For quite a while I’ve been concerned about the wellbeing of the people I work alongside. I’m a freelance arts manager; I produce concerts and arts projects for a variety of independent artists and small artist-led groups. Most days I find myself on the phone to a colleague asking, ‘Are you OK?’.

Guest blog by Judith Walsh

For quite a while I’ve been concerned about the wellbeing of the people I work alongside. I’m a freelance arts manager; I produce concerts and arts projects for a variety of independent artists and small artist-led groups. Most days I find myself on the phone to a colleague asking, ‘Are you OK?’.

Why do so many people seem so strung out? Why are brilliant people teetering on the edge of burn-out or an anxiety-induced black hole? And the crazy thing is, we all seem to love our work and have deep-rooted beliefs driving our creative output.

It was with these worries that I approached a small group of colleagues at the recent New Music Scotland ‘Time Out’ peer-to-peer residency. The response was incredible. Not only did the room light up with affirmation that, yes, this is a chronic problem across the arts sector, but also that we are in a great position to make steps for positive change.

Rewind back to 2014: my friend and fellow freelancer colleague Ruth Davie met with me to share concerns about our own patterns of working – specifically, how it was detrimental to our health and wellbeing. One major concern was that we were the sole managers for the artists, bands, and small organisations we supported, and that there were very few safeguards in place to ensure the projects would be able to continue to run smoothly should anything happen to take us away from our desks.

Fellow arts administrator Jenny Searle (nee Kempton) joined us to provide external facilitation and pull together the information that would become the founding documents for our new model of working: The Creative Consortium – supporting artists and arts organisations. Our model of working allows freelancers to work together across projects, to pool resources, skills, and workloads. It enables us to work as part of a team (a lifeline in the vast expanses of isolated working-from-home), and means that artists have access to more than one person. The major issue we wanted to confront, was the ‘hit by a bus’ test: ‘What happens if I get hit by a bus?’. We used to break out in cold sweats thinking about how our projects would continue to run if we suddenly disappeared. Now, because we share workloads, there are usually a couple of us across each project and should any of us be hit by ill health or – God forbid – choose to go on holiday or have a baby, the whole thing won’t grind to a halt.

Since October 2014, The Creative Consortium team has worked together to support over 15 arts projects (from independent artists and arts organisations) and has grown to a pool of five freelancers. At the core of our work remains the Values that were present at the beginning of the journey: that the workplace should contribute to our health and wellbeing, and that we should be in a position to support each other, so that we can create work of the highest quality for the benefit of the sector as a whole.

With that in mind, we’ve drawn together a Wellbeing Charter to share with you all. What a wonderful thing it would be if, in the near future, most of the arts sector had adopted new attitudes and approaches so that we could all be healthier and happier at work.

Good luck! Let me know how you get on.

Download The Wellbeing Charter

Judith Walsh is General Manager of Mr McFall’s Chamber and Ludus Baroque, Project Manager of Live Music Now Scotland, and supporter of independent artists and arts projects.