For all cultural managers/art professionals out there: Are you tired? Do you need a different type of break? Let me invite you to an experience that will change you. Organized by yours truly.
WHAT: 4 full days of wellness and creative workshops, safe space for reflection, sharing and healing, peer learning, mindfulness practices, light sport activities and relaxation designed for cultural managers and arts / cultural professionals who have experienced a burnout, exhaustion, permanent tiredness
WHEN: 8 – 13 July 2019 (8th and 13th are travel days)
WHERE: MAKAK Bed and Breakfast, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
PARTICIPATION FEE: 230 EUR
DEADLINE: Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis but no later than 31 May 2019.
APPLY HERE - http://multikulti.bg/2591
This sounds really nice @bistra ! What made you start organising these…? I have heard it’s not the first edition right? I can only assume there is a personal experience there, would you be willing to share it?
In my bubble, I know many who are definitely your target audience… Will spread the word and maybe even register myself, checking my calenday for the summer!
thanks, @noemi! surely, the idea came from personal experience
traveling around Europe and meeting cultural managers, i kept hearing about the same problem, especially from people who genially love what they’re doing and don’t see it as ‘work’. for me the problem was that both my ‘working time’ and my ‘leisure time’ were filled with the same people, activities, ideas which, from one hand, is very cool but on the other, it’s sometimes difficult to set boundaries. not to mention that i lived and worked with my partner and we would spend 100 % of our time thinking and speaking about work. even if we were out for a run, we reflected on our work, brainstormed, etc.
i agree that this could be a structural problem and a ‘how we work’ problem and as a manager i do try to tackle it as much as i can to make my colleagues life easier and structured in a better way with time i also accepted that at the end, it’s a personal responsibility and i cannot take all the blame
on the ‘how much side’, and to me, it’s also often a financial problem and not-for-profit under-funding doesn’t help because work which a whole team of 5 people would normally do has to be done by 1-2 persons. then the organization/the team can say: ‘there are not enough resources, we are not doing it’, however they do want to do it so they proceed… which also teaches donors that it’s okay to under-fund (if that’s a verb )
most of all, throughout the years i noticed that the shame is the biggest problem, the image that we build for ourselves and for the others as ‘full time change makers’, ‘i can do it all super heroes’, etc. and there is a lot of inner frustration building up and often people become severe to themselves instead of being kind and generous… for some reason it’s easier to do it for others
back to the Re-Creation Camp - we use the Art of Hosting method for deep connection and meaningful conversations but from there the program is co-created and based on participants’ needs. thanks a lot for sharing it and i would be happy if you come
This is a deep insight I think - it’s been my experience too, individually, but I also see it in our collective. I think it becomes even more dangerous when we project it onto others and the world, as if it’s becoming a requirement to be self-sacrificial and go the extra mile just to get things done, and if someone is not willing to do it, then they get less respect.
What also seems to come across from your words is that it’s not just cultural managers, this is generalized to a lot of people working in social change.
I am starting to like more and more the idea of doing great work but pursue rewards and adequate funding with assertion - and think about our new projects more strategically, with the goal of social change on the same pedestal as the goal of wellbeing for ourselves. This has been raising eyebrows in some circles, especially in culture where precarity is the rule and prosperity seems to be bourgeois. Maybe I’m wrong, but at times I’ve wondered if going for prosperity can make you look like impostors.
End of philantropy and more impact investments, developing more entrepreneurial thinking, new kind of NGO leadership…, I guess these fall into what I mean when I say going for prosperity.
This podcast produced by @CWD might interest you. He’s one of the more strategic thinking edgeryders working in culture that I’ve met lately
with time i also accepted that at the end, it’s a personal responsibility and i cannot take all the blame 
