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INCOME from Arts Council England & Necessity FundSee About ACE and About Necessity tabs below.
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Cost Notes
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Commission Costs
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Performative lecture fee1500
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Performative lecture material costs 850
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Audio performative commission- for radio 1000
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Audio performative commission material costs 600
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text/ written commission 1 350 + 50 for audio recording400Link to commission brief
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text/ written commission 2 350 + 50 for audio recording400Anahi: *We have questions & uncertainties about the ideas of standardized fees and how much work is renumerated for what amount. How do we make this expansive and flexible, but also fair and equitable (and also possible within our current budget)? Jack: NUJ has a freelance fees guide. For an online publication, they suggest £400 per 1000 words, or £175-250 per day of research/writing. For print magazine, it could be up to £1200 per 1000 words, or £150-300 per day writing/editing. Jack: I wonder if 'standard fees' could be considered an agreed meeting point between writer and commissioner, as if we decided to meet somewhere on a hill or at a landmark. However, different artists/writers have different journeys to get to that meeting point. For neuronormative and mentally healthy writers/artists, that meeting point is easy to journey to because 1000 words does indeed take them about 2 days (@£200 per day) to write. For 'normal' people, the fee therefore seems 'worth it'. But for neurodiverse writers/artists who may also have disadvantanged backgrounds (i.e., those who are contantly worried about survival and have no buffer, or who have more than normal caring responsibilities, or simply don't have a quiet place or time to write, or who may have complex trauma), they have to take a lot more time and to overcome more obstacles to get to the point where that standardised fee is worth it.

So is there a need for an access assessment that can be conducted so that you can supplement the standard fee with an 'access to writing' budget that accounts for the extra time or emotional/psychological work that needs to be done?

If so, what would that access assessment look like?

Also how much budget also needs to be allocated to staff in order to handle writers' access and equity needs?		Ale: Row 29 is the amount we have to support the artists should they need extra support. With them we ask whether they have any additional access needs directly and we weave that into the final budget. PB has an additional access pot that includes also access for the team. However, so far we have never accounted for the additional time that work around access and equity requires. We have always absorbed this extra work as part of our normal monthly salary/time of two days per week for each of us.Xavier: I think we should acknowlege that we didnt know about the NUJ fees, and that is helpful. In our experience the standard rates have been around £250-350 which is how we came up with the fee structures here. My main question here would be about how we come up with the budgets, since standardised rate don't necessarily accommodate different methods of working nor access needs.

So, in future, maybe we should be talking to guests before finalising the budget rather than set up a specific one and then changing it as we go? In a way, that often goes against standard practice which is to include the fee on invitation, but we could look at different ways of going about it. Also understanding that a maleable fee suggests more workload for the purposes of negotiating a final one, so this also needs to be accounted for in the final fee.		Jack: Could I challenge you to take one live or past example (say a writer you know well) and try and put some actual numbers to this.

How much would you actually budget for this person's access needs, and for your extra work in order to accommodate and host this need.		performingborders : Example 1

In a commissioned interview, one writer asked to involve their mentor to help unentangle the questions we asked. The idea was for them to talk with someone familiar to them about the various points of our questions that they might find complex. To do so they needed someone who knew exactly how they think and work. And as this was the first time they were working with PB, they felt the mentor would be the perfect support. So PB added an additional interview fee for the mentor of £150 as well as crediting their name within the interview. The additional fee was taken from a potentila addiitonal interview with another artist, so to make sure the process could be followed we focused only on one interview with two people from the very beginning.

The audio recording of the text was also done a bit last minute resulting in some time stress for our team. So in order compensate for the lack of time due to lateness, the PB editor decided took onboard some of the the adddiotnla work that was meant for the writer.

