Resources

Let’s be honest. Those of us who run programs are typically terrible at documenting them. We’re always too busy running around actually doing stuff to record what we’re doing. And then when the time comes to report to people - stakeholders, customers, funders, donors - how awesome we are, we are left scrambling.  

Fishadelphia’s bookkeeper, Althea Baird, consults with organizations to help them develop equitable payscale systems.

Decisions at Fishadelphia used to be very messy. It wasn’t clear who was supposed to make what decision, and sometimes I would contradict a decision someone else had made, which caused all sorts of problems. So we’re trying to move toward more tidy decision-making. This year, as part of their job descriptions, everyone got a table of their decision-making responsibilities and roles.  

At our summer 2025 retreat, we worked with a facilitator to develop community agreements for Fishadelphia. Every workplace is different, but most workplaces have some kind of vision of how they want to work; community agreements are a way of capturing, articulating, and sharing that vision with everyone.  

We all know that whoever is in charge of the money in an organization holds a lot of power. Originally, our Executive Director (ED) just did the budget every year. Over the last few years, we’ve been developing a collaboratively-oriented budget process.

When we first started building budgets, we would estimate how much revenue we were going to have for the year, and plan spending accordingly. We then broke out how much we thought we were going to earn and spend each month into monthly projections.