Okay, now. Okay, it's 7.02. You know how in Zen they say, if you're on time, you are already late. So let's start. So good evening again, and thank you very much for being part of this meeting. My name is Diego Miglioli, and for those who don't know me, I'm the Vice President of San Francisco Zen Center. And tonight we'll be talking about the impact this pandemic has had on San Francisco Zen Center's financial sustainability.

[02:02]

Last week, you received an email letting you know that you could send questions that you had regarding this issue. So first and foremost, I would like to thank everyone who sent these questions and concerns. There were many of them. And in a minute, Senator Abbott will be answering these questions and expressing some key issues regarding this matter. The way the meeting is going to go is the following. So it will last for around 30 minutes. While the meeting is running, you can send questions using the chat function that you have at the bottom of your screen. Just click on chat, and you can type your questions there. Just make sure that you address those questions to me, that I'll be reading them and relaying them to Abbott Ed. So he will respond as many as possible to those questions, but we do only have 30 minutes, and we'll see how much time is left. So thank you again for being here. And Abbot Ed, please go ahead.

[03:06]

Good evening. And I keep wanting to be on the gallery view, but it keeps throwing me back to speaker view. Good evening. It's so wonderful to see all of your faces, some old friends and some new friends, I'm sure, this evening that you took some time out of your life to have this conversation with me. I really much appreciate it. You and your family and all your friends are well. I'm happy to report that in the 10 weeks since we shut down our three centers, all of our 140 students are well and no one has gotten sick yet, which is very good. So tonight I will answer a few of your fundraising questions. And so I first would like to just... express my appreciation for your very generous response to our emergency fund raising appeal in the three weeks since we launched it on april 27 we have raised uh 305 000 from that launch and with the match that came from 50 of our closed donors that's 610 000 and if we raise an additional 195 000 along with the match we will make our million dollars so

[04:25]

We're only one hundred ninety five thousand short of our goal right now, which is really an amazing thing. And I cannot express how I feel when I'm faced with the generosity of our supporters at Zen Center. Zen Center is a organization, a nonprofit organization that has a budget of about six million a year and that we bring that income in and we spend all of it every year. And we've done this for 50 years, and I think that's what a nonprofit should do. So when we get into these situations where an emergency happens, most often a fire at Tassara's mother event, our friends come forward and help support us through it. So I'd also, the first question that came, and I'm just going to work through these questions because I have a long list of them, was, could somebody describe the breakdown of the contributions we've received so far? And I would say we've had 1,098 contributions. Tremendous response from the community. 57 of those were over $1,000.

[05:26]

So that was a very generous 57 of them. And the medium donation was $100. So of course, every donation is appreciated. And it's been wonderful to see this response from a wider community. There was another question that says, what happens? What's the plan B if we don't? raise the full amount. So I'm very hopeful that we will raise the full amount. But we have thought about Plan B, and Plan B would probably be cutting expenses more. And I will get to a little bit of how we've thought about our expense cutting in the midst of this, because obviously the first thing that we did 10 weeks ago when we realized we were shutting off all of our income was to cut our expenses to only the essential expenses that we had. Someone also asked, if we've donated money and plan to do so again, what else can we be doing to help out San Francisco Zen Center?

[06:32]

Are there individuals or entities we can write to for additional help? So obviously, we're making our appeal more widely known, sending it to your friends. or sending it to organizations that you think would be responsive to us would be a wonderful thing to do. Also, as you know, since we closed our face-to-face in-person practice teachings, we haven't closed our teaching. The Dharma is going out through all of our online activities, and I welcome you to participate in all our online activities, our online workshops. And when we open greens again, I welcome you to go Well, we'll be opening it for takeout pretty soon. I welcome you to start patronizing greens because that's a tremendous support to Zen Center too. But of course, if you have some other idea about how you could help Zen Center, you can email the development department, which would be development at sfcc.org. I think it's the same email that's been sending these appeals out.

