Howdy reader, Kenny here, in the middle of it all, once again.
In our last community communique, Emeshe wrote vividly on the nature of the village embezzlement discovery that has given Rabbits a number of unique springtime projects. In addition to stepping out into the vernal sun, fluffing my cottontail, and warming my winter-chilled leporine coat, I am also having to spend a truly unfortunate amount of time talking to friends and neighbors about deliberate financial mismanagement stratagems, and that has me in some kind of a headspace.
It’s baby goat season, and I’d much rather think about that. Because the Dairy Co-op values letting mothers raise their own babies instead of having milkers bottle-feed them, socializing the kids in other ways becomes that much more important. In my non-farmer opinion, the best way to socialize a baby goat is to head down to the barn on a beautiful afternoon and scoop one up in your arms while talking with your neighbors. On particularly joyful days, a baby goat themed happy hour event emerges, where community members drop in, hold baby goats together, and talk about village goings-on in those few blessed hours before dinner.
The Dairy Co-op runs a raffle every year during kidding season; a few dollars for your chance at the life-changing opportunity of naming a baby goat. Mae is quick with the email announcements–baby pictures, loving descriptions of their coats, temperament, and natal health reports, as well as the mention of the lucky winner who gets to choose the baby’s name.
Saying that the Diary Co-op runs “at cost” would be disingenuous, applying a level of capitalistic scrutiny to the concept of “valuable labor” that is both uninteresting and devaluing to the work performed and community impact felt, but the proceeds from the raffle definitely go toward keeping the new babies and long-time veterans happy, healthy, fed, milked, and yes, socialized. The co-op also facilitates the community coffee hour at the Mercantile, overseeing scheduling, the beans, and of course, the milk. The Dairy Co-op’s yearly report on its projects, successes, stressors, finances, and more are available upon request if you find yourself intrigued. This co-op is so infinitely wonderful and interesting, that spending the rest of this piece covering it would be timely and joyful.
It was recently discovered that Cob, former village accountant, stole upwards of 10 times the amount brought in by this year’s naming raffle, every year for at least 10 years, from 100 percent community funded accounts. So we’re figuring out what to do with that information, while also coming up with some great baby goat names.
I am serving on one of the multiple committees that were spun up in response to the seismic news of the embezzlement, focused specifically on creating a financial report on the state of the books in the wake of these discoveries; discerning what we do and don’t have, where it’s supposed to go, and recommendations for how we can keep it there in the future.
It has me thinking a lot about the things I don’t think about. Specifically, the aspects of modern life that allow one to simply not consider things. Turn on the faucet, plug in the laptop, warm up the car, condition the air, and have an “assistant” guide what to do when any of it breaks, right on the phone screen.
Being at Dancing Rabbit doesn’t absolve me of this reality. There is a certain comfort in knowing that I don’t need to know anything about something to benefit from it. I couldn’t begin to describe the engineering magic of the fiber internet that is routed into my house made of dirt, sand, and hay, but I do value having an internet connection, even if I have no joy for learning how to set it up myself.
Another thing I enjoy not thinking about, ironically for someone on the financial investigation committee, is money. Within the mutual aid collective I am a part of, there is a need to handle the money we receive from grants and dues, and we have a member who volunteered to hold an accountant position. In the wake of the embezzlement situation, I found myself thinking about how, because of my trust in this person, I allowed myself to “hole” concerns about the collective’s funds.
Now, there’s no embezzlement going on in the Queer Mutual Aid Collective (QMAC), but thinking about all this did bring me to a blessed conversation with the QMAC accountant about the broad responsibilities of this role now and what they could be in the future, how aspects of it can be communalized and how we can ensure transparency. Not because anyone actively mistrusts one another–it is a blessing to be able to trust one’s comrades–we talk about these things because verification of trust is integral to the “trust but verify” framework of healthy project communication. There are no privately held secrets in a truly shared project, which is one of the things that makes the intimacy of community so different from the isolation of individualism.
Although I am distraught, disappointed, and drained with the larger looming lucre losses, there is no better place to publicly ponder the painful particulars of fructuous financial fraud than with a barn full of spring-ready Rabbits, all holding at least one baby goat.
Kenny Dane is a regular contributing writer to this publication.