Apologies: Shankho Chaudhuri, Laura Meaton, James, , Anna Fleischle, Peter Braithwaite, Titas Halder, Leo Wan, Susan Kempster
Newcomers: Mimi Doulton, Steffan Donnelly
Present: Ben Arkell, Bill Bankes-Jones, Jack Hudson, Jack McCann, Mimi Doulton, Paul Carey Jones, Tamykha Patterson, Alistair Cope, Emma Jayne Park, Beth Steel, Kelsie Acton, Ella Taylor, Paule Constable, Athena Stevens, Freddie Crossley, Jake Orr, Steven Hoggett, Andy Whyment, Nikki Edmonds, Adele Thomas, Anne McNulty, Kat Rose-Martin, Steffan Donnelly, Vicki Mortimer, Hazel Holder, Leigh Toney, Jess Murran, Arran Pallan, Tom Piper
Action points for next week’s meeting:
- ACTION – Fundraising – Al Cope would like to start a conversation about how we fundraise for FMTW, this will become part of the new coordinators job, Al will start this conversation in slack.
- ACTION – request for the volunteer group look through the photo’s in the google files are still not allocated to a name. Rename the file to the person’s name.
- ACTION – Paule will put a shout out on slack for a group of people to gather around Davina to discuss the job description and appointment
- ACTION EJ and Mimi going to buddy up to look at interacting with EXCLUDED UK AND UVW Union.
- ACTION Kelsie will put and Agenda, and a meeting link in slack to a regular access meeting.
- ACTION Vicki M will add the weekly values meeting to the diary. Or Kindness café as it could be known.
- ACTION – put a slack channel called future thinking together to look at all the freelance thinking that has been done – share the reading material and once the Lynsey Turner report is published A Thomas will arrange a meeting.
Welcome was given to two new members Mimi and Steffan followed by Introductions – Introduced the group to each other, and to our current favourite item of clothing.
Updates & reports:
Meeting with Treasury rep – Paule, Athena and Stephen, met with (kate) from the treasury office, really positive conversation, there is a really a need to collate numbers and data, rather than anecdotal data.
Coordinator– Confirmation that FMTW have funding to employ a coordinator, we have approached Davina Shah to oversee this recruitment process along side volunteer
SOLT/UK Theatre and freelance project – Update on a meeting that took place over the last 2 weeks with members of FMTW and several Exec directors of buildings. – vicki spoke about the possible next steps
Excluded UK – Sonali is in touch with FMTW via Paule Constable (see actions)
AAPTLE – Nicki confirmed 10am on Monday in the Diary there is meeting on Monday – to get an overview and perspective of how APPTLE and FMTW could and do work together.
Arts Council England- Vicki Mortimer updated on the meeting last week with ACE the conversation was reported as positive and collaborative, more updates after further meetings.
Society of Authors – Beth Steele updated on her meeting with SoA and noted that in attendance was a rep form the Writers guild, who mentioned they had been collating data on how the pandemic had been effecting writers, so moving forward as we are data collecting we could look to the guild for writer specific data.
Projects
Access Working Group – Kelsie Acton announced a regular access working group meeting (see Actions). Andy W asked the question about if this was ACCESS within FMTW or ACCESS in the wider community. And a discussion was had about internal FMTW Access or Access in the wider community – the general consensus is that is initially for FMTW then will naturally become about the wider industry.
New Values Working Group – The suggestion is that we have a regular values meeting group – the suggestion is that we look at and borrow other working models from other organisations who are already doing change work successfully. Looking at mutual aid models to help us to make decisions as a group. This will go in the diary Wednesday at 12pm is in the diary. V Mortimer suggested that this might be a good space to discuss any situations you have encountered that sit at odds to values within FMTW.
- The question was asked if we should have our values document on the website
Freelancer Charter – the suggestion was raised that some of the group would like to work on creating a charter.
- Ben A spoke about the benefits of creating something that is succinct, that we are able to role out to the wider community.
- Discussion was had about the seven inclusive principles for Arts and Culture Organisatons – http://www.artscouncil-ni.org/images/uploads/publications-documents/Seven-Inclusive-Principles-for-Arts-and-Cultural-Organisations-working-safely-through-COVID-19.pdf to look at as a good model
- Several questions were ask around what a charter might look like and discussions around how it could be structured. Was agreed it need to be clear and concise
- Collective acknowledgement that the FTF and other freelances have already done a lot of work around this and that is where we should start (see Actions)
- Future Generations Act was also discussed as a good resource.
- There was an agreement that we should be thinking long term and that there needs to be clear understanding of the driving force behind the frustrations.
Newsletter – Paul Carey Jones kindly agreed to summarise the last week.
AOB
Vicki spoke about GLC/Fuel Collaboration.
Al suggested – there is no Brexit information on the website and that it would be good to have a recourse page on that.
Next main meetings:
26th Feb: Meeting – Chair: Anna F. Minutes: tbc
5th March: Meeting – Chair: Ben A. Minutes: tbc