Where our money goes

People often point out that our prices are higher than grocery store fish counters. Why? Our core values include transparency, so in answering this question, we want to share our whole budget.

Here is our projected budget breakdown for our 2023-2024 year, followed by some explanations.

Labor costs

The largest components of our budget are all going towards paying people to do the work of getting seafood to you! Unfortunately, when food is cheap, it often means that people were exploited in the process.

But at Fishadelphia, we believe that everyone deserves nice things, which means that we won’t compromise on paying everyone equitable salaries, whether they are filleting a fish or writing text for our website. For our staff, our payscale currently starts at $16/hr and ranges up to $25/hr for our leadership team (which includes our founder/director). Realistically, this is vastly underpaying some of our staff who could could be making much higher salaries elsewhere.

Furthermore, the costs we pay to contractors to process and deliver the seafood are as expensive as the cost of seafood itself. Again, our goal is not to squeeze these other people and organizations that we work with but to ensure that they are compensated fairly for the work that they do.

 

Youth programming

Our youth program and educational workshops are also supported by our general budget, though we do have additional grant support that helps as well. While our youth program has previously been core to running our operations, its current role in Fishadelphia has been redefined. Our current goal is to move towards a sustainable business model that can support our youth programming, freeing us from the need to apply for and please grant-offering foundations.

Donations

We gladly accept donations! These donations go directly towards funding subsidized shares (our Community Rate and Neighbor Share programs). Note: we are not a 501(c)3 (donations are not tax-deductible), but we are a value-oriented non-profit entity:

 

Private Non-Profit Entity

Any nongovernmental corporation, trust, association, cooperative or other organization which: (i) is operated primarily for scientific, educational, service, charitable, or similar purposes in the public interest; (ii) is not organized primarily for profit; and (iii) uses its net proceeds to maintain, improve, and/or expand its operations.

 

Sometimes we also do mutual aid campaigns to raise money for Fishadelphia community members that we know are in need due to specific circumstances–that money is handled separately, never enters our general budget, and is 100% transferred to the person in need. Usually we announce such campaigns through social media and collect those donations through Venmo, Cash App, etc.