where people working on their own don’t have to work alone

The Consortium of Arts Related Entrepreneurs (CARE) is a 6-month long community (February–August 2023) where independent arts and culture workers join together virtually to learn, teach, support each other, and build entrepreneurial skills.

I’m here for the folks who came to the field out of passion and now know that’s not a healthy basis for a working life and want better for themselves and their colleagues.

I’m for the changemakers more than the places where they make change.

I think it was the Nagoski sisters, in their book Burnout, who talked about the surprising realization that what mid-life crises look like for women tends to be very different from the masculine stereotype of sportscar-buying, younger-women-dating, burning-down-the-bridges. Instead, it comes as a questioning of what we’re prioritizing for ourselves and an examination of how we want to feel/how we’re not feeling that we can change.

To me, this word says change while leaving room for multiple possibilities. It says tear-down-the-Bastille radicalism and steadfast growth over time. It says spinning something on its head to see it from a new perspective, and it says changing form until things look entirely new. It includes room for power, the energetic force that keeps things moving and power, the quiet dedication that wears away stubborn resistance bit by bit.

It’s change as a lightning bolt and as a slow drip of water on rock.