Just a collection of our Chaos
Unfortunately the former TCO Lisa has chosen to keep all of the camp dues for herself. As a result the camp has been dissolved. The core crew has reformed under a new name.
Posted to the Facebook community: Burning Man Forever ‘’’ I was one of the leads for Camp Connect MOAR. We were based around the loop near Center Camp for the past few years. Our camp TCO was named Lisa, who’s playa name is momma dizz, or dizzy. We did yoga, reiki, face painting, served tea and an assortment of other fun events. I think several of our camp members have actually posted here over the years to get advice and perspective on this whole ordeal.
I originally had planned to step up and help keep the group going since the rest of the camp was awesome and everyone did a great job contributing to camp and to Burn. At this point, I really just want to get the word out so that folks are aware of the risks of dealing with our old TCO. There is a certain amount of trust you need to extend to the TCO and she has willfully leveraged that trust to exploit our camp family.
My wife stepped up to build our kitchen and lead food prep for the entire camp, she poured her heart into providing our camp with a time and place so we could break bread and bond. All of this was in the camp budget and approved in advance, as well as supported with receipts and agreed on as part of dues. Lisa left us holding the bag for nearl $9000, tho she took every piece of equipment we paid for and ate every meal we provided. Some of you may have had this food as well, whenever we had left overs we brought it to neighboring camps like Jazz Cafe, the Post Office, HOTD and the Bike Repair folks; Cookie loves to give people food packed with love and Lisa exploited this to increase dues and pocket her profits.
The key take aways - She made turnkey agreements secretly for at least 2023 and 2022; pocketed the thousands in cash, and then just let the rest of camp deal with the extra work and drama. If you happened to “own” a section of camp infrastructure or work area, she didn’t reimburse you from the dues either and would just pocket that. This past year at least 2 campers were never reimbursed for tickets when they discovered they couldn’t go and sent their DSG tickets back to camp to re-allocate internally; Lisa simply resold them and kept the cash herself.
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