Second Tree is a grassroots, volunteer-led organisation. We don’t have a distinction between paid and unpaid roles. This is often a point of contention in grassroots organisations, both in terms 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, we see no point in trying to economically quantify each role: we don’t pay high wages to anyone in the team, and the same stipend policy is applied and known to everyone in the team, regardless of their position, including managers and people with many years of experience.

The founders of Second Tree left much better-paid jobs to come here as volunteers to help, and the same has been for the majority of the people who followed. Of course, for our volunteering to be sustainable, we had to develop a stipend system, but we created it with the central idea that we are not compensating the quality or the specific work a person does. We want as many resources as possible to go to our services. The stipend scheme is only in place to allow people who want to stay for long – the most valuable ones for an organisation like ours that substantially invests in people and capacity building, as in their long-term relationship with the refugee community – to continue being part of our team for as long as we all want. Second Tree is not a job as many others. No one is here to get rich. The amount of money we get is thought to allow us to live a decent life while doing this meaningful work, and is based on the cost of living in Epirus, Greece. That’s why all the amounts are based on length of commitment and not of role in the hierarchy.