Dear People’s Plumbing Community, 

One of our core principles is transparency. Financial transparency is a lot of work, and we have not been prioritizing this as much as we should. This is what we would like to be the first of our quarterly financial reports to our community after a year-long lapse. However, they will only be as useful as the context behind them, so we want to take some time to tell you a little bit of how we’ve been doing overall.

People’s Plumbing has been growing over the last few months, including taking on new team members, investing in tools to expand our services, and getting a new van. However, this growth comes at the cost of our owners not having been able to take their full salary of $18 an hour. We made this decision together as a way to invest in the company, knowing that these tradeoffs are normal with any young company, and with the faith that offering more to our community in need would be reciprocated should we find ourselves in need.

However, this decision to invest in growth came just before a period of unfortunate circumstances. Cristobal experienced an injury leaving them unable to work for several months, one of our vans broke down, and a gradual change in participant demographics has occurred (more on this below). As a result, we’ve found ourselves unable to cope with our workload, and we had to briefly shut down and take a hard look at our finances. 

For the first year and a half of our existence, we have dedicated ourselves to serving our community, and not thought at all about whether any participant would be able to contribute to us financially. We were blessed to have a good mix of people who could consider above our minimal sustainable rate and those who could not and our finances worked out to keep us financially sustainable. This has not been the case this year.

We try our best not to consider whether or not someone can afford to support us financially when we choose what job to take on from the community, and so far we have largely been able to do that. However, recently both nonprofit and governmental entities are spreading the word about our work and sending people our way, almost all of them people who would not be able to contribute to us. 

This should be great, as we believe that everyone deserves access to clean water and working plumbing. However, with the addition of so many participants we have also been scheduling jobs 2-4 weeks out. Often, those who can afford to hire someone else (or who might have contributed more) will find another company with a quick turnaround time. Meanwhile, those who can’t afford to contribute don’t have any choice but to wait for us to be available. This further increases the proportion of people we serve not having the capacity to contribute.  

We are faced with a dilemma. In order to be able to pay our workers, we are considering having to prioritize jobs that we think will bring in more revenue, as opposed to taking jobs based on who has the greatest home repair need. 

We don’t like this idea of having to prioritize our work by ability to contribute rather than greatest home repair need. But we are in a position where we have to seriously consider prioritizing paying contributors over members of our community who are in immediate plumbing need. So we’ve decided to let our community know about the situation that we’re in, to give people the opportunity to contribute so that we can continue helping people without caring how much money they have.

People’s Plumbing must bring in another $2,400 of revenue each month in order to pay our owners $18/hour. If we are able to bring in another $4,500 (total) each month, we would be able to pay our owners and meet our growth goals. To be clear, we have so far been able to afford paying our non-owner workers $18/hour for their labor, though our changing demographic makes it more difficult to do so.

If you want us to continue operating as we have been, ignoring capacity to pay when scheduling calls, please consider making a financial contribution.

You can make a one-time financial contribution on PayPal, CashApp, or Venmo. 

You can support us monthly on Comradery, or on PayPal.

Send us an email at info@peoplesplumbingcle.com or text us at (216) 810-6034 to organize a contribution with cash or check. For more details about our financial situation, including cost breakdowns, check out our website at https://www.peoplesplumbingcle.com/financials-2026

We are so grateful for all the support that we’ve gotten in so many different forms from so many different people; from financial contributions, to people spreading the word about us, to people supporting us when things are hard. 

We will do our best to continue supporting our community, regardless of their financial situation. In order to do that we need to stay afloat as an entity, and support the people who have been sacrificing their wages to support the community. 

With gratitude, 

The People’s Plumbing Team