Anxiety-wise the work had to be done late in the evening when the PB editor has usually much less energy and childcare responsibilities. This problem could not have been solved by having more money to pay another person outside the team to edit the interview and help with recording. There was no additional time to co-ordinate this. So the easiest time/money/pressure-wise solution was to finalise the work and be Ok with it potentially being not 'perfect' for publication day.		performingborders: Example 2

The interviewee's first language was Spanish so the interview was conducted in Spanish. This is an access/care condition we are able to provide and in doing so, we also make PB a multilingual space. A transcript then had to be generated in Spanish and English, and a final version of the interview and the audio recording had to be prepared also in both languages. This duplicates the amount of work on the part of the editor who now has to do twice the work for an article that has the same budget as an article in one language. Here the access or dual language costs have to be absorbed by PB, i.e. one of us willing to take on this extra work.		performingborders: In general our approach is to acknowledge that everyone has different needs, we can anticipate some of them but not all as everyone is unique in their way of approching work. We also try to agree timing with the contributors to help the workflow and access needs. Although we are aware of the limitations of operating on a outcome-based art system, where the funding are linked to a pre-determined set of activities that need to be delivered.

To face this, apart from trying to co-ordinate timing and being as flexible as possible with the contributors, we set aside a substantial budget for both accessibility and contingencies so that we are equipped to respond to as many personal/group needs as possible.
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text/ written commission 3 350 + 50 for audio recording400
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text/ written commission 4 350 + 50 for audio recording400
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text/ written commission 5 350 + 50 for audio recording400
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text/ written commission 6 350 x 2 + 50 x 2 for audio recording800
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Link to brief: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TIDTAY1TkfFRriP-UY1I1378hYeLgzDFpaTbYHF9LTs/edit?usp=sharing
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BUDGET COMMISSION 1500
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Access Costs
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Performative lecture - visual description ( £30 per minute estimate), provides recording & transcript 500Link to brief: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-x4hj3dn6-AGLlDLKhfpWt3n2BvdvFo6XDrLg6bJ4xQ/edit?usp=sharing
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AUdio work - audio description ( £30 per minute estimate), provides recording & transcript 500Link to brief:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bVb1iIWZPnRZp0WItKB2y0pDhI7Mwe294RbQsYiqCio/edit?usp=sharing
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Creation of 'easy read' version (downloadable) based on design 500Anahi: *Aknowledging that this work is separate but should be related to the overall content is important to us but they're not always skills held by the 'designers' and is often a different type of work, there is a desire that eventually this line and the design line are the same...
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Access costs for Artists750Anahi: *Fear and knowledge that this is just the start of what a reall access pot looks like when you center it in how you create work.
*Also uncertainty on how to handle this when a support person becomes a collaborator and not just an access resource - should we not make this a part of the curatorial budget then? 		JKT: See cell G15performingborders: So far here we are using this funds to support contributors' childcare, translation, additional time for neurodiverse contributors.
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Sector Support
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Unionisation or alternative worker support organisation Pot2000This is a pot that will be offered to contributing artists to cover 1 year of a union or alternative workers support organisation subscription fee - Fully covered by Necessity Fund
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Migrant legal support Pot3000This is a pot that will be offered to non-Uk citizens artists that are undergoing financial difficulties to access legal support for their right to remain to work in the UK - Fully covered by Necessity Fund
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Designs Costs
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Web design of the publication (with access to the webite - implement directly) 2000
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(IF NEEDED) 2 days from Mike on website 600
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Promo support
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Promo & marketing 2500This included the promotion and outreach for public gathering in 2023
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Additional lines from PB team (ongoing)
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Guilt about lack of time for Extended chosen family, caring responsabilities for children, elderly & petsJack: Could you try to quantify guilt? If you can't quantify in monetary terms, is there another unit of measure you could invent? For example, some in the Crip Community use Spoon TheoryAlessandra: I like the spoon theory! I would not be able to calculate guilt in this visual-quantitative manner myself. Nor could I think about money as I think there is no money quantity that could compensate for any of that.

However I could think of it as the weight I feel in my chest: the heavier it is, the less free to breathe I feel, the higher is the amount of non-acted-upon guilt.		Alessandra: Actually I have now spoken with other carers and we came out with a way of caluclatiing that focus on the time we would like to spend per week with our chosen family.