[07:33]

So we would like to respond to any offer you have to help us. So there were a whole series of questions around Zen Center's budget. I'm not the chief financial officer of Zen Center. Emily is that. But I'm going to just try to give you a general overview of how Zen Center runs its businesses. So generally, we get about $6 million worth of income a year and about $6 million worth of expenses. The large portion of our income comes from the fact that we invite people in to share our practice. There's a long tradition in Zen that started with Bajan way back when in the sixth century in China that a day of no work is a day of no food. So in Zen Center, self-support is an important part of how we have run the organization.

[08:36]

And that was true right from the beginning when we bought Tassar in 1967. We decided to keep the guest season open, to use the guest season both to share our practice with other people and a means of self-support. And we've continued that practice in all three of our centers. So in all three of our centers, we... Of course, give Dharma talks that people come in and listen to. We have workshops people attend. We have overnight rooms. People can stay. They want to stay for longer sessions. We put on conferences at City Center and Green Gulch and Tassara. That guest income is $2.3 million, which is 37% of our income. Our teaching and practice income is 900,000. That's another 15%. And the products we sell, which a lot of them are through our bookstores and things that when people come and visit us, is another 10%. So you can see once we close the doors of the temple, over 60% of our income went away.

[09:39]

The Tassar guest season alone is a $1.5 million in revenue that we bring in. So of course, how do we spend our 6 million, which was the other half of the question, 45% of it is spent on people, the 13 employees that we have, and the 140 residents that we have. And I was looking at some odd numbers around all of that that Hemley gave me, and I wonder where they are right now. Oh, here's an example. On stipends, we spend $750,000 a year. That's an average of $500 per student. So a student, a staff people that live here at Zen Center get room and board and health insurance and $500 a month in stipends.

[10:45]

Someone asked, is it more efficient to live in community than it is out in the world? Well, we've never had a really good way to analyze that, but just approximately, I just ran some numbers in my computer, it probably costs us about $25,000 a year per person that we're supporting in Zen Center. That's a very low cost. We're going to find out soon what that cost is because a lot of our expenses are mixed with serving guests who come in from the outside and other things like that. But... And so we'll know soon what it costs just to support the 145 people that we have living at Zen Center right now. And I suspect it's going to be even less than $25,000 a year per person. There was another fact. Someone asked something like, well, how much is your health insurance a year? We spend $850,000 on health insurance. That is, we pay more for the health insurance for our students than we do for the stipends for them.

[11:47]

And we pay about $760,000 in food a year. So as you can see, it's not so easy to cut the expenses at Zen Center because we live so inexpensively the way we do it. And someone asked, well, what about your properties? And do you have a big mortgage on your properties? And one of the things I'm happy to say is that we bought all of our major properties almost 50 years ago, and except for a couple of the buildings that we bought on Page Street, which were more recent. So we have a total right now of $600,000 in mortgages, and we have that to one entity, which was a nonprofit that said that they wanted to carry that mortgage for us at no interest. So the mortgage costs we have are very low, which is very fortunate because it allows us to live in these beautiful properties and invite you all in to stay in these properties without a large mortgage cost.

[12:54]

And of course, this means there's no risk or foreclosure or any difficulty that we'd have if this virus goes much too long, we will be able to keep all of our properties. Someone asked about our buildings on Page Street and whether we could rent them out, and I did want to make a comment about that. The trouble with renting, first of all, currently all of our rooms in Page Street are filled except for one flat, which we might consider renting out. But mostly, if you rent out property, the rent control in San Francisco is very strict, and someone could stay in that property. for a long time. So it's not so easy to just rent a piece of property for a year or two while you need extra revenue. Someone also suggested, well, maybe you could sell a piece of property.

