End of 2022 reflections

Well freelancers, we’re almost at the end of the year. 

I started planning out this blog and it was all a bit depressing. I began by looking back to January 2022, and remembering how isolated I was feeling as I was in my 4th bout of Covid isolation in less than 2 months (kids man, they’re germ machines!), but how I was hopeful things were getting better. Vaccines were rolled out and schools weren’t talking about any more home schooling, work was starting to be a bit more consistent…surely 2022 couldn’t be worse than 2021?! 

Ha, how wrong could I be?!

I thought about writing out all the bad stuff. In fact, I did! But it was then that the most important thing came to me. Back when the emergency funding was coming through, the Government kept talking about the ecosystem – unfortunately they punctuated it with the words “trickle down”, which we all know is code for keeping the money at the top. But the idea of the cultural eco-system is so true! 

An eco-system is a community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. 

In the cultural sector we all need each other, and no more so than in the North East where we are already on the backfoot. This is why the North East Cultural Freelancers community is so vital.

Before the pandemic, aspects of our ecosystem were already under threat. During the pandemic we were all in the same storm, though some of us in watertight vessels and others of us in leaking dinghies. Now we are in phase 703807823 of Covid (I refuse to say it is over – I am literally recovering from a very bad dose of it right as I type) and we have a cost of living crisis to deal with. The country is potentially on the cusp of a general strike, and the North East remains the region with the least amount of core funding and infrastructure from Arts Council England. You can read North East Culture Partnership’s analysis on this year’s National Portfolio for more information on this.

When an eco-system is under threat there is a danger that each organism will look out for themselves – which means that gradually one area will leach resources from the other to survive…and in turn all aspects of the ecosystem suffer. We have already seen this across our sector. 

If we have learned one thing from the last few years, I really hope that it is that we all have value, strength and power! That we need to make sure our workforce is relevant, supported and accessible. That buildings are important, and people are more important. 

The year behind us and the year ahead will continue to have the same key themes at North East Cultural Freelancers – and that is connection and equity. We need to continue to work and grow together. We all have our part to play in that. Our focus will remain around – Covid recovery, health and well being and the cost of living crisis – and we will continue to develop our Hold the Door Open programme, learning from our video commissions and bursary programme and continuing to ask the freelancers of the North East what support they need. 

To survive we need to work together, always recognising our power and potential to lift colleagues up whilst also creating boundaries for ourselves and asking for what we need.

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