Finding Energy in Enough for Entrepreneurs: Shaping Sustainability in Your Business 

Running a small business can feel anything but sustainable. But your work is needed in our world and figuring out how to be your brilliant self without burning out is essential.

I’ve teamed up with my local arts centre Riverfront, Newport, Wales to run a series of workshops to support entrepreneurs and creatives navigate these painful financial times.

Thanks to generous funding from The Riverfront Newport and The University of South Wales, the workshops are free.

You can attend in person or online.

• Workshop 1: Seeking Our North Star

Finding a Fit for Creative and Business Hopes

Considering our dreams for our art and business and what makes that difficult in the world today. With cost of living crisis, chronic illness, caring responsibilities and loss of arts support, there are lots of reasons why we may struggle to shape the art-life we seek. 

In this workshop we’ll look at:

– The current landscape you are working within – what resources you and what reins you in here. 

– The star at the centre – we’ll look beyond the shape of your dreams for the golden pulsing heart of them. 

– Shapes beyond starlights – having found the core part of your work, we’ll think about the shapes it can take and the ways you can offer this work to the world. We’ll take these ideas into our plotting of your landscape and think our next steps for bringing this into the world. 

This workshop has now past but a recording is available, sign up here to get a recording.

• Workshop 2: Nourish and Bloom: Sustainable Business Building Class 

Creating a foundation for your work to flourish for community artists, small business owners and creatives. 

We’ll cover:

• Finding space – the technique you’ll want to use at every ask, to make sure you don’t burn out.
• Pricing for community and sustainability 
• Pruning of what we need to cut back for you to flourish and how to do it with kindness. 

This workshop has now past but a recording is available, sign up here to get a recording.

• Workshop 3: What Holds Us Here – Tuesday 14th November, sign up here.

Structures and systems to support sustainable art and change making. 

As a disabled entrepreneur, I both need to hold so much and can’t hold everything. I take participants through a behind-the-scenes look at my own business and explore the systems and structures I use to organise a creative and change-making life. 

We’ll figure out:

– Where your entrepreneurial energy leaks are.

– How to set up support to drive your work forwards, without your energy being the fuel source.

– Making creativity sustainable as we are precious and not self-renewing resources. 

• Workshop 4: Visioning Our Visibility – Tuesday 5th December. Sign up here to be notified when tickets are released.

Supporting ourselves to show up for our work and in the world. 

Many small business people and creatives feel pressured to show up on social media but are unsure how to do it. Or we’re doing it, but not seeing the growth we need (or are told we should be getting). It can feel somewhere between a popularity contest and a performance without directions. But it doesn’t have to be like this. 

In this workshop we’ll consider:

• Beliefs and pressures we’re holding in terms of what we ‘should’ be doing. 
• Consider our history with being seen and taking up space. 
• Look into our business or artistic eco-systems and consider what’s necessary for us. 
• Draw on our work to find ways to show up that are possible and sustainable for us. 

• Workshop 5: Career Out of Joy: Creating About Pleasure After Pain – Sign up here to be notified when tickets are released. 

Creatives centring pleasure in eco-systems focussed on our struggle.

We’ll consider working as artists and creatives and ask: 

• Where is the appetite for our stories? How do we discern what’s ours to share and ours to protect?
• What can we draw on to begin writing about joy in a world that dismisses our pleasure?
• How can we centre our joy when we’re only asked about our pain?
• How can we write both pain and joy in a trauma-informed way?

Get in touch with any questions. Sign up for notification of future classes and let me know what you want to learn about together next!