[13:55]

And of course, we could. And there was a period of time 30 years ago when Zen Center was going through some financial difficulties. And we sold three or four pieces of property on Page Street, which, of course, I'm very sad we did because we certainly could use those properties right now. Another one of the questions people had was, what's our plan for reopening our properties? Are we going to stage them? Are we going to open City Center before we open Green Gulch? Are we going to open Tassar first? And this is a very difficult question. As you know, formally so far, we've said Tassar is closed through the end of June, and so is City Center, and so is Green Gulch Farm. Within the next 10 days, we'll make a decision about whether Tassar will be closed through July.

[15:00]

And we'll make soon after that decisions about whether City Center and Green Goals Farm will be closed longer. So, of course, this is quite difficult for us to do financial planning because all of these being closed reduces our income quite enormously. And we have to actually ponder the question of whether we're closed for the whole next 12 months. And we have done that and we've run quite a few different financial scenarios thanks to the finance committee and the board has requested that and we will have a route through that. I think if we complete this $1 million fundraising and we have our traditional other fundraising of the year end letter and the Zenathon and all of you and our other members continue with your membership support or slightly increase it, we would be able to make it through to the end of this next fiscal year, which is April 30, with what we raise in this fundraising.

[16:05]

So I'm happy to say that, and I'm happy to say that we'll be able to do that and support the residents that we have at Zen Center in our three temples right now. That's important because The residents at our three temples are the residents that run all these programs that we're currently running online and that we would run again when we reopen. And so we need to have them there and in place to be able to run our programs. And second, these are the most mature students in Zen Center. Many of our residents have been practicing for over 40 years. There are teachers, at least 20 of them in Zen Center. are brown-robed teachers, and we committed to supporting them. And at the same time, we have many young students who are serious and training in Zen, and we're committed to supporting them. On the other hand, we're trying to meet this moment.

[17:06]

So since right now TASARA is not open, we've reduced the staff at TASARA, the student staff at TASARA, to a minimum that we need to be prepared to fight a fire if it comes into Tassara and support the ongoing facilities. So maybe it's around 25 people. We normally have 80 people in the summertime at Tassara and we've moved the 10 people up to Green Gulch where they can do farming because farming is one of the things we can do in the midst of this thing to both supply food for ourselves and and to sell food to people that enjoy our wonderful produce and the bread that we bake at Green Gulf. And we've been giving food to the food bank when we have excess in certain areas of crops. So it's an offering we can make to the larger community at the same time that we support ourselves and offer our marvelous vegetables to the wider community. I'm trying to see.

[18:13]

Here's the question I think I answered, but I'll just read it again. How are you able to sustain current and retired teachers and residents at City Center, Tassar and Green Gulch? Well, we do it by living very simply, owning the property that we live on and living in communities so that we can do it very cost-effectively. And of course, it's wonderful to live in community. As Fizuki Roshi said, group practice is the shortcut to awakening. It's the kind of foundational aspect of the way Zen Center is. There's many Zen practice places in America, but no Zen practice place has 150 residential people practicing together. And it was a decision we made early on as our style of practice, the way you have to live with other people and have other people helping you with your practice is such an important part of our style of practice. So that's been sort of the way we practice, and it's been our tradition from the beginning.

[19:30]

And in that light, someone asked, what are the implications of this pandemic to Enso Village, our retirement center that has been moving along. And I'm happy to say there's been nothing important is slowing it down. We had to stop construction on our preview center, which was to open a month ago because of the pandemic. But we're back in now working on it. And we should be open in about a month. And once the preview center is open, we'll start taking 10% deposits. And we hope within a year, we'll have got enough deposits that we'll be able to raise the construction money to build the place. And within three years from now, we should hopefully be able to make it available to the wider public. And our senior retiring elders will be able to move in in the next two years after that. So between three and five years. our elder monks will be moving into Enzo Village.

[20:35]

There were some other questions. Some of them were personal questions about how to practice in this situation and I've referred them to other teachers in Zen Center. So I think at this point in time, I hope I've covered most of what was sent me and I'm happy to see if there's any other questions that have come up, Diego. For the time being, there's no new questions in the chat. So if you have any other questions, please, you know, scroll your mouse down to the bottom of your screen. It'll say, is here chat button item there. And please write your questions there and send them my way, Diego. Oh, there were two extra questions that I forgot to answer. Someone said, when I went to donate online, I would have had to pay an outrageous fee to do it.

