2025 round up

This has been a year of financial uncertainty, AI dominance and Grantium breakdown. But thanks to K-Pop Demon Hunters and Arctic Colin the Caterpillar, not all has been bad, and we’ll no doubt look back at 2025 with misty eyed nostalgia. 

This year we’ve thought more than ever about the complex systems linking money and workplace burnout. In part this is because we’ve earned less money than ever and entered a new phase of burnout, which will change our working capacities for the year ahead. 

We’ve fundraised around 53% lower than we managed just 2 years ago. We don’t think we’re getting worse at our jobs, but having a 2 month pause (looking at you Grantium), the removal of certain funding streams, there being less to apply for and more competition in applying for it, is definitely having a real-world effect.

We released a beautiful new resource Pause: A Self-Care Support for Producers, co-produced by Producer Gathering with support from Artsadmin and Marlborough Productions. This is complex subject matter so has been hard at times, but this generous group of excellent people contributed to something brilliant:
​Emma Wee, Evie Muir, Kim Simpson, Lou Platt, Nick Murray, Sarah Ferrari, Seyi Osi, The Black Wellbeing Collective, Toni-Dee Paul.

​Next year we’ll be pushing this (lack of) energy into launching our burnout-based board game Frazzled Freelancers. So if you happen to be related to anyone at Hasbro, or have philanthropic interests in the gamification of freelancer working conditions, we’d love your money. ​

​We’ve spent our festive end-of-year get together making stuff out of clay. That’s because someone told us to do art if we felt burnt out. It doesn’t seem to matter that the reason we feel burnt out is because of art.

We can report it wasn’t particularly relaxing, as Laura had a meeting straight after and Ash had to wipe a kid's arse mid-trinket dish build. But we’re glad we still had something to show at the end of it, because we’re results driven.

Very merry application writing to all tho-ho-ho-se taking part in the R&D-looming-deadline festivities, and wishing you all a well-deserved and hopefully paid break.

Ash + Laura x