In my case - I'd love to have extra 5h per week during weekdays to spend with them. It is a way to focus on what we want to do instead of the often socially-induced pressure.		Anahi: I think I am thinking about this guilt in terms also of how after a work week or an intense project, I feel like I have spent the "best of myself" on the work, leaving a tired, sometime fragile and not always energetic self for my friends and my family. What this means to me is that I often feel more passive, less communicative and less able to go out of my way and comfort zone to do things that are not immediately restful, or if I do it's at a cost to my energy/ rest. I am guilty that I generally don't have enough emotional and physical energy to call my long distance relatives - I always think - when I have more time. When will this happen?

I would like to have 6 more hours a week to talk to my (chosen + extended) family, which means being rested and ready for interpersonal relationships! A unit of measure for me is 1 x call with my grandma, which often leaves me sad and emotional but also full and warm for about 3 hours. I want time to be able to spend this energy with her and others, twice a week.

I am thinking here also about aftercare and if we budget that in - again this is a time budget.		Jack: @alessandra I like the weight-on-chest idea. I have a tightening-in-my-stomach version! Very much like spoon theory, could I challenge you maybe to get some weights (or books or other objects) and to place increasing amounts on your chest. Could you then quantify the levels of guilt in relation to your body? For example, 1 kg of guilt (2 bags of sugar) = not being able to have dinner with a good friend; 10kg of guilt = missing a weekend with my child, etc.Jack: @everyone I love that you have identified the exact number of hours you need extra. Can I ask you to take it one step further and guestimate how those hours you need might translate back into something that would benefit Performing Borders, e.g., 5 hours with family leads to reduction in chest weight guilt from 15kg to 1 kg, which in turn leads to lightness at work and double the efficiency or quality of attention?Alessandra:

1) The weight of not being with my family in Italy this week that my dad had a heart attack: 13.3kg of books ( I felt like selecting them among performance and live art book & anatomy - the weight of the body)

2) The weight of not being able to focus during the time I'm spending with my child this week/weekend: 6.4 kg of books (here a mixed of philosophy, activism & children's books)		Anahi: I tried to think of the pies and although I like the provocation, I am finding it difficult to actually think of what splitting myself up in different pies looks like. I thought about maybe getting real pastries to help with this, but as I'm not eating gluten this was also bad haha. My problem is that I am not able to really quantify how much of a pie slice I shoul dbe taking, and how big the pies should be, although I do see that the pies exist (I see that I have limited amounts of energy for various things in my life). I found it hard to think of how big a slice each activity throughout the day took in relation to the others. In a way it almost feels like rtaher than different pies, they're all ingredients of very similar pies (maybe the same) and quantifying this was really hard for me, to the extent that I couldn't really finish the activity without changing all the pies at the same time, after I did anything...What I have found is that my body knows when the pies are done before I do mentally and often any boundaries or communications about emptiness come with sleepiness, reluctance to work and an inability to focus (often after 6 or 7 PM or on the weekends where it feels like my body just says NO...). Maybe this is not useful hahaperformingbiorders: It was interesting to see that for us all the idea of spending more time with extended and chosen family does not bring to mind the idea of lightness or increase in productivity. In PB, as in other migrant spaces we inhabit, the distant family and the relations with them for example often leave us more drained than energised and will require additional time to recover. We all feel that from our personal experience this relation of productivity/connection with family is one that stands out as actually it requires an huge mount of emotional labour. Also, we feel and share with you the idea that the excel-sheet budget format is in itself colonial/neoliberal. It's an inflexible one that asks to calculate and quantify also things that cannot always be calculated and centers quantitative-thinking over other ways of relating to the world.

We think that opening this space up and this discussion about the impact of projects (qualitative and/or quantitative) is a way to think how to retain humanity within a sector that still asks artists, curators, workers to build individualistic narratives of success that keep replicating themselves also in alternative and grassroots spaces and practices.
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Anxiety due to the vulnerability of this budget process How are pressure, anxiey and guilt connected? How do they impact time, energy/motivation, the body, relationships, communication, hope/morale, staff turnover/longevity, creativity?

