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Like the losers we are, we've made a financial planner for you to celebrate the New Financial Year! 🎆 It's based on the one we use to ensure that we can make enough money in a year to cover what it costs us to be in business (our overheads) and cover what it costs us to live (our "wage"). We would recommend opening it in Google Sheets then clicking File > Make a copy, in order to save it for yourselves so that you can edit it and use the full functionality. This includes percentages that will auto-calculate and figures that will auto-populate as you add things. HOW TO USE IT: There are 2 tabs at the bottom of the workbook. The first is an annotated EXAMPLE, and the second is a BLANK VERSION for you to use. The first thing you'll see are the Target Annual Costs. You need to make these your own, and you can add lines for each of your overheads as required. Then, the Income box starts with a Description line. This is for your to describe different strands of your practice broken down into projects, clients or types. Next there is a Target Income column. This is the target you are aiming to reach for each different category of income. We work this out based on the capacity we think we have for each different type. >>For example, you might think "I charge £300 for a consultancy session on the use of K-pop in live art, and I reckon I will do about 5 sessions of that this year" Therefore 5x£300 = £1500 target income for this line. But, whatever you put here, it's a goal, and will be flexible - fill it in as you need and explore it for yourself. It should be a living document that you change throughout the year as more information becomes available to you. It can also help you see what areas you need to chase for more work. Next is a Confirmed Income column, which we fill in when a job becomes confirmed or we receive a contract. The % Complete column next to this will auto-fill cleverly to tell you how much of your target income against that line has been found. As you add to it you can see the totals adding up across the year. At the bottom the Still to Find box shows you how far under covering all your costs you are, based on the Confirmed Income you have. While it's a minus you still have jobs and money to find and confirm. If it's a positive number, then you can add more to some of your Target Annual Costs, such as your Target wage, you lucky little sausage! We're doing more and more advisories/consultancies on how freelancers can think more strategically to make projections for the period or year ahead so they feel some sense of control and stability. This Financial Planner can be a useful tool for plotting out what you need, where in your career it is coming from and where the shortfalls are.
Let us know if you find it helpful!
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[Length: 2 mins]
TLDR, direct link to templates here We didn't plan to make a new ACE Under £30k template because we thought ACE had made one that was fit for purpose...but then we used it and realised it wasn't. So we've now got a whole page dedicated to ACE templates in our resources section. This includes a DYCP template, a DYCP report template and an Under £30k NLPG template, plus the old under £15k report for while it might still be useful. The Under £30k template links to a folder in which there is a full template, and also a workbook for all the numerical data needed in the application. It's a whopper at 28 pages before you've even input any information, so there is also a folder with bite size chunks of the application in it in case this makes it easier to navigate. In the template we would recommend opening it in google docs then clicking File > Make a copy, in order to save it for yourselves so that you can edit it and use the full functionality. This includes an outline on the left hand side of the document if you click on Show Document Outline which makes it easier to navigate the document. We really hope this is useful and is more accessible than the one that ACE have released. Our previous Under/Over £15k templates were downloaded thousands of times and we had a lot of requests from folks to make a new one. It's taken hours of unpaid time* to make, but that doesn't mean it's perfect or that it makes the inaccessible process any easier. Please do share this with anyone that might find it useful. Please do tell us if it actually is useful. And if you fancy, please do tell ACE how useful you think it is. Please tag us @_TheUncultured_ if you share on socials. *UPDATE: On sharing this template publicly, we were kindly offered money from some NPOs to cover the time it took us to make this resource. Big thanks to Derby Theatre (shout out to Sarah for offering in public first), Theatre Bristol, Cambridge Junction and Prime Theatre for their contributions. You can listen to the full post below here, or read on:
