Celebrating 5 years and saying goodbye
When Janice Gittens was first coaching me she said “Next week let's talk about your relationship with goodbyes”. I was confused initially because I didn’t think I had a problem with goodbyes, and then I realised I’d never properly done one. When my grandma died people thought I was too young to go see her in the hospice, when my foster siblings came and went it didn’t really feel like it was my place to centre myself and my needs, and when I’d left employers I’d done it in a frightened hurry to escape the workplace trauma that I wasn’t coping with.
But together with the team and the board I'm finally ready to say goodbye to the organisation that transformed my belief in what was possible. Due to lack of funds and capacity, as well as our personal decisions around what we need within our work, we decided in March to officially close Collaborative Future (although our friends at William Joseph have kindly agreed to keep our website live so people can benefit from all our resources and I'm sure you'll still find many of us collaborating in other capacities)
While many of us will carry the values and learnings from Collaborative Future into other work, there is much that we have to let go of. In order to say goodbye to what we've built, and celebrate everything we've done over the last 5 years, I want to take you back to the start.
Lived experience shaping change
When I first went freelance it was after burning out from a role where I felt repeatedly gaslit, undervalued and undersupported. I had wanted to use self-employment as a way of exploring what different companies were like working for because I knew that no matter how progressive their talk was, when you dig a little deeper most workplaces are a little bit toxic. Of course, as my favourite autistic special interest is “being meta”, I decided to simultaneously create a programme that helped young people do the same. And I also offered DEI consultancy to try and develop some inclusive companies that more people would want to work for.
At the time I was heavily pregnant and broke freelancer with mounting debt, frantically crowfunding (with support from Works Social) to run a programme to support other young people and freelancers like me. It was my first time being able to use lived-experience to shape change, and in return the community we built shaped me. I met Sonia on the pilot programme, and I knew straight away that her lived experience and creativity was complementary to mine. Not only did she become one of the co-founders of Collaborative Future, taking many of my wild ideas and turning them into something tangible, but she also created a safe space for me to start embracing my queerness more openly.
Experiencing possibilities
From that point onwards Sonia and I were committed to working with each other, and enabling more people to find value and be valued in their work. We couldn't yet articulate the impact in a way that got funders to pay attention but we could feel the possibilities deep within our bones, and so could all the businesses we were working with.
“Collaborative Future provide proactive and practical solutions to systemic challenges which, as a small business short on resource and time, we really value. The value is cyclical - the expertise we accessed through the internship programme was high quality and creative and as a business we learnt through the training provided and the approach and insight on how to embed more inclusive practices into our everyday work…. Personally I believe change comes from individuals who are inspired and can see opportunities to work together. Collaborative Future provides a much needed space for this to happen” Cat Ainsworth, Dot Project
So in the height of the pandemic we incorporated Collaborative Future and started our first 6 month programme supporting 13 young people to build their skills and gain paid work experience. Much of what we learnt during this time informed our recruitment practices and our ideas around “shared value”, a platform to encourage organisations to pay people for their time contributing to research and design processes.
Within the first few months of the programme one of our interns, Rania, got offered a job at William Joseph, and since then she has been an invaluable member of our board. Meg and Tracy went on to work for Woodgate consulting, and Zoya joined our friends at Civic Square. We were in full swing of experiencing how rapidly our programmes were creating possibilities for young people, and with growing support from our community of businesses we decided to hire our next team member, Prisca, who became our third co-founder.
Building strength through commitment and community
By December 2020 we could see how devastating the pandemic had been for young people. We wanted to give them a sense of community and hope. So without any external funding we launched our most ambitious programme yet. We hired 7 young people on 6-month real living wage contracts. Whereas we'd previously paid people as and when they did projects, we felt that in order for people to feel secure and bring their whole selves to this opportunity we needed to offer them some form of stability.
We also committed to holding much more space for them with an entire roster of coaches and trainers to support them throughout the 6 months. It was a revelation for everyone involved, and Prisca and Sonia shared some amazing learnings here. The love and care that people involved demonstrated towards each other was profound, and every single one of the interns went on to pursue amazing opportunities beyond the programmes.
Jane who designed our beautiful illustrations became a user researcher at Snook, Shanice joined Agencies for Good and now works at Into Education (as well as joining our board), Anne-Marie got to pursue her design career at Red Ant, Nu went to Wunderman Thompson and then onto a variety of charities, and Becky (who wrote about our hiring process here) and Laura went back to studies.