Is there a way that you can calculate the costs for each of these as a result of the pressure/anxiety/guilt that the organisation experiences? 		Alessandra: pressure, anxiety, guild are 'time-demanding emotions that suck our energy away and stops us creating new energy. I wonder if we could think of how much time we think we would spend weekly with these work-related feelings (eg. 3h, 8h?). And calculate what we could do instead for the project and ourselves so that we understand the possibility of replacing those feelings with new ways of thinking about time? Not sure it is easy to do but could move us to think beyond those emotions (that also have their role in alerting us of potential 'dangers' so cannot be discarded completely).Anahi: I like this idea too, I get the sense that the cost of the combination of these 3 is quite high especially on the energy and longevity of projects, and of course the body.

I wonder if there is a way of creating a budget of 'time' here, which has to balance out so that if you end up 'really stressed for 3 days to make something happen' you can have spaciousness and gentle work for the next 3 days, How can we record this?		Anahi: Also I think combatting some of these things at a systemic level through doing organising work outside of PB is essential to also giving me a sense of agency and alleviating the sense that I can do nothing but feel the symptoms. This type of organising whether it's with feminist groups or union spaces for example, is work too. I would like to start thinking of it as something that is covered by my general wages (for example, some days I spend up to 3 hours on organizing work, and this should be counted as part of my job as a part of an organisation trying to do things differently).Jack: @Alessandra. Ah! Your thoughts here are connected to my suggestion in E44 above that you try and invent a way of costing how the hours you spend with family/friend can lead to increased productivity or benefit for PB.

Or you could also invent a different measure?		Jack: @anahi Your proposal to include organising work in your general wages is interesting! It makes me therefore think that organisations need to create employee access profiles, or an employee intersectional work profile. This would be a bespoke and detailed access rider of how that employee works and what extra time or conditions they might need. This might mean that advertised job descriptions should not be fixed but something that should change at interview depending on that person's intersectional needs and external organising needs? Perhaps we could start regarding the interview as a way of co-creating that employee's access/work profile. Once we are clear on that profile, then we can offer a fair salary? So what would a fair and reasonable salary look like for the totality of explicit and hidden work that a PB editor needs to do?performingborders: As the PB platform works on many level beyond the e-journal (research, commissions, curation, writing, artist supports, network of sister-organistaion partners, fund raising,...) we want to think of a way to make this work central in our working life but also acknowledges that all the pb members have an active socially/politically-engaged life within movements of resistance (feminist, queer, migrant, unions, ...) as well as constantly providing one-to-one people-support/mentorship. One work cannot exist without the other as it is part of creating an equitable present and a future within the arts and beyond.

One solution could be to receive a full-time salary as directors of a small arts organisation (in the UK it is usuallybetween £35k-£50) for a 4-day working week (there are various experiments around the globe of paying people a five-day full-time salary for 4 days of work) where the arts activities of pb do not increase but we use the additional paid time to work on the various activists' platforms we are part of as a way to look at that as practice and research that is brought directly into the shape of pb and its approaches to work. Also the additional time will allow to reintegrate our chosen and extended families more into our lives.
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Pressure in having to deal with never-ending amount of work and precarity for the organisation
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Pressure and Constrains due to current socio-political situation (national and international) and climate emergency
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Fatigue in working after 2 years of pandemic and the current pressure of 'going back to normal'
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Opportunity to open up a much needed transparent conversation about money, resorces and possible futuresThese are questions perhaps of potential. How would you map potential (or opportunity) in a budget?Xavier: I am struggling with this because the potential here is always limited to the amount of budget we have at any given time. We can only see the potential of the next few weeks, and even when we are celebrating another sucessful grant, we don't have the stability to be able to look much more in the future as we have to start thinking and planning straight away again into the next fundraising plan. The opportunity is always conditional, never a freeing possibility.Alessandra: I think we can think of potential in terms of resources that we are sharing and these can be: emotional (e.g. talking with critical friends or external colleagues and seeing the amount of amazing work out there which brings hope and joy - and pain - for the day); knowledge (e.g. talking with people opens new pathways in our thinking and working - eg. On Work interview series ); connections (every time we talk to someone we build a new connection in PB's constellation of collaborators, partners, etc., which can lead to new collaborative projects as well as sharing of contacts.

