Balancing business with generosity
Balancing business with generosity: a transparency post:
I have been teaching A LOT recently and people always say how busy I am. Well teaching has been my main income over the past few years and I am extremely grateful that people see the value in what I do, how I teach and what I offer.
I have always made it a priority to offer free tickets to marginalised community members and recently have also been able to offer free or really cheap workshops.
What I want to be transparent about is that I am still being paid to teach these workshops. I receive payment from galleries and festivals to be able to offer these classes, I have written this framework in to grant proposals or I am offering free classes because I have materials left over from other workshops.
I don't want any emerging or early career artists out there thinking that if you want to teach and still have your classes accessible that you need to be out of pocket and going without.
I also want to make it clear to other teachers I am not undercutting anyone or cheapening anyone's skills.
You need to be paid for your skill and your time. As artists and craftspeople we deserve to be valued like any other profession. I’m still not making bucketloads of money from being a full time artist/ workshop facilitator so I have to make sure that my needs are covered because I can’t show up for my community if I’m worried about how I’m putting food on the table.
So how exactly do I do this?
When I first started teaching I saw a great initiative by Aaron Sanders Head (a queer textile artist from Alabama) where they have people sponsor workshop tickets for people who otherwise can't afford to attend. I really loved this approach so I reached out and he shared that they got the idea from Bedhead Fiber. I love that this Pay It Forward initiative has inspired so many people and I hope you find a way to adopt it as well!
I have been doing this now for a few years and it has led to a few wonderful things: many marginalized community members have been able to attend workshops for free and now when people purchase a workshop ticket but can no longer attend many opt to pass on their ticket to someone else.
When I teach workshops at galleries what happens is they will usually pay for materials, pay me a facilitators fee and either charge ticket prices or offer the class for free to their community. If there is a ticket price for participants I always ask if the gallery can offer a few spaces for free. I negotiate this in the first meeting and take control of the allocations.
So who do I offer these free spots to? Anyone who would identify as marginalized, this includes: BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, people living with disabilities or mental health and low income. I only ask people to let me know if they would like a scholarship ticket, I don't want anyone to explain themselves.
There is also a fine balance of how much energy and level of deliverables you offer with workshops. One thing I had to learn was how to scale your workshops for different price points and time frames - sometimes institutions will only want a 1, 2 or 3 hour workshop opposed to your usual 4-5 workshop. This means participants will receive samples opposed to a finished product or a very niched down segment of your knowledge and that's okay because you also have to honour the people that come to your private 6 hour expensive workshops.
Figuring this out will be an individual process based on your offerings and can take some time to refine but it's important that you have boundaries as well as make sure you are paying yourself correctly/ knowing how to best show up for your community.
I will give you some examples of different workshops I have given recently:
• a regional gallery is paying me a facilitators fee, a materials fee and travel fee - this 1 hour workshop is part of a festival program and free for participants
• I taught a workshop at a gallery recently that paid me a facilitators fee, they paid for materials and charged $100+ a ticket. I asked that 2 of spaces were free to marginalized people
• I taught a NAIDOC workshop at an investment firm this year, they paid me well and allocated 60 spaces for their staff. Less than half showed up on the day so I used the leftover materials to teach a free workshop to the Diverse Arts Group that I facilitate
• I did an event with Indigenous chef Chris Jordan that was a degustation dinner, I asked my community to donate money towards gifting a ticket to local mob to experience fine dining using local native foods, within a week I had raised over $2000 and 50% of the table was occupied by mob and we got to enjoy the experience together
There are many different ways to engage community and make your workshops accessible while making sure that you are still being appropriately compensated for your time, and sometimes connecting with community is payment enough. You will have to make decisions each time between your energy levels and what fills your different cups.
Sharing some final thoughts:
The other year I took a short business masterclass at Bond Uni where we met with Clinton from SOBAH, he spoke about doing business from a First Nations perspective that centres reciprocity. Not long after doing this masterclass I met with local Kombumerri elder Uncle John and he reminded me it was also really important to embrace generosity of spirit. I constantly remind myself to do business from a place of reciprocity and to work with community generously.
I have also been extremely lucky to connect with seasoned workshop facilitators who have helped me a lot over the years, this is a special shout out to Ellie Beck (@petalplum) and Vicki Cornish (@bonsai_woman) for sharing your wisdom with me. So make sure to get to know other teachers in your field so you have people to connect with who know what you’re going through.
And my last bit of advice is to leverage your position to benefit your community, no one knows what your community needs more than you and the people that belong to it. So ask questions, listen to your peers, implement change and ask others to help you do it. One of my biggest lightbulb moments was acknowledging that I am only one person, but that if I could enlist the support of the broader community and institutions, I could make spaces more easily accessible.
I hope this has helped and given you some insight if you are thinking about teaching workshops or already teach workshops and have been wondering how to make them more accessible to marginalized peoples.
