I am in awe of anyone who manages to write ‘weeknotes’ – it feels like a beautiful, reflective practice and one I should probably try. For now, I have managed to create a ‘yearnote’ chronicling the first 12 months of my freelance adventures.
My first reflection is one of surprise – I’m actually making a living as a freelancer! And I am getting to work with lots of amazing people across a real diversity of projects and areas of focus. In doing so, I’m leaning into the possibilities that come from hopping across sectors and teams, cross-pollinating ideas and sharing learning and insight. I’ve always loved connecting dots between different projects, people and systems, and working independently as Pragmatic Radicals lends itself to this perfectly.
Over the past few months, my main focus has been supporting organisational change and transformation through interim leadership at Play for Progress, an incredible grassroots charity in Croydon that supports unaccompanied young people seeking asylum and promotes community resilience through trauma-informed creative engagement in the arts and education. As well working with the team on the hard work of reigniting momentum behind fundraising efforts and getting resources in place for the year ahead, I’m most proud of two things. The first is creating a truly trauma-informed impact framework which gathers first-hand testimony from the young people in the PfP community without requiring them to provide formal feedback. Huge shout out to the fabulous music team for helping unlock some brilliant, creative ideas about how to do this! The second thing is stewarding the process of identifying a permanent Executive Director. After a thoughtful and intentional process including support from the Experts By Experience Employment Initiative, we have appointed an incredibly warm, energetic and inspiring new leader with first-hand experience of immigration and detention in the UK (look out for an announcement on this soon!) I am so excited to see where she takes the organisation next, and look forward to accompanying her on this journey as her peer mentor.
In a serendipitous opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas I have been able to draw upon the thinking that we did around impact and learning at Play for Progress with another organisation. After facilitating a Board Away Day where Clowns Without Borders asked me to help the team to get to know each other better, and start to articulate their strategic vision, we are now looking at how they can measure their impact. We’re sharing ideas around collecting and curating creative forms of data as evidence of impact, to demonstrate the value of an approach which centres joy and play for children in crisis settings. What was been perhaps most exciting about this project is that all the organisation’s thinking involves not only the regular (adult) Board, but also a Children’s Board (hosted at a primary school in Tower Hamlets) who advise the organisation and hold them to account for their decisions. There’s a write-up of this radical, participatory governance approach here). And it is the Children’s Board who have really pushed for deeper consideration of the long-term impact of the work, with exciting and far-reaching consequences for the next phase of the organisation’s journey.
I’ve also had the privilege in the past months of working with the incredible CIVIC SQUARE, firstly as they prepared to launch the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait, produced in Ladywood, Birmingham, inspired by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. It was inspiring to be part of such a generous, collaborative effort to share practical learning with others from CIVIC SQUARE’s experiments with applying Doughnut Economics principles at the neighbourhood scale. I’m grateful to Immy Kaur for inviting me into a small army of freelancers helping to curate and copy-edit this body of work. More recently I’ve been doing research and contributing to the writing of a pioneering CIVIC SQUARE report for the Design Museum Future Observatory. It’s now being turned into a graphic essay which will be more accessible to a wide range of audiences – can’t wait to see it.
Focusing on building an effective, empathetic and collaborative team, one of my first freelance gigs was working with the lovely Gabriela Matouskova on a team-building project with Hope for The Community, an innovative award-wining social enterprise supporting journeys of hope across Coventry and beyond (also local to me). We had met during the second Covid lockdown, swapping notes on a park bench on how juggle leadership roles with home-schooling our kids, so it was a joy to work alongside her team in my new freelance capacity. Through a series of self-reflection and group activities over a period of time, we built a shared understanding of the respective strengths of each team member, creating space for honest conversations and building trust across the team.
I worked on another social enterprise project this year, supporting Change People, who are part of the Advonet Group in Leeds whose work is focused on independent advocacy and inclusion. The brief was one that I recognised keenly from my time leading a social enterprise myself: how can we develop our products and services in ways that are useful to our community and deepen our impact whilst identifying new markets and generating revenues that cover the costs of programme delivery? By working alongside the team as well as consulting others in their wider ecosystem, I was able to produce a viability assessment and make recommendations for a pilot project to unlock the programme’s potential. Even better, since it is core to my ethos that this sort of reflective work also leads to tangible action and impact, I’m now mentoring and advising the team leader as they implement the project.
I’ve also delivered several projects as an Associate for Make An Impact CIC, led by impact measurement specialist Heidi Fisher, where I’ve led organisational and project evaluations and created social impact reports across the social enterprise and public sectors. This has tended to involve helping clients to think through and articulate their Theory of Change before co-developing and implementing impact measurement frameworks using a range of tools and processes including primary research with service users / experts by experience. One of the highlights was leading an evaluation of the 10,000 Black Interns programme for the NHS England Leadership Academy. Working with a small team of colleagues, we mapped out the impacts of the pilot programme at individual, team and organisational level, helping to identify how to make the experience and long-term impact for the next cohort even better!
Finally, I’ve tried hard to reserve some time for pro bono projects. This year that has included a small pro bono project supporting a new anti-trafficking micro-charity, the Mozaik Institute, to understand how to channel their many creative assets and organisational strengths into the charity’s first strategic plan, and serving as a Volunteer Mentor for the Experts by Experience Employment Initiative who are on a mission for equity and lived experience leadership in the UK migration and refugee sector through equitable employment.
With a growing interest in supporting hyper-local community projects, I’ve also been working with Gurpreet Dosanjh of Brixton Yoga who – after 1,000 days offering free online yoga throughout the pandemic – opened a new space near my home in Leamington Spa late last year. I am enjoying acting as a critical friend and advisor on all things strategy, pricing, place-making and community building as Gurpreet seeks to create an inclusive wellbeing space for all. My ad hoc work (and general life chats!) with Gurpreet are entirely pro bono, but his Auntie’s samosas are a pretty exceptional incentive to stay involved, not gonna lie!
I’ve also become a Non Exec Director at Shared Assets, a think and do tank working to create a socially just future through practical projects that build new relationships between people and the land. As we navigate the future shape of the organisation, exploring distributed leadership models along a spectrum from conventional hierarchy to cooperative, I’m so mindful of the risks and uncertainties inherent in working in that liminal space bridging between old, dominant systems and new, emergent systems. I hold onto a hope that resources will flow to these bold organisations that are building movements imagining and organising for alternative futures that serve people and planet.
During the year I’ve been grateful to be part of several freelance communities and networks who have given me inspiration, solidarity, resources and referrals. Big shout out to the Associate networks at Fair Collective, Make An Impact CIC, SMK and PG Collective as well as one rather wonderful Slack community for freelancers working for social good.
Having met so many committed, visionary humans over the past year, I’m hopeful for what lies ahead in the next 12 months. I must admit I’m also grateful for the opportunity to have slowed down a bit this year. Not quite as much as I’d intended perhaps – personal development project for the year ahead: learning to say ‘no’ a bit more!
As I look to the coming months, my diary filling with exciting new projects, I’m reminded of a trusted colleague and mentor who has inspired and galvanised me into action on many an occasion over the past few years who described my superpower as ‘pathfinding’ – defined in the dictionary as “exploring untraversed regions to mark out a new route”. If that speaks to navigating uncertainty, conspiring to plot radical yet pragmatic steps with and through complex systems, I’m in!
Check out my portfolio if you are interested in reading more about my work over the past year.