As the physical distancing advice continues I want to make sure we stay in touch – so here is the first of my weekly blog posts throughout the COVID-19 situation. I thought I’d start at the beginning, and just let you know what’s happening here at New Brewery Arts.
You have probably noticed that we have closed our buildings, but what does that actually mean? Few of our staff can work without our public activities so, to be safe, we sent all staff home as soon as we could. A few staff remained to pack everything away and to ‘mothball’ the buildings. I’d like to say how great the team were, and thank you to all our suppliers who helped us with advice and reassurance. Like a number of other organisations, many staff are being furloughed, and just a small, skeleton team are left working from home. Phones and emails are all on divert, so if you want to get in touch you still can.
We have hundreds of people through our doors each week and we tried to phone each and every student to let them know that their class or course had been cancelled or postponed and, as we issued refunds, we heard so many people telling us what their time with us means to them.
We also spoke to all our studio makers, to tutors, to the makers we sell in the shop and the craftspeople who were ready to be in our next exhibition. For many of our community of craftspeople there was massive uncertainty about their income. We’ve tried to help where we can, we have made sure we paid people straight away, we’ve honoured existing contracts, we’ve talked to funders about how they can help, we’ve signposted information to the self-employed when we received it. But it’s hard enough being a maker – income is sporadic at the best of times – and now as exhibitions and craft events planned for the summer have all been cancelled, there’s little certainty for craftspeople around their next significant commission or sale. We’ll be working over the coming weeks to see what more we can do to help craftspeople get through this.
And we’ve also been working to see how else New Brewery Arts can help, and at the moment we are talking to Cotswold District Council about what help we can offer to our local community and to local food businesses to see if they can use our commercial kitchen to help them deliver food locally.
That’s our first week of this ‘new normal’ - it's all been about the people who make up our community. Next week I hope we can take a moment of stillness and creativity and we’ll see where we go from here.
Take care