Stories of Hope and Home

In this post, I spoke of new adventures ahead, nebulous ideas which I hoped would start to take shape through the autumn. I guess this is the update that follows the "watch this space" with which that ended.

It is all very exciting, but I admit, also slightly daunting. It is an act of faith: and while the parts about believing it's an amazing idea and that it will be a great project are easy; it also requires me to believe that I can make it happen, and that's a different type of confidence which I mostly have, but which sometimes wavers.

The exciting part is that the project now exists. Well, it has a website, a twitter feed, and a facebook page, so it certainly exists in the virtual world; there is probably a little more work to be done for it to become real in the real world. Even there, though, it is slowly starting to take shape, and I am beginning to believe it will happen.

New beginnings involve plenty of dreaming dreams; but mixed in with reflecting on possibilities ahead, there are plenty of mundane realities to put into place too: opening a bank account, looking into public liability insurance (talking to insurance brokers is definitely the most grown-up thing I've ever done), risk assessing, applying for grants and even starting to think about the dreaded GDPR. It is a probably a good indication of how passionate I feel about this undertaking that even these administrative tasks haven't felt overly burdensome, and even things like receiving a debit card in the post has been tinged with excitement (which may be even more the case when the bank balance goes above £00.00).

I know that, for all my enthusiasm, there will be plenty of challenges ahead. The thing I am currently finding most difficult is the bit that involves working out what I am worth, financially speaking, although it comes with all sorts of overtones of how we experience value.

Budgeting probably isn't the greatest strength which I bring to this anyway; but I have had no problem working out costs and asking for money for bus tickets, for tea bags, for paper and printing, for all that stuff which will make running the project possible. What is proving much less comfortable is writing in payment for my time. I am not naive. I know projects like this don't run themselves, that potentially it will take a huge amount of time, energy and commitment to make it a reality. And while I know that I have many failings and things which are not my strengths which I will have to seriously work on, I do think I am the person who has the gifts and skills and perhaps more importantly the passion, to make it happen. I know all that, I think, but it still doesn't sit easily or comfortably to turn that into monetary value. It is perhaps hard to explain why, but writing my working hours into a grant application feels somehow different to applying for a job with an advertised pay scale. I know it needs to be done though, but it has made me reflect on how we place value on ourselves and on our work; perhaps that, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.

There will, undoubtedly, be more updates to follow as I attempt to turn a vague idea into a concrete project.