real audit of membership for a very long time. And so we've had a similar membership as we have, as we're calling on now, but it's just that the number previously wasn't accurate because it wasn't based on really doing an audit of who was actually a member who was still on the rolls. And I think those are the, a lot of emphasis on looking at a long-term, very intentional volunteer effort and the pros and cons of that in terms of the availability for people to be volunteers and then the added dimension of actually coordinating volunteers, that there needs to be a way to coordinate volunteers as well as to recruit volunteers. And I think I'll leave the rest of it for the summation that I do for the FAQ that we're going to do. Okay, I'll jump in here real quickly. Some of the questions that were asked were quite similar to what everyone else has brought up. People were asking about the ministerial compensation separate from the staff compensation and the fact of co-ministry, how is that affecting staff compensation? Will that be a major hurdle in the future? And the staff that they're looking to cut, they said eight out of 18, are they full or part-time? What is the breakout here on this? They were curious about that. And they're also saying, what is the total percentage of staff that was above the UUA minimum? Are they not the UUA baseline? Also, I think it was mentioned that a few U.S. benefits are above the standards and has that been factored in. Also, I've mentioned that has any thought been given to giving up some programs that are given by the staff and just rolling that money into compensation for the quality or for increasing payment to the staff. And as anyone really talked to the staff, what are the choices? What are their thoughts on this? And have we lost quality staff? How many people have just been so frustrated they've got up and just left us? So, as I said, very similar to what other people have run across. I can add in a couple thoughts from my group. And I would say that most of what was covered in my group has already been said. So, if I leave anything out that hasn't been said and please help me with the folks from my group. But I would say we had more questions than we had real solid stances on what to do in this situation. Definitely wanting to looking for a better understanding of where these numbers come from. Where do the UUA standards come from? How do we line up against that? And then also in light of Madison cost of living versus cost of living in other cities and things like that. Also some disappointment in the fact that like 100K is a number that supposedly seems out of reach for us. That seems like a number that we should be able to get to. Some disappointment there. Wanting to know how the staff feels about this decision or about the options here. Understanding the staff levels are already high. That staff work insane amounts of hours and would they rather have extra help or would they rather have the more pay there? So, yeah, I would say those are some of the main goal points that came out of our group. But please, anyone from my group, if I miss something big, jump in. I think I may be the last group. We had, of course, a lot of the same thoughts. But also why is the increasing part of our revenue so challenging for us? Like why is this a problem? And do we know? And is there anything we can do to affect that? That program should be reduced as we can pay the staff. That a tough love stance of well, we don't have the money to pay for X programs. So, we're going to have to cut it and make that abundantly clear. Make that reason abundantly clear that we just don't have the money to do that. There has been a culture change in how we talk about money. There used to be guidelines that said if you make X amount of money, you should pledge this in this range. And that we don't do that anymore. And maybe we should bring that back. We want a happy staff. It is hypocrisy to not live our UUA principles. It should be a cultural norm to pay the UUA standards to our staff. And again, the same questions about salary and benefits. And the question of, you know, statements were made that, you know, I already give everything I can. I increased it this year. I don't understand why this is a problem. Why aren't more people doing what I do? We want to know which positions are underpaid. Which programs might be cut? And if staff were moved around to different areas, according to the income, how would that work with their skills and talents and abilities? And that it is not a viable solution to cut a position and think volunteers will cover it. Thank you. Any other comments from people that may have been in a group? Okay. Well, those are really excellent. And will allow us, we're going to combine all these and make a nice FAQ document that we share with the congregation and have a lot of these answers. And I can, I can already guarantee it will be a long document, but that's good. Any closing thoughts? You know, we have, we're in this stewardship campaign now. The budget work starts, I mean, it's kind of always ongoing, but we, June was the date that, you know, it's voted on. We have a lot, a lot to do in that time. But any other closing thoughts from Roger or Terry or Monica or Lorna? I was having these kind of unpleasant memories as I was going through this. And I realized I got it down to the fact that I've actually been here before. I've been on two different personnel committees under two different ministers. And in the last one, which was like this one, the personnel committee was chaired by a personnel professional. And we were charged with the idea of going out into the community to compare our staff salaries. We were saying the staffs were underpaid and we were looking to how to increase compensation. And, and I'm talking decades ago. So this is, this is past history. And so we went out and we looked at comparable in the community. And lo and behold, in comparison with the best we could come up with, looking at comparable positions in the community, FUS staff were really significantly underpaid. So one would hope that as a result of that, we were able to convince the congregation to increase staff salaries. And in fact, we were not successful. And in fact, part of the message that we got back, and this was part of it was we couldn't afford it. And, and we have the same stresses then as we do now. Part of it was that there, and this is really hard for me to even repeat, but that there was intrinsic value in working for us in working for a community with the values that we have. And in working in this space. And so there were there were intrinsic values that couldn't be measured if you look at salaries at the university or at various places in the community. And I hope that we're not going to go there with this with this discussion. And I'm going to jump in just to say thank you for having all of you show up is really awesome. And it's going to be, it's so helpful to get all these questions on the table. I know that some of you may be frustrated that we're not getting into answering all the questions today, but it will be good to do that more carefully and thoughtfully, especially. And it's really good to know that this is going to be not like a two week conversation, this is going to be an ongoing conversation. I see this conversation impacting and the and the stewardship campaigns impacting the coming budget next year and maybe beyond. So just just know it's it's a it's going to go a while and this is one opportunity to have your voices be heard. Also want to lift up that the staff had an opportunity last week with Laura and Tim to address these very same issues. And so I think that's really great. And that's why you're not seeing a lot of staff here besides the leadership team. Thanks. Really, thank you all. And thanks to the personnel committee. Okay. Thank you, everyone.