My Material Conditions

Telling a money story before I listen to the stories of other people.

Over the next year, as part of my Clore Fellowship, I’ll be thinking about the role of art in the organisation and transfer of wealth.

By this I don’t necessarily mean I’ll be exploring how we better fund the arts, though some of that thinking is happening in my company BAP!

We are experiencing a humongous wealth transfer, and I am interested in how art, artists and creativity might have a role in organising that.

As I begin this thinking, and inspired by Michael Gast’s substack Organizing The Rich, which was in turn inspired by other thinkers and organisers, I want to reintroduce my money story. (Spoiler alert: I am not secretly wealthy)

This is an idea that has emerged out of a growing body of people that would probably call themselves wealth organisers instead of fundraisers. Michael has done a post about where this thinking has come from which you can find here. We, especially in Britain, are terrible at talking about money. In order to organise transfers of resources, we need to get better at understanding our relationship to money. In order for me to properly interrogate the relationship between art and money, I think I first need to interrogate my relationship to money.

So, here we go, my money story:

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Despite insisting that working-class people from Yorkshire are not as they appear in popular media, the history of my family quite annoyingly looks like the film Kes. For generations the majority of the men in my family have been miners, we predictably did not have a lot of money, but we did have access to resource in other ways through the wider union movement.

The first change in my story was the slow decline of the mining industry in the UK. As pits closed my family largely pivoted to getting a trade of some kind. My Dad became an electrician, which meant when I was born we didn’t have a lot of money, but I did have two parents at home who were both working, so I never had a sense of us struggling for basics like food. The trade off here for the men working, is that the women of my family would do short-term lower paid jobs that were flexible, and instead do the labour of organising the community and family.

I was born in the early 90s and we were probably the last generation of kids that could confidently say you can grow up working-class, with some sense of stability. My parents were able to buy a small house, albeit on the edge of a declining ex-mining town which is basically in the middle of nowhere. Their income wasn’t high, but, neither was the cost of living compared to now.

In the first 12 years of my life I didn’t necessarily go without, but there were delays. If I wanted something for my birthday that was too expensive, I would normally get it 2 years later when it was cheaper. This waiting for money became really normalised in my life. Set against the backdrop of having epileptic seizures that would sometimes stop my breathing, it felt very insignificant to have to wait for a PlayStation in the grand scheme of things.

I was working-class but I was only in an area where there weren’t any people with wealth, so I didn’t really have any contextual reference points for having less than other people. It meant that people with big houses and lots of money were a sort of fiction, they existed on TV and films.

As I got older this changed slightly, my parents separated when I was 14 and I lived across different places for a while. Eventually my mum managed to get us a very small flat with just the two of us. Understanding that my parents had to negotiate who would get the house, as well as who would get me, gave me a sense of resentment towards money in a way. How were we discussing this material thing when our family was being redesigned quite quickly?

By the time I turned 18 and went to Uni I thought 3 things:

• Waiting for material things was fine and not that bad.

• Rich people were not part of my reality.

• I didn’t want to be tied to money in a way that it would dominate my emotional life.

Going to university changed some of this. I had friends that suddenly had very different upbringings to me. There weren’t just middle-class people, I seem to remember one person at Uni had a family who owned a castle somewhere. Rich people were part of my life, and what I realised is that wealth has not brought them happiness or emotional stability in any way.

I developed no real aspiration to make lots of money, in fact I actively didn’t want to have my life dominated by that. I almost went to Uni to study computer science because I was good at maths, but I didn’t want that enough and instead pivoted to English Lit, and spent most of my time writing or making plays. I would entertain a lot of risk, because I knew losing money and not having much was survivable. Whereas a lot of working-class kids are told to pursue the thing that would get them stable employment, my reluctance to have much money allowed me to make decisions a little bit like my more middle-class peers. I eventually went to drama school to do a Masters degree in writing musicals even though the employability if that is basically 0 and I ended up with some debt from that.

As I got I to my career, I was writing plays, doing various jobs, some of which was producing. I quickly realised the part I was good at was raising the money, because money wasn’t a real thing for me, I saw fundraising as an act of storytelling. If I could say the right things to the right people, then the flow of resources would change direction slightly and suddenly the art that got made would be able to change too. I found it much more exciting than scheduling rehearsals or planning what to do when an actor was sick - and I can think the Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy Fellowship for giving me the skills to pursue this.

Getting into fundraising was when I started working with really wealthy people. I recognised very quicky that their money story was much more fraught than mine. Money meant something to them, they had an emotional relationship to making a donation, a lot of them associated a sense of safety with their money. Luckily I was good at navigating other people’s feelings about money during negotiations, as I had done with my parents. I still get a kick of adrenaline rush out of donor meetings, because I recognise they get something out of this donation that we can’t put on an impact report.

This work means my material conditions have changed significantly now. I have a freelance practice but run my work through a ltd company, I take a salary of £45k out of that company which feels huge for me and I have no real desire to chase more. This is largely because I am engaged to someone who has a proximity to resource and income means we were able to buy a house in London with a mortgage last year. I don’t think it’s fair to share his money story so I won’t, but I think I can say I still have a chip (tree?) on my shoulder about being paid for. I never want to feel in debt, like I owe money in some way, because that might interfere with my emotional reality. It is still a scenario I will avoid at all costs.

Owning a house was a strange step for me, neither of my parents live in houses they own (though my Dad does co-own a caravan I think). To be part of a class of asset-owning people was not my aspiration, but I am here now and the stability of that gives me brain space I have never had access to. People would say I still have working-class values but my current socio-economic reality is not that. I could never have imagined what this kind of financial stability would do for my creativity and mental wellbeing.

It also has taught me something of the guilt I often sense in wealthy people. Though my socio-economic conditions have a sense of middle-class stability, I am acutely aware that if the price of our house rises, it often detrimentally affects other people who might be renting (me for the last 15 years). I am unsure what to do about that yet, other than redistribute where possible.

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Here’s where I sit with money now.

It is a story. It is a really successful story we all believe in, and choose to continue believing in for some reason despite the harm it causes. Telling a money story has helped me really identify how my story relates to the wider story of money. Putting out the tension between my public organising around class and my recently change in socio-economic conditions, means I am telling a more true story. It is more freeing, and I feel more like I can be present in my work around fundraising.

Though on a personal level, I do still feel tense posting this because we are so squeamish about money and the hierarchy that creates.

I wonder what people will think of this, and I’d like to have those conversations over the next year. What stories are we telling about money? How does money affect the stories we tell? How do we grapple with that a bit better? Is this level of honesty useful in grappling with that?