We ran our first The Artery in person event! We promoted the event as The Artery Business Spa Day, a chance to refresh how we feel about our businesses. As with all of The Artery events we focused on the stories we want to tell through our businesses.
The starting point was how can we attract more of what we love to our businesses. We offered questions as prompts to focus on:
What inspires us?
- Who or what inspires you?
- What excites you?
- What are you confident about?
- What motivates you?
What opportunities may come with this inspiration?
- What opportunities might there be here?
- What do you have the most enthusiasm/energy for?
- What does the business require?
- If you had a blank sheet what would you do?
What are the outcomes we are looking for?
- What do you want to be different?
- If you had a magic wand, what would you wish to be different?
- What would success look like?
- What are you aspiring to?
What resources do we need to refresh and refocus?
- Who else can you involve?
- What will you do to get the support do you need?
- What are your fear about the situation?
- What would help?
What are our next steps?
- What ideas are bubbling up?
- How do you plan on moving this forward?
- How committed are you to these actions? On a scale of 1 to 10?
- When will you take your next steps?
The discussions showed we love being part of strong communities, sharing skills, collaborating and we all face similar challenges, particularly around funding for creative projects and managing work flow.
We’re interested to hear of any apps that help freelancers/creatives manage the day-to-day functions of their business, so if there are any that work particularly well for you, get in touch and we’ll share the list. Particularly interested in free or low cost apps.
The other area mentioned was funding. There are many ways to fund projects but here’s a list of websites that can help with funding:
The Arts Council page is a good place to start:
In the Create Your Future Toolkit there is a list of arts funders with links. This may be a little out of date but can point you in the right direction.
For filmmakers, add to this Film Hub North and Screen Yorkshire and Screen Industries Growth Network and XR Stories
Film makers may be interested in looking at Yorkshire Film Archive’s site as they have a Nature Matter project that they are currently recruiting to and are very keen to support independent film makers to make use of their archive and access funding to show films through Film Hub North.
And of course, York and North Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership for general business support, Alison Laws is your contact, and Ad:Venture for those with businesses less than three years old.
