Systems Thinking

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in mid-March, I hear the telltale grumbles of a rooftop snow avalanche building momentum. Soon: a roar, a bit of house shake, a momentous thud, leaving a whole section of our metal roof cleansed of months of Northern Vermont snow accumulation. Just as suddenly, we are off the grid. You […]

Sometime around summer/fall 2020 I noticed the word anti-capitalism shift from niche corners to wider internet meme-fodder. Like a lot of concepts and phrases that pick up steam in the wider halls of the internet, the more the phrase was thrown around the more the meaning became…fuzzy? muddled? I saw “anti-capitalist” slapped on all sorts […]

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s wreckage, I revisited this piece that I wrote last summer after historic and devastating flooding in Vermont

This is the third part in a trio of posts about extended leave in a business. Much of what I wrote about providing paid leave for employees applies to owners, but there’s obviously some particularities about ownership that require some more thought. Read the first two posts: Providing Paid Leave The State of Family Leave […]

Part two of my deep dive conversation into the Creative Economy with Tara McMullin and Charlie Gilkey, where we think through the impact of the economy on small businesses and creators, and think through where what we might create instead. – Kate Tyson Read part one here: The Creator Economy is Eating Creative Acts. Tara […]

Sometime back towards the beginning of the year I whispered to both Charlie Gilkey and Tara McMullin that I didn’t think the Creator Economy should exist…and that I also thought it was a bit too hot of a hot take to take public. They both told me I was wrong, and so we sat down […]

Somehow 2024 was the first year we needed a parental leave policy at Wanderwell. Typical of me, crafting a new policy sent me down a rabbit hole, weeks reading everything I could find on the United State’s absolutely fucked support for new parents. And so today I bring you part one, a dive into the […]

I did a little experiment recently where I tracked all the different ways I interacted with service fees and tips in my day to day. Even though I’m aware that tipping is a thing I frequently do, I was surprised at how frequent and how diverse these financial exchanges turned out to be in just […]

Vermont— yes, seemingly the entire state—flooded over a few days a bit over a week ago. It made national news, so maybe you know this. You may be far away and file it away under “yet another natural disaster” in the abstract feeling that these things tend to take on. I didn’t really register the […]

Greetings! This post is part of a series called Enough is Enough, a summer of exploring failure. We kicked off with a piece on Queer Failure, and if you’d like to read the full series, find that here. Today I’m thinking my way through something that’s been troubling me these past six months or so: […]

This post is adapted from [Im]Possible Business, a zine exploring radical business alternatives. Learn more and download the publication here. Read another post in this series: Business as Queer Failure Utopias have always entailed disappointments and failures. — Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother Étaín was an “underthings” store in Portland, Maine, that offered an inclusive […]

While working on [Im]Possible Business, inevitably, I’ve had a steady stream of conversations and thoughts that I wish I could add, couldn’t jam in lest the zine morphs into some ungodly 20,000 page un-plublishable tome. The reality is, so many of us are making “uncapitalistic” choices in our businesses every day. It’s just a matter […]

To read Part 1, how to think about redistribution and giving within your business, click here. In the Part 1 I wrote about the opportunity in stewarding business resources to create more resilient ecosystems. Since businesses are set up to generate more resources than individuals, we can also use them to channel those resources into […]

There’s a whole mess of reasons why all businesses should distribute profits to their employees: -Redistributing money = redistributing power -You didn’t build your business to only benefit yourself -Your employees should benefit from the value they create Those are just three of many, but you get the idea! I’m not talking about the folks […]

Steps Towards Building an Equitable Business. Lately I’ve been thinking more than ever about pricing, access, and the assumptions we are, often unconsciously, baking into our business models. Particularly for those of us who have high-priced consulting or coaching services as all or part of our business, I’m thinking about how these models intersect with […]

Shared Interest: A business loan, amongst friends, that funds a community grant. Shared Interest was a grant available to the local creative community, made possible through a collaborative with our friends at Little Baby’s Ice Cream. The Story In 2016, we  extended a short-term, low-interest loan to our friends at Little Baby’s Ice Cream, in order to […]

You’ve been there, on your worst days: muttering (yelling?) the phrase “Burn it all down” about your business. We’re here to tell you we think you should. The college I attended, in a small town in Minnesota, is home to one of the largest Prairie restoration projects in the country. There was a good stretch […]