25 Sep Updates: Welcoming Ben and the BackEnd :)

Delighted and honored to officially introduce Ben, who’s 7 months into the year-long process of becoming a full collective member here.

Every person at Lupinewood has a position helping run this place, and we lovingly call Ben’s position “BackEnd” – among other things, he wrangles the multi-headed hydra that is our finances, oversees record-keeping and archiving, and keeps track of the systems we use to coordinate labor internally.

He’s been taking clunky systems we’ve used for years, picking them up and being like, What if this was a beautiful streamlined user-friendly process instead?

At our last meeting, he rolled out a system for tracking and disseminating updates to our core organizational documents, inspired by collective bargaining agreements in unions at places he’s worked.

When he’s not making the above magic happen, he works locally as a therapist (just jumped through all the hoops to get his private practice covered by Masshealth🙏), organizes with community recording studio and practice space Electro-Acoustic Mechanics, shreds bass with his band Grammerhorn Wren, and silently communes with his ball python Bee, looking all shiny here,