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Musings News

Don’t Forget the Self-Employed!

At The Stove we recognise the position and the responsibility we have within the region’s cultural, creative and community sectors. Of our 600+ members, we estimate that as many as half will be self-employed or freelancers.

With the national shutdown of the economy for COVID-19 virtually all freelancers and self-employed people have had their incomes wiped out overnight as events and regular contracts have been cancelled – people are literally facing personal bankruptcy overnight. This in contrast to people employed on PAYE who will now be supported with 80% of their wages through the Government’s national bailout package.

First off, we have written to the region’s MSPs and MPs asking them to advocate for the Scottish and UK Governments to take urgent action to support the self-employed sector.

In Dumfries and Galloway 17.2% of people in employment are self-employed, against a national average of 10.8% (source: Skills Development Scotland – Regional Skills (D&G) Assessment 2016).The vast majority of self-employed people submit a tax return every year and it would be straightforward measure to extend the 80% package to the self-employed on the basis of, say, an aggregate of their last 3 tax returns to assess average earnings. Such a measure has been adopted by Sweden and different European countries are also supporting their self-employed economies.

Currently the self-employed in the UK only have access to statutory Sick Benefit (£94 per week – if they are ill) and have been given a 6 month ‘holiday’ from advance tax payments.

The cultural, creative and community sectors have been one of the regions success stories of recent years, being one of the very few local industries that is attracting people to relocate or move back to the region. Figures show that there are now more people employed in the Creative Industries in D&G than there are in Agriculture (source: SoSEP) – this is a sector with high value jobs of exactly the sort we are trying to attract to the region through initiatives like South of Scotland Enterprise and Borderlands. It is imperative that we, as a country, act immediately to protect this vital sector within our local economy and support the people and families that rely on self-employment/freelance work.

At The Stove we know how important we are to the ecosystem of the cultural, creative and community sectors – organisations like us can function as a conduit between individual freelancers/small teams and national/international partnerships and funding – we can draw budgets into the region that are spread amongst the local sector. Typically, The Stove puts £200,000 per annum into the freelance economy of D+G. Our first instinct at the start of the health emergency was to maintain our support for the wider community around us – both the folk we work with as participants in our work, but also the wider creative community. We have been able to honour all the existing commitments we have to freelancers across all our projects (and also keep on our café staff).

Looking into the future we know only too well that the freelance community normally expect regular work through organisations like us at festivals and events. We are working hard at the moment to find ways that we can continue to deliver on projects and offer new contracts to freelancers. We are a creative community and opportunities to do useful and creative work for the local community will present themselves!

Currently we are working on ideas to bring the local cultural, creative and community sectors together at this very challenging time – in the hope that we can be a useful collective resource and also forge some self-help initiatives that will help this struggling within our own sector. If you have anything you would like to contribute then do get in touch.

Please stay tuned to the various Stove platforms for updates.

#Homegrown

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News

Embers – Igniting culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway

Our Norwegian Story in Dumfries town centre 2017

How do we connect up the culturally-led work that is happening in communities across D & G and build our region into a powerhouse of enterprise and opportunity?

There is growing recognition that something special is happening in D+G – our creative sector is working at the heart of rural communities and helping to inspire, facilitate and connect other initiatives (eg taking over underused buildings) that are making a real difference for places and the people that live there.  The Stove Network has been both a resource and catalyst for the region through its work in Dumfries town centre. It has formed in-depth working partnerships with the local authority and other groups/agencies, building a portfolio of experience in bringing together community, agency and business interests to develop its work in place-making and culturally-led regeneration.

The Stove has received national and international recognition for their pioneering work in this field and with the advent of the new South of Scotland Enterprise Agency (SoSEP) an opportunity has been identified to develop a plan to strengthen the connection between existing projects and seed new ones for the benefit of the region as a whole. SoSEP has granted The Stove funding for a focused piece of work, based on their Enterprising Communities proposal, to look at the opportunity for better shared learning, the support needed for this activity in place-making and culturally-led regeneration and pathways to opportunities in Creative Industries.

How can we work together to strengthen these for our region? What support does this work need to flourish and grow localised decisions for the places we live?

For the next 6 months The Stove will be carrying out a feasibility study for Enterprising Communities, under their project – Embers – igniting culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway – to explore and define a joined-up vision for work in place-making and culturally-led regeneration and enterprise in Dumfries and Galloway. This piece of work will not focus on the model to deliver this work but on how we can strengthen the pathways between the work we ALL currently do. We will look at what we need to support this, to encourage new work and sustainable development in this area.