I think the possibilities grows exponentially every time we have a new conversation - although I am not sure what number we can add to that exponential equation. We won't take all the opportunities and might miss to see some too. I see them as a potential system like an atom where some of the 'balls' explode with activities...some not.		Perhaps it is a question here of meeting the minimum standards of survival? Numerous studies continue to show that humans get happier with more money and available budget to a certain level, and then increased budget does nothing to increase happiness. Beyond this, other 'budgets' are more important: friends/family, self-fulfillment, health etc.

This budget commission for me is an opportunity to stop and take stock of what is the minimum budget required for you and the artists you commission to be able to meet your 'minimum survival happiness' level, i.e. to cost the professional recommended rates and salaries, but all the other costs too. How much total money and time needed for this is perhaps the 'real budget'. And because the current funding culture is to discount 'personal costs', this creates a culture of chronic underfunding leading to burnout because staff and artists have to compensate for the underfund?		performingborders: Yes to all the above! Maybe our comment to E45 is an attempt to look how we could carve space and fair support within the neoliberal society we work within.
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Opportunity to reflect on labour and rights and shape the budget in accordance to that
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Opportunity to wave care into the frame of the budget and make it stay
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Opportunity to inclusde sector and legal protection support
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Opportunity to set aside some budget to celebrate the work done together
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Opportunity to meet & work with new people & welcome them to the PB project (excitement at what it could mean for their work to pollinate our spaces)
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Portion of pb team salaries covering the work of the propject (each pb member gets £2,000 per month to cover curation, production, promotion, fundraising, research and every activity convcerning pb. Time covered: 2 days pwr week - flexible Anahi: There is also a struggle here because we have this project as well as various other ones at the same time... it makes it hard to know how much time we're spending on this project 'really' JKT: See cell G15 again. But this time, calculate each of your own access needs in relation to the £2000 work requirement. How would you articulate these needs and support each other?Xavier: I am not sure how to calculate this at all, the main thing is that there are constrains that arrise from having to work on other projects, that distracts us from the attention and focus that we should dedicate to PB so that we could earn more/find more resources. Whilst that is also linked with guilt and anxiety of having no personal life, it does detract from the possibility of long term planning or higher material conditions because we simply do not have the time to focus on that. Our two days a week are already stretched. So in order for us to be able to find better resources/support we would need to dedicate more time to the platform. But that conundrum is hard to define; how do we best to go about it, especially after years of already over-working, you know? I think 4 days of working week per person would be ideal, as it would allow us more time to work on what we do already, but also a bit more time to look at broader fundraising and material conditions for all involved.Alessandra: Here, as we are working on many layers of PB and the £2,000 covers all aspects not only the e-journal - I would add to this 'salary' budget line covers only a fraction of what goes towards creating the e-journal activities and its access-related activities. Also it is only temporary and it has to cover for fundraising activities for the future too. I would say that this past few months (Aug to Dec) we might have spent half of the 2 days per week on the e-journal. In terms of access I get £120 childcare to cover some hours per week that can be linked to the e-journal as well as the rest of activities as well.Anahi: What's becoming more and more of an 'access' thing for me has been a space to work in and people to work with - tricky because this is not something easily paid for with 'access funds' and has to do with work structures etc, might not be useful in this case!

