How we’re continuing a culture of care
two young people staring at a billboard that reads, 'We cannot recover within a broken system'
As #WhoseFuture2 comes to a close, the rising team reflect on the ways that rising promotes a working culture where care and wellbeing can thrive.
We’ve now come to the end of our 2021 Whose Future campaign that platformed the work and voices of 35 young creatives across 135 billboard and poster sites in Bristol over 4 weeks.
A step-change from our previous Whose Future campaign, the theme for this year’s campaign was radical care and wellbeing, as we wanted to intentionally move away from a reactionary space into a place where we could engage our radical imaginations to dream, aspire and inspire new ways of living and thinking about the future.
We challenged ourselves to move slower and closer together, to think deeper and to pause when necessary.
Over the course of the campaign, Whose Future 2 presented an opportunity for Rising and our wider community to explore how we can model and centre community care in the personal and public spaces we occupy.
It gave us a fertile testing bed to explore what rest as an act of resilience and revolution looks like in a pandemic / capitalist system. It also connected us to a community that could help us explore what role the arts can play in care-giving and care taking in the communities where we live and work.
These are some of the questions we have been reflecting on over the past year. With the support of WECA, we have been able to bring even more people into the conversation - with a range of virtual and in-person events, wellbeing walks, social media discussions (and scrumptious vegan cupcakes) which has helped make this reflection process even more expansive than we had imagined.
In the come-down from the excitement of the campaign, we have used this time to hold ourselves to account and reflect on the ways in which we (as an agency) promote working cultures in which care and wellbeing can thrive, and what we want to be doing to continue this legacy in the sector.
WHAT WE’RE ALREADY DOING:
REFLECTION AS PART OF OUR PRACTICE
The team schedules in weekly time for reflection in relation to how many days people work (e.g 4 hours reflection time a week for those who work 4 days a week, 3 hours for 3 days etc.). This is time for members of the team to decompress, reflect on what’s happened during the current week, or about to happen, research, read or even just rest if that’s what’s needed.
We've been exploring how we can structurally acknowledge and legitimise the practice of reflection with our freelancers. When we invite people to run sessions that are emotionally taxing, we also pay them an additional fee for time to rest and reflect afterwards. This came about through the thinking we've been doing as a part of our Resourcing Racial Justice work and is something we’d like to expand to more of our work.
CO-LEADERSHIP AS A MODEL OF CARE
We believe in the value of co-leadership as a method of disrupting outdated, authoritarian ideas of leadership and as a strategic model for centring care throughout the agency.
All of the projects that Rising currently runs are co-led by two or more members of the team, as a way of sharing capacity, responsibility and challenging our dated understandings of leadership from that of dictatorship to one of co-authorship. We believe that beautiful possibilities can emerge from a model that stems from the sharing of power.
COMMUNICATION AND CARE
As a small part time team of seven with four regular freelancers, we try to keep communication clear and transparent. This is through regular check ins on zoom or face to face, weekly team meetings and the marmite that is Slack.
Besides our community, Rising’s biggest asset is our brilliant, diverse team. Much of the richness of Rising comes from the fact that we have nurtured a culture where deep meaningful chats and openness is encouraged. To deepen our communication and internal support for the team, we are all trained in coaching and action learning sets, have received Mental Health First Aid training and have done Conflict Resolution Training with Community Resolve.
A photo of the Rising team
An image of 6 members of the Rising team stood in front the Whose Future posters smiling and looking happy
TIME OFF
Our full time holiday entitlement is generous at 28 days but unfortunately we as a team still find it hard to always take that time off (we’re getting better, promise). We operate on a 4-day week and close the agency on Fridays.
We also offer mental health days/weeks whenever needed, no questions asked. But they often come with surprise food deliveries instead. At the height of the trauma following George Floyd’s murder last year, we also took a team wide wellbeing week off where we closed the agency. We hope as a growing agency that we can remain responsive to the team’s needs, and put people before profit and productivity, always.
WORKFLOW
We don’t dictate when and how people need to work, some of us function better 9-5, 10-6 or 3-6 and then 7-1,1 but we do try to come together at least once a week for a check-in to see where everyone’s at.
We use timesheets to make sure people aren’t constantly working overtime, and spend more time than you think encouraging people to take their full holiday entitlement or claim back time off in lieu. At the beginning of the pandemic we suspended timesheets as people adjusted to working from home to take the pressure off and to acknowledge that the team sometimes need to work less hours as an act of self care.
PAY
For the creative sector we’re relatively well paying with our full time equivalent salaries ranging from £22-30k and pay rate is reviewed every year.
Our day rates for freelancers range from £100 - £300 amongst our community depending on the work involved and level of experience needed, but average around £150 - 250. We also pay for lunch breaks for any regular freelancers.
We’re a Real Living Wage employer and we also advise other partners of fees for freelance work too. We don’t advertise any roles with fees below the Real Living Wage and ensure that any roles we advertise for ourselves or partners have a minimum of 2 weeks before the deadline to give people enough time to apply or receive reasonable adjustments.
WHAT WE WANT TO DO NEXT:
FULL TIME PAY FOR PART TIME WORK
An ambition for us is to figure out a way to be able to offer our team full-time pay for part-time work. The knowledge and work we all do outside of our Rising days enhances the work we do for the agency and want to officially acknowledge that. We know that freelancer life, while rewarding, can be stressful - balancing multiple jobs and projects without the luxury of knowing where your next cheque is coming from but there’s also power in being able to say no, to prioritise oneself above work. To be able to feel secure financially, frees our team up to do that radical dreaming that makes our work possible.
INSTIGATE COLLECTIVE ACTION
In the conversations we’ve been having about community care, all roads have led to talk of unions and collective membership organising. On the 28th July 2021 we held a virtual event called 'Stand Up For Your Rights' with ACORN and the Designers and Cultural Workers branch of United Voices of the World union(cultural work IS work!). In a world that is becoming increasingly individualistic and neo-liberalist, unionising our community feels like a step in the right direction to creating the change we want to see, together.
We also want to officially launch C.A.N (the Creative Action Network), the CAN is our way of bringing our community, and the people of Bristol (and beyond!), together to strategise and take action to affect change.
We'll get there. But first, rest.
An image of Rising featured artist Sophia Harari stood in front of a poster saying 'Rest is a revolutionary act'.