How do we build on existing networks in the communities and cultural/creative sectors – overlaying and combining them to create a powerfully integrated regional field of shared resource, capacity, knowledge, skills and opportunity?

Embers will be led by Katharine Wheeler for The Stove with support from across our networks, agencies and partners. Firstly, Katharine will look at areas of best practice in place-making across the region and secondly, produce a feasibility document as a regional development model for place-making and culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway defining out how best to take this forward.

We are working closely with Carnegie Trust who will be providing case studies and help in identifying significant indicators of this work throughout the project.

The feasibility study – Embers – will explore a regional development model in relation to the main aims of how the new South of Scotland’s Enterprising Partnership (SoSEP) can support place-making, creative industries and culturally-led regeneration across Dumfries and Galloway.

This will feed into SoSEP’s current enquires:

  • What forms of support are needed to enable the communities in the South of Scotland to become more resilient and to help communities grow?
  • Advise within that what type of support SOSEP could provide, and how, to enable community organisations to become more successful.
  • What would success look like – for communities and for SoSEP?

We have already been in communication with some of our partners and other organisations and groups across the region about this piece of work and will be looking to connect with others. If you are wanting to find out more about this, or get a copy of our initial Enterprising Communities proposal please email [email protected] directly.

We are delighted to also be working with Issy Petrie, Policy and Development Officer, Carnegie UK Trust on this collaboration – read a recent blog about her work with us here: https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/blog/culture-creativity-and-conversation-thinking-about-tomorrows-towns/

D-Lux at Bakers Oven in Dumfries 2018
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News

Reflections on an Engaged Practice

by Katharine Wheeler, Stove Curatorial Team member since June 2015.

Katharine has been doing an Artworks Fellowship the past 10 months with The Stove and Artworks Alliance, a period of artist-led development and deep interrogation of practice presented through personnel and honest reflection.

Early last year an application crossed my desk, and that of The Stove’s, to submit a proposal as an artist/organisation pairing for a supported period of interrogation and artist-led CPD (continued professional development) in Participatory Practice.

This is a language learned through my deepening involvement with The Stove over the last 3.5 years but can still send me into a labyrinth of jargon…anyone who has attempted to casually slip “Participatory Practice” into lunch-time conversation knows my pain! Never-mind trying to communicate what that work can involve, what the “thing” is that I do within that. It is there, it’s benefits come through the the things we make with people, the conversations we have, the ideas we share and the projects that this creates where people, from all backgrounds and experiences, really are working together to creatively change the places they live, and it may seem cheesy but the lives it changes (including my own) in the process. It is this process, the ethos, the change I see it make in people and places that I am passionate about and makes me want to be able to communicate it, to understand what the “thing” is that makes it work, or not work in many cases, what are the sometimes very subtle differences between an activity that really is engaged, collaborative with others, and one that isn’t.

So how is this relevant to my Artworks Fellowship with The Stove. Well we were asked two things: to think about what we wanted to develop in ourselves as artists (blue sky, anything we wanted to achieve) and come up with a line of interrogation, a question, that our Artworks journey would relate to in our participatory work with the paired organisation. I found this incredibly difficult, to identify a question that I felt was relevant to this “thing” that I was passionate about. I wanted to reflect on this “thing” that makes our work at The Stove so profound, as an organisation and for me as an individual artist. But I kept getting lost in the language, trying to understand the structure. I needed to really understand this “thing” outside of the jargon and identify my part within it, my relationship to it, before I could reflect on it. What am “I” and what is “It” and is the separation important.

In this way we were maybe different from the other 4 pairings, as I had become completely entwined in the structure of The Stove and my practice had developed profoundly within that but I could not see what it had become exactly. As you might notice I do not tend to do anything by halves…continued professional development you say…some might just go away and do something but I needed to spend months pulling it all a part. I did end up just doing some things in the end – drawing, reading (or compulsively buying books and trying to find the time to read them) – turns out that is also important.

Artworks became a lens from which to observe myself, The Stove, my/our work, relationship, everything I did I began to look at with interest: Why do I/we do it that way, what is the usefulness of that, what is important? I set aside Fridays as Artworks days, points for reflection, often Fridays were over-run catching up on project enquiries, partnership development, talking with people. Sometimes I thought I would drown in what seemed self-indulgent reflection of my “practice” and what was important within that, sometimes I got lost in Stove world, lost myself entirely to the “Organisation” and Artworks gave me a life line back to look at what my individual needs were, and why they were both important for myself as well as The Stove.