[21:45]

I have sent in checks instead. But I'm sure others see this fee and just forget about it. Why do you use this service? Well, I had a wonderful conversation with the people that run this service. And of course, it's about 4.5% if you were to donate online. And 2.1%, it's 4.1%. 2.1% of that is the natural cost that Visa charges for running a credit card. And the other 2% is Classy, which is a particular service we use that allows us to do campaigns online. And according to the report I got from the people that do this, over 4,000 nonprofits use Classy. It's the standard way to do that. Of course, if you don't want to pay that extra fee, you can uncheck a box at the bottom where you're making a donation and Zen Center will absorb that 4%. And of course, you're always able to send a check, in which case there's no fee either direction. But I checked into it and they are convinced it's the most efficient way to do it and is very comparable with other solutions that we could have come up with.

[22:52]

Okay, Ed, there is a question here. From Lou Reeling, it says, is it realistic to expect typical fundraising results at a time when everyone has so many organizations contacting them who also desperately need support? That's why I've been so amazed at the response that we've gotten so far. I mean, you know, in past, and I've... been raising money for Zen Center for 50 years, basically, since I was president back in 1978 or nine. And we had a Tassara fire, the Marble Cone fire in 1977. But of course, it only affected us. So we would reach out to the rest of the world and they would say, wonderful, happy to help you. And we were, so I was very curious, not curious, worried, I guess this is a better way to put it. How are we going to raise money?

[23:54]

Will people really respond to our need in a time when there are so many other good causes that need support? And I personally called many people and had discussions with them about it, and they came forward. And someone said, of course, we'll help. So I've been very pleased that we've gotten this broader response in the midst of this. And I, of course... and very encouraged by that. Thank you, Ed. And then there's a question here from Jerry Bernstein. Is there a timeline for donations this summer still okay? Maybe I can answer that. Yes. Yes, it is. It's okay unless, Ed, you want to say something else. No, I think that's fine. Several people have asked me in the same way that Lou asked. I have one friend who... So I'm giving locally where I am in New Mexico right now, and I'm really trying to do that. But call me back in two months and we'll see about that. So, yes, anything that you can give this summer towards the emergency fund would be greatly appreciated.

[24:58]

And that would be fine. Great. From Gretchen, this one million campaign covers that scenario for how long of a closure? Well, like I said earlier, the million dollars, plus if you all keep paying your membership dues and you contribute it to our year-end letter and to next spring Zenathon, along with some other resources that we have from some close friends, will get us through till April 30th of next year. Thank you. And Pasha is... asking how shall we increase our membership fees to sustain through these times? So maybe I can answer that. Just you can send an email to development or Dawud, do you want to say something about that? Yeah, no, pretty much you can email me directly if you'd like.

[26:04]

The development email will work just fine or membership at sfcc.org. Note that unfortunately, If you already have a membership account, you cannot yourself change the amount on that account using Classy. So please do the easiest way is just to contact us, and we can really quickly change that for you. Yeah, there is a follow-up from Pasha regarding how much should all the members increase their membership in order to cover this, right? So this is 50%, 100%. That's a difficult number to know right now, but... Well, I think your heart will tell you what you can increase it for. That's all the advice I can give you. I mean, I know many people are struggling, and so give what you can. It's much appreciated. There's a question here. I can't see from whom. It says, are there any situations or challenges unique to San Francisco's Zen Center that you have to keep in mind when thinking about opening up?