2021 was another tumultuous year for most, but we were fortunate enough to continue to have each other and our lovely networks, which we’re pretty pleased with. We got supercolds, spent more time on zoom than our new year's resolutions would have been happy with, Laura had a 3 month burnout period and Ash moved to Brighton. We feel alright as of December 15th, thanks for asking. Despite the stop-start nature of life mid-Covid, we fundraised £513,198 for independent artists, an average grant of £14,255.50. We also produced some fantastic work this year: Stomach Full - Rachael Young The Rising Sun R+D - David Shearing Out of the Frame R+D - Connor Bowmott + Regan Mott 24 Italian Songs & Arias + Voices - Brian Lobel BINGE - Brian Lobel Medusa Reclusa R+D - Lauren John Joseph He’s Dead - Marikiscrycrycry Prada in the Rain R+D - Marikiscrycrycry REGNANT - Xavier de Sousa We gave direct support to 32 creatives through advisories, mentoring and consultancy. This has enabled us to meet some brilliant folks all over the country, to help with their strategic planning, business planning, fundraising and sustainable development. As part of our ACE-funded Producing for the End of the World we delivered free Arts Council Project Grants and DYCP workshops to over 70 individuals. We’ll be doing more on this project in 2022. We launched OPEN DOORS: The Real Cost of Artist-Led Spaces with East Street Arts, the beginning of a campaign we’ll be doing a lot more work on in 2022. We taught brilliant future artists at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College, London Studio Centre and Middlesex University. This ranged from delivering an entire Festival module to delivering one-off lecturing on fundraising, producing and collaborative practice. We delivered further facilitation with professionals, early-career practitioners and young people with East Sussex Arts Partnership, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Bristol, Producer Gathering and The Committee at The Yard. Through these we explored money, value and sustainability. We were fortunate enough to work with Eve Veglio-Hüner during her LSC placement and as Assistant Producer following that. 23% of the work we did in 2021 was unpaid. As freelancers, having a quarter of our time as unpaid is unsustainable and we will continue to challenge the culture of this and explore ways for this time to be compensated for ourselves and others. 2021 has basically been 2020 v2 for everyone and we hope that you got through it as unscathed as possible. We’re tired, you’re tired. Let’s have a bloody break and then see what 2022 has to offer. Ash + Laura x We're very pleased to be working with powerhouses Malik Nashad Sharpe and Xavier de Sousa on their upcoming performances in London and Manchester. Find out more below and hopefully see you there! He's Dead - Marikiscrycrycry ICA London 26 - 27 November 2021, 8pm Tickets: £10 / £7.50 concessions, book here He’s Dead is a dark fantasy choreography that engages with the question ‘Was Tupac depressed?’ This question cannot be answered and so this conceptual group work uses dance, text, live action, and sound, at the juncture of darker schemas, atmospheres, and dramaturgies in order to shed tears for the things that we cannot unearth. Moving beyond the social framework of hope, He’s Dead works with undercurrent modes of meaning-production, utilising choreography as a tool and formal force for interrogating, in this case, im/possibility. The work proliferates marginal identifications and melancholic subjectivities as both a fantasy framework and as practises against dehumanisation. REGNANT - Xavier de Sousa
HOME Manchester 27 November, 3-9pm £20 whole show // £6 per hour slot // concessions available, book here REGNANT is a new theatre performance, a dinner party with the guests diving into how we interact with each other within the context of migration and belonging. It is composed live with you, our guests, and patrons. Almost all the materials present on stage, from the pottery to the decoration and the food, have been created by hand for you. As your hosts, we invite you to join us at the dinner table, get merry, make friends and explore structures of power within local communities and how they influence how we shape our collective future. In REGNANT, Xavier expands the dinner-party setting of his previous show, POST, to think more broadly about collectivity, community and privilege within the performance space and in the development of the narrative itself. This performance will include a variety of local guests and co-performers, who will be turning up across the duration of the piece. You can listen to the full post below here, or read on:
UPDATED on 17th Nov: we've removed our template as ACE finally have their own one now!! Download here. --- This might be useful if you are planning to apply as soon as the new applications open on 22nd November, or if you just want to see how different the application looks. Just a note on dates: any under £15k apps must be submitted by 19th November 2021, otherwise it will be an under £30k app from 22nd November so plan wisely! READ THIS NOTE BEFORE USING: This template is created based on the guidance released from ACE on 2nd November 2021 and is only a makeshift version of a template to help understand what the application in Grantium *might* look like – as it hasn’t opened yet I can’t guarantee that it will be formatted exactly as below but hopefully this is close and can help us to get our heads around the many, many changes! We'll add an updated template when we can access the form in Grantium, so more soon! We're super excited to announce that Brian Lobel's beautiful project 24 Italian Songs and Arias has been reimagined as a digital archive of 24 interpretations of those 24 songs. It has been created with support from Gweneth Ann Rand and Allyson Devenish who are also part of the show, and has been commissioned and made possible by University Musical Society (UMS) at the University of Michigan.