I didn’t identify a single line of interrogation, I observed the process of finding the dilemmas in my work with The Stove, the tensions, our working process and how this is relevant to our work with other people, to the “thing” we do with our communities. My journey with The Stove became more about looking at all the pieces and how do they fit together, what piece am “I” in the organisational jigsaw, what pieces may be over-used, under-used, lost under the table.

In hugely simplified terms what came out of it for me is that Participatory Practice (one that involves others at its roots and not just its surface) is not about how it all fits together, or what the picture looks like at the end, it is about the “process” by which you choose to approach it, who is involved, the time you spend along the way. If this process was a walk it would be about who is there at the beginning, who joins at various points for a little while or for the whole jaunt, how our route changes direction and navigates the places we go through, how those places change us, and how we constantly choose and re-adjust our route. And whether we are aware this is still only one way and we can only ever see it from our individual perspective, how can we take that into account? In that sense it is truly about valuing the individual rather than coming up with one umbrella we can all fit under – spoiler…you will never find that umbrella!!! And why would you want to.

A creative practice is a deeply personnel thing…this journey became a deeply personal thing but it has also added another level of understanding to what I do with The Stove…even if I am still a long way from being able to fully communicate it.

If I were to communicate one thing from this learning then it would be if you really want to include other people in your work, to co-develop and collaborate, then you need to create a process together that you agree on and then surrender to a journey that leads you in directions you have not considered or planned on. And in order to do that you will need to understand each-others methods of communication.

Categories
Musings

Doing business, the Stovie way

Stove Angels

by Lauren Tuckerman

Lauren is a researcher who has been working with the Stove for over a year looking at the Stove as a business and how it interacts with other organisations, the community and its members.

I first came across The Stove three years ago when I was working in a different job, but as soon as I started this research project I knew I wanted to work with them. My supervisors recently asked me why this was, and that made me reflect on what attracted me to working with The Stove.

The first thing I remember about meeting The Stovies was how friendly they were, and their interest in what I was researching. That was a big plus for me. When I asked to research them, they proposed a more collaborative approach. This was right up my street, I wanted to research with them, rather than do research on them.

From the perspective of my topic, this was also interesting. I’m looking at how ‘open’ organisations are to different sources of information. And already The Stove was showing that they were ready to collaborate with researchers. They understood that it would take up their time and were careful to make sure the research was the right fit for them.

Their openness to working with me did not stop there. I was invited to different events, meetings and discussions. While some of the other researchers I know working with other companies were struggling to get information from organisations, I was heading to meet The Stove’s partners, sitting in on team meetings and attending the board away day.

Throughout this time, I built up a rich picture of how The Stove does business, and how it works with partners, the community and its members. While I am still in the middle of getting all my notes and interviews ready to be analysed, I have a few insights into what makes The Stove an interesting business.

The Stove’s Curatorial Team is one of the ways they are unusual. The majority of charities and community groups will have a voluntary board (which The Stove also have) who are in charge of overseeing the organisation, but who also may have a huge impact on the direction of the organisation. The Stove has two levels to set direction, the board and the CT, and at the board away day, both levels came together to generate ideas for the future of The Stove.

In terms of my research, this was interesting and important. The Curatorial Team is made up of practising artists who have strong ties to the community of Dumfries, and they therefore bring in practical experiences and their ideas help shape The Stove.

When looking at how they decide when to work with another organisation, we spent a lot of time talking about the ‘fit’ between The Stove and the possible partner. There isn’t a set of conditions an organisation or person had to meet to work with The Stove. The way people work is important in making this decision. That’s not to say that The Stove expects everyone to do things their way. It looks more like the ethos of the approach that matters. The values embedded in how people work are important to The Stove.

Although I’m two thirds of the way through this research project, I still feel I have so much to learn and that my observations, thinking and ideas will grow. I know one thing for sure, I’m so grateful I was able to work with The Stove and they have supported me with so much throughout the process.

Lauren will be presenting and sharing alongside researcher Lizzie Smith as part of an open discussion on the role of cultural and third sector organisations like The Stove this month. It’s open to all and takes place on Thursday, 21st February.

