On the “Cahoots Manual”

Hey Winners, Nick from You Are Here here to explain what our upcoming Galah fundraiser is actually raising funds FOR. We’ve been working obsessively on the Cahoots Manual in Ket’s lounge room, and it’s high time we ask you to check our working! 

The Cahoots Manual 

Our job is to act as free-of-charge Creative Producers to the Canberra arts community. We help artists and arts orgs with all of the things that help them make good work. We get involved in the fun processes (to make them more fun) and the annoying processes (to make them less annoying). We help with artistic thinking, planning, relationship building, resource gathering, budgeting, problem solving and critical evaluation. 

Everything we do is a response to what artists tell us and show us that they want. What they most commonly want is:

  1. Community with other artists 
  2. Ways to develop and improve their practice 
  3. Help with stressful admin like insurance, budgets, funding apps, writing bios etc. 

In 2019 we committed to building a creative producing model that would actually meet these three main desires. That was the goal of the Cahoots residency, which ran from 2019-2022 and included 8 artists per year.

We made a lot of mistakes (which will be detailed as juicy case studies in the Cahoots Manual) but by the end of four years we had tested and refined a process that was doing three things successfully and repeatedly: 

  • Creating safe, fun and useful community between a gang of artists and producers from all kinds of artform, age bracket and Canberran archetype.
  • Getting everyone up to the same skill level for giving/receiving/using critical feedback, celebrating everyone’s subjectivity and individual perspective.
  • Creating measurable development processes for each artist based on what is genuinely useful for them to be working on in that moment.

Which was a great start, we feel! But also – quite limited as a model, as it can only serve 8 artists per year. So even if we had secured the funding to keep running the residency (we’ll keep working on that), we would have still been looking at how to share our process with as many creatives as possible.

That’s what the Cahoots Manual will be: a written guide for groups of people who want to DIY the Cahoots residency, and form a creative community of artists, producers and organisers. It will give step by step instructions for:

  • Selecting the right humans for your creative community
  • Clarifying why you want to do creative or artsy stuff in the first place, and then keeping those values centered in everything you do
  • Coming together as a group and get to know each other’s artistic self-hoods and obsessions, to allow for safety of sharing and reciprocal care
  • Becoming critical feedback sources for each other in a thoughtful, caring, but still juicy way
  • Defining your own versions of artistic success and excellence and work towards them
  • Sharing the jobs and roles between artists, producers and organisers in a way that challenges the typical burnout and overwork experiences 
  • Judging the moment you are in- what has already gone well, what has failed and can be learned from, what is easy, what is hard, who you need to meet and what are the good options for what to do
  • Making better artworks by testing, iterating, breaking things up into steps, opening yourself to feedback from the right people, collaborating, being ambitious and EXPERIMENTING 
  • Creating measurable processes for developing your art, that embrace the artsy-fartsiest thought-spaces while still making sure something has moved forward and happened.  
  • Strengthening and developing a creative community across years and years
  • Creating an arts practice that builds exponentially upon itself 
  • And yes, doing all the annoying bits like insurance budgets grant apps risk assessment paperwork all of that stuff

We’ve already started creating the Cahoots Manual. It will be a document that artists can use to access our producing knowledge, even if we can’t work in person with them. That’s the main thing your financial contributions to our Galah will pay for.

Secondarily, your support will help us continue our day job, of working in person with as many Canberran creatives as hit us up for free help. Across 2025 we will offer a suite of 1-on-1 creative producer sessions that creatives can book into, as well as co-working sessions, and a few half-day hang-out/networking events. We need more Canberran creatives to know that we will help them for free with their grant apps or big scary artwork idea or whatever they want, so please tell everyone you know!

But the Cahoots Manual is the big one. We are anxious to be extra-transparent around our fundraising activities, so let me know- have I explained it clearly? Does sound good, do you want it? Am I on the money about what artists want? What are you wearing to the Galah?