[27:11]

Yes, there are. Unlike, let's say, if you were running a resort in Hawaii or a Hyatt Hotel or something, you can have people come in. And if one of your workers gets sick, you send them home. But all of our hospitality efforts, the workshops we put on Tassar, we're inviting you into our home. So if one of our teachers gets sick at the city center or at Tassar or at Greenhouse, there's no home to send them to. They're there and they're there and it's hard to not have them infect other people. So that's why when we closed our doors 10 weeks ago, we were very strict about it because if the virus gets into city center or Green Gulch or Tassar, it will spread quite quickly through the community. We don't have individual bathrooms. You know, we share bathrooms at 300 Page Street. the baths at Tassar are shared. So it would be easy for the virus to spread, which means it's going to be very, it's going to take us longer to learn how to open our facilities to run our programs than it would in an ordinary circumstance.

[28:21]

And this is one of the things that makes it challenging for us to see when we'll be able to do that. There's a question here, Ed, from Rupal Sangvik. regarding our $6 million budget you talked about. So he's asking, what is the new budget in this emergency mode? Well, we've run some numbers where with some cost-cutting and keeping all the people that we have in residence now, we could get it down to $4.5 million for the year. There was a wonderful lecture that one of our teachers gave at Green Gulch who was a tenzo out there about how hard it is to give up the... nuts and cheese that we're so fond of in our vegetarian diets. But yeah, we've had to cut food expenses and cut a lot of other expenses to make that happen. So we're constantly working at running this organization as economically as possible. I feel a personal responsibility when I've asked somebody to make a contribution that we not waste a single dollar that we have in this.

[29:27]

And at the same time, I want to keep all the people that are here practicing Zen both safe and continue their training so they'll be ready to when we're ready to reopen. Great. So we do have one minute left. And I want to be aware of the time, half an hour. So Ed, do you want to do any closing remarks? Well, let's see. It's hard to say what to do when there's so much unknown going on in the world. One of the great practices in Zen is not knowing is most intimate. And I think this is one of those places where we're sort of guided by that. And we had all of the priests in Zen Center share some personal thoughts about this situation. I'm going to share a quote from Rilke, which I think is kind of

[30:29]

nice in this particular context be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything live the questions now perhaps then someday far in the future You will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into your answer. That's Rilke. I think that's where we're at right now. We are taking a path one step at a time to find our way through this pandemic. Each one of you has your own challenges, and Zen Center certainly has its challenges, which are unique and complex. We're feeling our way through it. We have... wonderful people dedicating themselves full time to solving, finding our way through.

[31:33]

And I am actually quite confident that Zen Center will be a different and more interesting and exciting and more connected organization when it comes out of it than it currently is now. And I hope you are all part of that solution. So I wanna thank you all for your attention, for your support and for your love of Zen Center. And we are here to support you. Feel free to go to our website and take any of our online activities. And if you have a teacher at Zen Center, feel free to reach out to them for personal consultation and help. So thank you all very much. Thank you very much. I'm with Ed. Thank everyone for being here. Have a good night and please connect with development. at sfcc.org if you have any other questions.

[32:36]

Thank you very much. Good night, everyone. Good night. Good night, Darlene. Good night, Darlene. Good night, Darlene. Thank you, Ed. Thank you. Good night. Good night, all. Ed, that was so wonderful. Thank you. Ed, I have to say that at 6.57, I got a message, and he may still be on there from Ohio. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, and he said, give me the information. I want to hear what Ed has to say. My best wishes and love. I don't know. He might have stopped, but if he calls me back, I'll tell him. We want to hear from Maxine.

[33:38]

Good night. Yes, there she is. Where is she? She was there. Good night. Keeps coming and going. Thank you. Bye-bye. This was the best. This was just and also I want to say if I may a really deep thank you to Emily for all of the work that she's done in her presentations. for the board in the financial scenarios. He's doing a fantastic job. I couldn't even function without being able to call Emily three times a day to find out what's going on. It looks like it's time for me to leave this meeting. It was great. All right. Thank you all.

[34:40]

Good night, Ed. Thank you. Good night. Good night, Arlene. Good night. Hi, Robin. Hi, Susie. This is fun. Oh, yeah. Lots of fun. I know. Hi, Max. This is great. Okay. They're all gone. Bye, everybody.

[35:03]

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