Taking the famous book as a starting point, 24 international singers have been invited to offer their interpretations and share their stories on their journey to finding their voice. Brian and friends also ask you to submit your own versions, because we really want to hear what you've got, and it's polite to share! www.24italiansongs.org You can listen to the full post below here, or read on:
Today we're launching a UK wide survey for studio holders in artist-led spaces.
This survey marks the beginning of a longer term collaboration with East Street Arts. At this time it will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the labour hours and associated costs to individuals that goes into running artist-led studios, a vital part of the arts ecology. Artist-led studios are often nimble and reactive, but entirely reliant on those who make up the collective or membership cohort to function day-to-day. While there are anecdotal explanations for why many artist-led spaces find it difficult to be sustainable or even grow, at this point we want to avoid making any assumptions. Who can fill this out? This survey intends to collect data from artists and arts workers who identify as part of an artist-led space. Our use of the word art and artist is not discipline specific. If you have a studio that you do not consider to be artist-led, or if you do not currently have a studio, you can still fill in some of the questions that should appear as relevant to you, as comparative data will still be very useful for us. Definitions The term artist-led to describe who you are and what you do means different things to different people. We are using the term artist-led studios to include those that: - Have artists at every level of decision-making and of their governance structure. Practicing artists lead on all decision making. - Are independent, DIY and grassroots organisations that include artists in their make-up on some level. The survey is anonymous. At the end of the survey you will be given the option to enter a prize draw for up to £50.00 in vouchers for Village Books (a Leeds based independent bookshop) at which point you will be asked for your email address. This is on a separate link which cannot be connected to your survey answers, so the survey answers will always remain anonymous. The survey will take approximately 6 minutes to complete. Access If you have any questions or require access support to fill in the survey, please contact us or call the East Street Arts office to arrange a meeting on 0113 248 0040. FILL IN THE SURVEY HERE You can listen to the full post below here, or read on:
We're pleased to announce that we are partnering with East Street Arts on OPEN DOORS: The Real Cost of Artist-Led Spaces - a collaborative campaign to understand the barriers that artist-led spaces face in achieving and maintaining sustainability. It will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the labour hours and associated costs to individuals that ensures the running of these spaces, as a vital part of the arts ecology. Over the next few months, more activity as part of this campaign will be announced, including information on events and ways to contribute to this conversation. Connect with us on social media for more updates: @_TheUncultured_ and @EastStreetArts You can listen to the full post below here, or read on:
Written by Ash [Length: 6.5 mins] The funding landscape has been looking even more arid since the pandemic, unsurprisingly. While there have been some innovations in how support might reach individuals such as Strike a Light’s Let Artists Be Artists, on the whole the system is based in competitive, zero-sum game cap-in-hand applications. As individuals we’re an unpaid workforce in an unregulated market spending days at a time writing explanations for why we need money, knowing that each time we win there are many, many more who lost. They say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths. In fact, it’s likely a tax on the poor, the desperate, the ones in need. A lottery ticket costs £2 for an entry with very, very unlikely odds of winning millions at best. Competing for funding in the current application-focused structure costs vastly more in unpaid writing time, and while the odds are better, it will likely be for a few thousand at best. Around 1 in 5 eligible applicants were awarded DYCP in round 9, while 1 in 7 entries into a 49 number lottery will get 2 numbers correct. You don’t get any money for 2 numbers, but you do get a free lucky dip, giving you another crack at it. Under current rules you are only allowed 2 goes at an ACE DYCP. Even as a seasoned DYCP writer it takes me around 2 days to write a DYCP application. It takes around 45 seconds to buy a lottery ticket if you’re already in the shop, so somewhere in that equation cost/labour wise you might not necessarily have totally better odds at the lottery, but you could certainly get a ticket and repurpose the time you would have spent writing an application doing some actual paid work. A bursary, derives from the Latin for bag or purse. It’s just a chunk of change to enable someone to live and get on with the stuff they need to do. We