Our programme achieved before the government had officially started the Kick-start scheme. But it took its toll on our finances. We'd mostly been funding the programmes through the profits from our inclusive recruitment consultancy work, but our whole team were exhausted from being treated as a tickbox exercise and being exposed to discriminatory beliefs so we decided to stop this type of work for a while. To plug the gap we took out a loan, but we never fully recovered financially from the decision to preserve our mental health and wellbeing.
Feeling the weight of our broken systems
Off the back of the profound changes we'd witnessed during our third programme, and with the news that government kickstart funding that could be used to support programmes like ours, we dived head first into our fourth programme in August 2021. It was specifically aimed at young creatives in Nottingham who were currently on universal credit.
Prisca and Sonia led the whole recruitment process without my involvement and it felt like a profound shift to witness my team take the inclusive values and practices we’d embedded into Collaborative Future and build upon them. We hired 7 amazingly talented young people who had been frustratingly overlooked or discriminated against elsewhere.
After so much isolation during the pandemic we wanted these young creatives to be able to spend time in person. Sonia built collaborations with a range of spaces across the city such as Works Social, Carousel and Minor Oak where people could go and co-work and find the environment that suited them.
It was during this programme that we realised we were taking on more of the system than we could handle. We were filling the gaps of mental health services; we were providing support around situations of abuse; we were helping people navigate corrupt housing associations.
And even though other organisations had started to want to collaborate with us more as a result of our successes and our interns creativity, we were finding ourselves contributing to projects which were painfully ignorant. Our cohort was invited to participate in mental health research that entirely overlooked the systemic racism and classism that they faced, and left us and our cohort retraumatised.
In spite of these struggles in many way our programme was still a success. Many of the young people from our final cohort have gone on to hold profoundly healing spaces for others. Casey continues to run Mad Truth and got funding from Unltd, Taylor runs Notts poetry, and Chan runs 1525 collective at Nottingham Contemporary. However many of the young people we worked with are still struggling with navigating an unfair system, and there is no-way near enough funding and support available for people dealing with the daily stress of living in an oppressive society.
Space to heal
At the end of the programme Prisca, Sonia and I decided we needed spaces to heal too. We paused running intense programmes, and Prisca secured our first decent chunk of funding from the National Lottery Fund. With this funding we hosted a series of events for young people in London and Nottingham to gain peer support, hear from amazing speakers and contribute to our community-led research. Sonia also secured sponsorship from Hatch enterprise to host a diverse group of freelancers in the beautiful AMC gardens and provide them with an opportunity to connect and share knowledge. With new understanding about my autism (partly thanks to the Collaborative Future community), I took some time to set up the &Breathe space and start our journey to building a co-housing space in the Peak District with one of my partners, Nick.
The past few years have enabled us to reshape our own relationships with work, understanding how to find value both inside and outside of our employment, and discovering how we can live more authentically. And as a result we are now all working on new things that give us what we need and have decided it’s time to let go of what we built together.
Moving on
While I sometimes look back on the last 5 years with questions and confusion around how something so valuable and profound didn't achieve financial security, I remember something else Janice once said to me “You operate with a different currency”. And I realise now that our work has generated a different type of reward and security for the people involved.
As a small team, Prisca, Sonia and I have had nowhere to hide. We have had to stand up for our values, face each others demons, and summon incredible strength and energy from knowledge and resources we didn't know we had. While all of our interns gained skills and income through our programmes, more importantly they gained the belief that they are enough. That they are worthy of decent treatment from employers and services. We have sent 32 young people out into the world expecting more from life. And while we had some frustrating and traumatic experiences with a handful of clients, most of the brilliant teams we’ve worked with have made profound shifts towards more inclusive and anti-oppressive practices. Here's a shout out to all the organisations that we know are continuing to question and challenge themselves to do more and be better.
Collaborative Future has done enough. And we will continue to carry that change into all of the spaces we exist in in the future. You can also helpto continue our legacy by working with people from our community, using our recruitment guide and other DEI resources, and investing time and money into building a society based on equity and justice.
Thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey, helping to shape our organisation, our work and the people we have become. We will be hosting a small celebration in Nottingham on 25th May for those closest to us - if you would like to come but haven’t received details please email hello@collaborativefuture.co.uk.