Priceless was founded as an anticapitalist event. I’m not sure how it worked for the original False Profit crew, but for our Priceless Planners crew, and ongoing discussion has been about wealth disparity within the Planner community. The vibe has been that while we question capitalism, many of us are also doing well enough under capitalism that it’s primarily a theoretical discussion with well thought out experiments in how to HOST an event for others that’s anticapitalist. We set out to change that last year by taking on a radical experiment of moving from volunteer-only organizing (we do pay our food vendor, medical staff, and security staff; along with paying artists and musicians to help us host our event) to paying a couple roles. This is how that went, and what comes next.

Goals

We wanted to enable some of our amazing Planners to be more able to contribute to Priceless without it being extractive about their labor. We also wanted to have a way of helping to fill hard-to-fill roles.

Experiment

We decided to pay two roles for the 2025 event — the music coordinator and the production coordinator. Each stage has a build and management lead, but coordinating across the stages for A/V things, flow of event, making sure hospitality is staffed, etc. The production coordinator joins two other ATC (air traffic control) folks who have more history in the community and tie the whole event together. I’m on ATC.

To do this, I drafted up the proposal, floated it to the group, had lots of 1:1 conversations with folks who weren’t so into it, etc. I also set up hiring committees for each role, a job description for each role, investigated with other festivals what market rate was, worked with finance to set how much we could pay (over market rate!), and got the job descriptions circulated. I also worked with the committees to figure out what questions we would be asking and what rubrics would determine who we would hire. I did outreach, coordinated with interested candidates, and synthesized notes across interviews.

Outcome of experiment

We hired two lovely people. We were open with the folks we didn’t hire, and all stayed on to still contribute in volunteer roles, for which we were deeply grateful, as bad blood was a risk of this experiment. The event was well executed. The person we hired from a nearby community did really well, but didn’t fully incorporate into our community. The person who was already in our community went WAY too hard and we were concerned about her well being. Planners did treat these two folks differently, expecting to just hand things off to them to be completed rather than being in cahoots as friends throwing an event. I also got treated like a second-level manager, with “direct reports” and other parties coming to me with concerns and feedback rather than directly to the two folks. Which I’m fine with at work, but not for Priceless.

There was also a big shift in the Planner crew of assuming additional roles would be paid in the future, wondering why some roles were paid but others weren’t, and starting to see financial compensation as an indicator of valuation of role. We were also worried that if some roles became paid, they would become a “junk drawer” of things that other people didn’t want to be doing. And as I’ve said before, a Libertarian is just an anarchist who doesn’t want to take their turn digging the latrine.

In short, it was an ok experiment, but the costs were too high. We didn’t like people being treated differently than as equal friends, we didn’t like not being able to pay more, and we were worried about the slow slide into setting value judgements on roles with financial compensation.

What we’re trying next

At our retreat this year, we talked about a common practice across many groups we’ve been in — given a penny, take a penny. A collections plate passed in many churches isn’t just about giving to the church, it’s also about making it ok to take from the plate if you don’t have enough to survive just then. When Annie died, we set up a small fund for anyone in our social group to take from if they needed medical care. And when folks were donating funds to Occupy Sandy, they ran an analysis and figured out it would cost more to track fraud than it would to just let the small amount happen, and handed out cash to causes and families. So for 2026, we’re going to try out this model where folks in the community who can give a bit extra will put into a pot. Those in our community who are intrinsically motivated to contribute to Priceless but might have fallen on hard times can take from the pot.

I’m excited to see what we learn.