In terms of supporting each other, knowing where people are physically/emotionally and work wise is important - could we budget time for this?		Jack: So here is a thought that might help. Lawyers for example charge their time by the hour. Something like £200-500 per hour depending on their experience. A junior lawyer or trainee charged at £200 per hour will be allocated less important work: assisting, note-taking, etc. A senior lawyer at £400 per hour will be managing a team, drafting complex documents, advising clients. Additionally, every kind of work in a law firm is chargeable based on one's billing rate. Time is charged in 6 minute blocks. So if I was a junior lawyer and spent up to 6 minutes reading a letter, I would charge my client £20. If I spend up to 12 minute replying, I would charge £40 for that.

Is there a way of breaking down your £250 per day salary in a similar way to understand more clearly what this salary can reasonably pay for? For example, you can account for complex expert editorial work at £250 per day, but admin work at £100 per day, and activism/organising/networking work at say £175 per day. This might then give you a clearer picture of what kind of work you are doing, in what proportion, and how much you are overworking, and how much capacity you need to increase in the future. Xav's 4 day work week sounds reasonable to me actually. But it is still worth understanding what is the breakdown of these 4 days in relation to the work that PB needs.		performingborders: we consciously decided to move away from an hierarchy of tasks/pay within PB core group to embrace feminist/queer movements' approach of highlighting and cherishing the invisible work of admin, care and general underpaid reproductive labour. This is to make sure that we do not replicate arts organisation hierarchies within the group. We look at whole the labour/tasks as essential (curation cannot happen without admin that cannot happen without fundraising that cannot happen without an informal system of support among the members of the group).
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Anxiety that we are not spending enough time on this (relatve to our pay) but also anxiety that we need to work other jobs to make up all the funds we need in a month as freelancers/ independent artists
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Is a standardised fee for guests (writing, text) fair, specifically when thinking about access needs and creative/research practices of the different guests?
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Contingency
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800Anahi: I am thinking about the budget and space we have for making mistakes and learning ... is this something we have implied in the 'contingency' - is that the line that stands for: anything we haven't thought of/ have still to learn and still need to account for? JKT: Unfortunately, small organisations don't have the luxury of a 'mistakes' budget. Large commercial organisations can do this, and in fact some see 'mistakes' as a necessary part of making profit. It is part of R&D often. For small arts orgs who can't afford the budget for this necessary work, it means that workers/staff are the ones who end up subsidising the organisation for this work by putting in the extra unpaid hours to do the trial and error work.JKT: Is there a possibility of always including an 'experimental budget' for any future project where you are allowing mistakes and experimentation. e.g., your current funding application should have included a specific budget just for the three of you to experiment with writing this reflective budget spreadsheet?!Alessandra: At the moment we are doing this and leaving a comfortable amount of budget for contingencies for the running of the whole pb (outside this project as well). However, it would be good to look into having a separate pot for 'experimenting' so that it feels less of a 'mistake in planning'. You are right, we feel we cannot afford too many mistakes.Xavier: We can look at a budget line in the future that allows us to 'experiment' as you say Jack, in a similar way that companies look at budget lines for 'company development'.Anahi: I like this idea - in a way designating funds for something you know 'may not work' is a way of encouraging experimentation and actually changing how we work/ finding new methods.

On the other hand, I feel like I have some guilt around the money we have and having to spend it all 'on the right things' - is it too much to create space for 'mistakes' when you know funds are needed elsewhere , more urgently?		Jack: Haha yes I understand the guilt, especially when it is donated or public money. But we are humans and humans learn by making mistakes. So as Xav said, this isn't a 'mistakes budget' but an organisational development budget or even a learning (from mistakes) budget?performingborders: In a way the whole PB budget is about trying to create a way of organising that responds to the needs of its members and contributors. At every step we learn. adapt, change, re-direct. It is not easy but we agree, they are not mistakes as the 'norm' is unjust and as bell hooks said society is imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal. At the moment we are using the budget to share resources in a way to highlight and support the work of the people involved so outside this budget we have additional funds for accessibility + budget lines for training and research for pb group + each salary also included days when the memebr is away or unwell (the whole salary is paid whatever is the amount of work done) + additional contingencies for any eventuality. More needs to be done to make the resources we have (financial and beyond) more adaptable and we understand this is a step towards understanding how better to do this.
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