Resilience?
On 10 March 2021, Leila spoke at the Sunderland Culture, Citywide Cultural Conversation, on the subject of resilience.
When I started to think about resilience I did the totally clichéd thing of looking up what resilience was defined as in the dictionary.
I know, right! It’s like I’m starting a best man’s speech in a rom-com. I think it must be all the Key Stage 2 English I’ve been doing!
Resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
It was interesting though as the first definition was “a capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”.
It got me thinking about how that translated into the workforce I see and speak to regularly – the creatives, actors, dancers, musicians, producers, technicians, artists, facilitators. It got me thinking about resilience in the context of recovery. And it got me thinking about my own resilience.
I’m a resilient person. I have had to be. I won’t go into details, but toughness is something I have had bred into me and it’s something I’ve had to pull out of the bag on more occasions that I’d like to think about.
We’re in survival mode
But, does that mean I recover quickly? For me, no. Recovery and resilience or toughness aren’t necessarily the same thing! Recovery means you are past it and you are healed, but what if the thing that knocked us down, also changed us forever?
We’re in a prolonged period of trauma – as a society and as a sector. We’ve had our whole world turned upside down. Some fairly toxic things have stopped, and also a light has been shone in the inequalities for all of us.
The freelance and independent sector has been forced to stop immediately, and then quickly pivot, and in many cases work out brand new ways of working and being. For some people pivoting just hasn’t been possible. Also, some people have had absolutely no help throughout the pandemic. That amount of trauma in one place is going to change us, we cannot stay the same!
I think what I am trying to say is we are in survival mode right now, all of us. We’re past calling on our resilience – because in periods of prolonged trauma, where do you bounce back to? We’re surviving the pandemic as humans and a society; and we are in survival mode as a sector to, especially freelancers.
We’re learning how to just ‘be’. Our brains get tired, and they need a rest! I wonder if that’s why this current lockdown has been so especially hard on all of us, even those who seemed to be managing so well at the beginning.
We are in this together
I just want to clarify, when I say especially freelancers, I don’t want to create an “us and them” situation.
Organisations and institutions are in the same period of trauma, but the challenges for freelancers tend to be more specific and generally manifest in having less control of the situation.
Also, certain promises of support haven’t been quite so forthcoming. The SEISS (self employed income support scheme) was an afterthought, and has only benefited a certain people few. Yes, many funders and charities created benevolence or emergency funds, but these aren’t sustainable; and the so called ‘trickle down’ from the Culture Recovery Funding has either been too small or too inconsistent to have any significant impact.
For the last 11 months we’ve been constantly adapting and pivoting and flexing and the rest.
Brene Brown – who is an expert in courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy – talks about FTTs during COVID on her podcast. F’n First Times. She talks about the strategies you need to be able to manage FFTs…initially she talked about 3 strategies.
Name it. What is it that is happening for the first time?
Perspective. Think about it with perspective and context.
Reality check expectations. You’re doing this for the first time and quickly, it isn’t going to be perfect.
But these were all from the beginning of the pandemic. We are now nearly a year in!
She has since added to the list “build in rest and recovery.”
Arguably the thing which is especially hard for freelancers to do.
The heady days Before COVID
It’s easy to look back on the heady days before COVID with rose tinted glasses. Remembering when theatres and venues were open, when you could catch up with friends and colleagues at exhibitions and gigs or bump into your fellow freelancers in a cafe.
The reality for many freelancers and independents through was that we were living a hand to mouth existence. Often working beyond contracts as the free labour keeps adding up.
The freelance and independent workforce is also made up with more parents, carers, Black and minoritised people, and disabled people than the funded-side of the sector. Balancing creating your own opportunities because none of the funded opportunities ones are accessible to you.
The skills that set freelancers apart at the beginning of lockdown – the creative problem solving, adaptability, flexibility and fleet-of-foot are now exhausted.
Daniel Christian Wahl, who writes about designing regenerative cultures states “Everyone talks about resilience these days. It is not always a good thing. The resilience of the current systemic structures that are driving unsustainable behaviour patterns is taking us deeper into the mess we are in.”
Does that feel familiar? It does for me.
So, what do we really need to move to a point of thriving? Really thriving?
We don’t talk about thriving enough. Ultimately, we want to thrive! Yes, we’re in a period of survival, but rather than aspiring to resilience, what would happen if we all aspired to an ecosystem which supported us all to thrive?
Firstly, we need to look at our whole ecosystem. The government talks about the ecology of the cultural sector, and I actually think it’s a good analogy.
They talk about it being fed from the top – by the so-called “jewels”, the institutions. But what if we thought about it in interdependence terms. We all need each other to thrive.
If we began to talk as a collective and understand that everyone in our ecosystem has value – and that actually our freelancers and independents are an essential part of that.
For our natural ecosystem to survive and thrive, we must nurture our bees! Our pollinators. Our creators. Our workers. Our makers. In the cultural ecology, this is our freelancers, independents and micro-businesses.
What do we need to create a thriving cultural ecology?
I believe we need to think about everything differently.
Don’t fix, start again: I don’t think we should look at how we fix the current structure, but how we build a new one. What is good in what we have? What do we need to get rid of? What we could adapt to be more equitable for all? What can we build together?
Reflect and recover: We need to think about how we’ve survived this period (and those who haven’t) what can we learn from that? Through community we have come together and managed the uncertainty together.
Realism: We should be realistic. The uncertainty that we’ve lived with since March 2020 will carry on for quite some time! We can look at the 21st June with hope, but we also know a lot of damage has been done, and we are being ruled by a government who have already shown their disdain for our sector through the way they have managed their support. Audiences may well not flock back to our venues, and the financial damage to our society is going to be seen for years to come – in spending and in funding sources.
Open it all up: We need different voices, different perspectives, different ways of doing things, we need to distribute power, stop controlling every outcome - we need a broader church. We’re trying something new with our Hold the Door Open project, which could help us bring much needed diversity into the sector.
Many people have left our sector. Some will never return, but hopefully for some it’s a small hiatus until we come through the other side.
Hold the Door Open
Hold the Door Open is a response to the lack of diversity in the cultural sector when it comes to who gets to speak, who gets to be heard and who is put on stage.
Each time we’re asked to speak, we include others; whether that’s underrepresented voices or those who are taking their first steps in public speaking.