all need this, all of the time. We spend so much time scrapping around for money to make work, to show work, to see work, to go to work, to pay for someone to care for our children while we work. We all need a bag of money that alleviates all this wasted money-searching labour so we can just get on and actually work. So, I don’t know how bursaries are assessed. I’ve not sat on an awarding panel, and so I’ve never been given the information on how someone can say who should receive that bag of money and who shouldn’t. Who should feel relief, and who should feel like they didn’t ask nicely enough. Who should feel the comfort of knowing bills are paid for long enough to focus on their actual work, and who should feel like they wasted their precious time on this earth writing a begging letter to a room full of salaried people who don’t know or can’t remember how it feels to wonder if you have enough money to see you through to the end of the financial year. We wrote two lots of two bursaries into our Producing for the End of the World project and then realised we didn’t know how to give them out at a time when every freelancer just needs money. Money to work, money to be able not to work. So we decided to give out 4 bursaries of £600, specifically for producers, on a lottery basis. They just needed to send us a CV by way of entry, which we only checked to make sure they were actually producers in the Live Art/performance sector. If they were, they were eligible and were entered in. In the first round, for self-identifying early career Live Art/performance producers we had 56 applications and did a random number generator on google. This lottery selected Natalie Chan and Beccy D’Souza. We’ve done some mentoring with these folks as well which has hopefully been helpful, although the money will have probably just compensated their time doing this mentoring. In the second round, for self-identifying mid-career and established Live Art producers we had 21 applications and again did a random number generator on google. This time it selected Siân Baxter and Rafia Hussain. We actively invited applicants to spend the money on something that directly benefited themselves, and not to allow it to subsidise someone else’s project. They assured us they did that. The things they spent it on were basic - alleviating some precarity, knowing that bills are covered, and some time for rest can be accounted for. £600 is going to change nothing in the long-term, and will change very little in the short term. But that’s why it was even more important to just get it out to people, without application or judgement of “quality” or “merit”. It was just a bump, maybe a lifeline, ideally it would be a luxury. With freelancers working on average 2 out of every 5 days unpaid, we shouldn’t have to beg and plead for an amount of money that won’t even cover our monthly childcare. We should, without explanation, be able to go on fucking holiday. We should not have to show the amount of work undertaken for it, or endlessly evaluate how “timely” and “significant” it has been for your practice. Because it’s just a few hundred quid, helping a few individuals and their families. And in the middle of a pandemic, when most producers lost everything and still reached their arms out to support the sector around them, that’s a pretty good spend of public money. These bursaries were generously supported by Arts Council England. Who is generously supported by National Lottery. Who is generously supported by people like my nan, Beryl Bates, who played every week, twice a week, for the 25 years before she died without ever winning more than a tenner. Thanks Beryl.
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As artists and producers, we hold a lot of information of programmers in the UK and internationally - so we have come up with a few ways to make sure we don't stop any plates from spinning. We've created 2 versions of our Relationship Tracker to share as resources for artists and producers - read more below about each and how we imagine you might use them. For artists - or producers who want one tracker per artist
Created in Excel - also compatible in Numbers
This version of the resource is built to track one artist's relationships across 4 categories (tabs across the workbook): -UK venues -UK festivals -International venues -International festivals There is also a WLTM tab (Would Like To Meet) where you'd add in programmers you'd like to make connections with in the future. We imagine that once you make contact, you'd move them into the relevant category tab above. In column F, there is a dropdown to indicate what kind of relationship you have with the programmer so far, which we imagine you'd update as the relationship evolves: -Programmed -Commissioned -Bursary -Offered in-kind -Shown interest Columns I-L are focused on action - what is your artwork priority when contacting them, date you contacted them, log their reply and further action. For producers - track up to 7 artist's relationships
Created in Excel - full functionality only works within Excel
As this one is a bit more complex, watch this video for a guide on how to use it. Hope they're helpful! |