Categories
News

Catering Scoping Project for The Stove – Open Jar Collective

Catering Scoping Project for The Stove – Abridged version to accompany Catering Tender
Original version by Clem Sandison, Alex Wilde and Hannah Brackston

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Outline of the project

The aim of Open Jar’s work with The Stove Network was to gather ideas and viewpoints about the creation of a catering enterprise at The Stove. Following a period of targeted conversations with key stakeholders and pop-up engagement activities with the public, Open Jar Collective produced a report. This will now inform how the space is developed and used by the public, and forms part of tendering process to appoint someone to deliver the catering enterprise at The Stove. From Dec 2014 – Feb 2015 we surveyed the food businesses local to the Stove building, spoke to eleven individuals / group and ran a public feeding creativity event, which 20 people attended.

Identified needs

By the Stove:

  •  To provide a welcoming space that is a community resource, a hub for the arts community, a space for people to share and connect
  • To provide a flexible space that be used for a range of events, workshops, meetings or other ways of engaging people
  • To have the functioning of any cafe element of the space operated autonomously
  • A catering enterprise would be a stepping stone to the wider programme of the Stove and activities within the building. A way of signposting people.
  • An income stream as part of the social enterprise of the Stove Network Ltd charity and an integrated part of the activities of the charity.
  •  A desire to offer something different with its own unique identity
  •  A desire for the approach to be ethical in terms of operation, production and supply
  • Connected to the wider aim of regeneration and attracting people into the town centre
  • To connect with the street outside the Stove and activity in the square

In the meetings:

  • Training opportunities in the hospitality industry for college students
  • Somewhere to go after 5pm in the town centre
  • There is very little for 14 – 21 year olds in Dumfries
  • For people to work together to rejuvenate the town centr
  •  To create a destination

In the feeding creativity event:

  • Place to meet and space for groups to hire
  • Connecting with local food and food producers
  • A platform for exchange of knowledge or produce between small scale growing
    projects/allotments/community gardens
  • Mindfulness of food – simple menu, good food, affordable price, nourishing environment, sharing table / space
  • A space that is accessible to young people
  • To promote transparent and ethical buying
  • Collaboration – support a range of other local businesses
  •  Not displacing existing business – offering something new or distinct

What are the opportunities?

  • There is a lot of goodwill towards to Stove and excitement about the new building and what it can offer.
  • Offer something different, most places in the town centre are the same
  •  Work with the college to cook food off-site
  • Multi-functional arts venue – meet needs of lots of different groups
  • Alcohol free? – Stricter drink-drive limit – pub atmosphere in a cafe environmen
  •  Experiment with the waste food catering model
  • Growing Hub – connect allotments, exchange/barter schemes, information and knowledge about growing, seed banks
  •  To provide education about growing produce and cooking methods
  • Bringing food production into the town
  • Profit share with pop-up guest chefs / food producers
  • To create a community of people/organisations within the building which has it’s own momentum and draws in different audiences

Challenges

  • If you have a specific offer in order to be a viable business (eg. local food focus), how do you avoid alienating people who aren’t attracted by that particular focus?
  •  Quality is really important
  •  Is it possible to have a social objective of local, fairtrade, ethical and make money?
  • Not to be in direct competition with other food businesses in the town
  • Need a shift of mindset to encourage people to support small, independent business over the chains and multi-nationals
  • To ensure that an operator didn’t crash and burn due to lack of revenue or energy after a year
  • To create a viable enterprise opportunity given the lack of space and kitchen facilities

Considerations / restrictions

Restrictions of prep/serving/storage area:

  • The limited space available for preparing food, cold storage and serving means that it is fairly impossible to do much more than hot and cold drinks, cakes and maybe soup.
  • Catering for pop-up events would still need to happen off-site as there are not the facilities to make cooked meals.
  •  The conversion of the space off the courtyard into dry storage is essential to enable a catering enterprise to operate.
  • A double prep/washing up sink (in addition to the hand wash sink) will need to be permanent fixtures in the space along with the coffee machine, and electrics to power fridges.
  • Ideally the double sink and additional cold storage would be in the courtyard but this doesn’t seem feasible given potential building restrictions and the pillar blocking access.
  • Design will require counter area for serving, preparation and till. Cold storage required, recommend 3 undercounter fridges minimum – for milk, cold drinks, and food. Additional dry storage space for daily stock.
  • Need to be able to reconfigure the space on a regular basis for events so you will want to limit fixed items and have units on wheels.

Design / fit out:

  •  How do you balance the brand of the cafe with the aesthetic vision of the Stove for the space?
  •  Coffee machine would be expected to be part of the equipment that came with the space.
  • Due to space limitations, it may be difficult to fit in a dishwasher in the proposed set-up. This means that all drinks and food would need to be served in compostable paper plates/cups, essentially like take away. This may not appeal to all customers. If an industrial dishwasher was integrated into the prep space and china serving ware was used, additional staffing would be required to clear tables and manage washing up and additional storage space would be needed for china.

