Second Tree is a grassroots, volunteer-led organisation. We don’t have a distinction between paid
and unpaid roles. This is often a source of conflict and tension in grassroots organisations, both for
lack of transparency (who is paid, and how much, and who is not?) and decision-making power (who
decides who is a paid employee and who is just a volunteer?). This doesn’t make sense to us
because the work each one of us does is much more valuable than the monetary return we can offer.

For this reason, it doesn’t make sense for us to try to economically quantify each role based on
hierarchy: we don’t pay high wages to anyone in the team, and the same policy applies to everyone,
regardless of position, including directors and people with many years of experience. There are no
negotiations behind closed doors: everyone knows how the policy works, for them and everyone else.

Second Tree is not a job as many others, and we want as many resources as possible to go to our
services. The founders of Second Tree left much better-paid jobs to come here as volunteers to help,
and the same has been true for the majority of the people who followed. People who join the team
normally stay at Second Tree for a very long time, something that is very important for us, as we invest
a lot in capacity building and people, as in the long-term relationship with the refugee communities.

Of course, for our project to be sustainable, we had to develop a compensation scheme, but we
created it with the central idea that we are not rewarding a job description, but allowing team
members to live a decent life while doing our meaningful work, for as long as we all want. That’s why
all the amounts are based on length of commitment and there is no bonus associated with hierarchy.