Further thoughts

Sourcing / Pricing policy:

There is a direct tension between local/fair trade sourcing and affordability/accessibility of the cafe (i.e. having a more expensive menu than other local cafes and therefore being seen as niche market). The general trend in food businesses in Dumfries is to sell at a very low price (e.g. £1.40 for a take away toastie). This results in food that is not locally sourced, organic, ethical, and is often quite highly processed. Some people in Dumfries may be willing to pay more for better quality ethically sourced food (making it a unique selling point for the cafe), but not everyone. The Stove need to make a decision about how important local food is to them, and define what they mean by ‘local’, ‘ethical’ and ‘sustainable’ in the tender document, as these terms can be very widely interpreted. The Cafe manager/operator may need to charge more than other cafes in the area to fulfil this brief. It’s quite simple to serve organic fairtrade tea and coffee, because the mark-up is much greater on hot drinks than it is on food. There is good profit margin on seasonal veg soups, so this would be a good item on the menu to showcase local produce. Sourcing good quality meat, cheeses, and bread, and keeping prices competitive with other local establishments will be more difficult. The Stove could consider developing a “prefered supplier” list e.g. cheese from Loch Arthur, bread from Earth’s Crust, dried goods from Greencity Wholefoods. The Cafe Manager/Operator would then need to price the menu accordingly based on these suppliers. We think seasonal soup using local ingredients could be the unique food offer, and the best option with limited prep/storage space. This could be a springboard for creating a local food hub, engaging with local growers and setting up fruit and veg bartering schemes. This requires a creative and competent cook/cafe manager to make use of available seasonal produce to prepare fresh soup each day. Alternatively the cafe manager could research other caterers/local businesses that could supply fresh soup, sandwiches, and cakes on a daily basis.

Categories
News Project Updates

HAME. 2nd-16th May 2015

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By Gerard McKeever
gerardmckeever.co.uk

It’s easy to forget just how extraordinarily important the places where we live are. They are our frame, our point of reference, a huge portion of the real detail of life. This capacity of the land to shape us takes on a special dimension when we have either lived somewhere for a very long time, or spent the early years of our life there. I was born in Upper Nithsdale and spent the best part of two decades in the area before leaving for the city. It is a familiar narrative: the draw of study, work and a faster pace of life. Yet as a creative person I am increasingly aware of the consequence of D&G in my thought processes, a language of place through which much of my work is communicated. Because of this, and because of a longstanding ambition to return to the region, Mark Lyken and Emma Dove’s recent Hame installation for The Stove Network resonated for me.

Perhaps one reasonable working definition of Art could be: a community talking to itself about itself. This was a fascinatingly literal instance of that process, with audio clips of people discussing their relationships contextualised against meditative imagery of the area. Seeing the places we know celebrated and examined in this fashion makes them more real and more vital. It is a process of validation through which both the bonds and the divides in our community are exposed. The installation made us question which voices were included and which were not – whose particular home was being offered a platform?

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On a formal level, the piece made use of the suggestive space of 100 High St., succeeding in creating a feeling of audience participation through its non-linear looseness. At the risk of straining the point, wandering around the multiple levels of the installation captured something of the jagged, contingent nature of our existence in place. If and when the piece is transposed into a linear production it will be no doubt engaging but very different, precisely calibrated as it was to radiate from the town centre. Lyken and Dove took us through a mixture of voices that spoke with the random authority of community. From recollections of a previous era to the impressions of youth, for two weeks the Stove became an open archive of shared experience. Just as ‘hame’ doesn’t quite mean the same as ‘home’ to me, all the little details and nuances of life in D&G have a particular shading. It was this odd quality of rootedness that the installation did so well to elaborate. Fortunately, Hame was also too stylish to fall into the tourist information or museum exhibit traps which a piece of its nature must face.

The Stove is a commendable effort to further invigorate a growing community of creative people in and around Dumfries, and in doing so contribute to the salvage of the town centre. As one of the many young locals living elsewhere but with half an eye on home, I find projects like this encouraging. Alongside the growing number of music festivals in the region, the successes of Spring Fling and other arts events, D&G seems to be building towards a creative critical mass, a blossoming that is being noticed on a national level. Perhaps we don’t need to look so far away after all, if we have these things at hame.

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Images © Colin Tennant

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