Running a grassroots arts collective is basically one long game of dress-up. Except instead of fun costumes, it’s metaphorical hats - and we seem to collect new ones every week.
We started Flos because we wanted to make space for women, trans and gender-diverse artists who don’t often get the spotlight. What we didn’t realise at the beginning is that we’d also accidentally sign up to about 25 different job descriptions.
Here’s a sample of the
hat collection so far:
Producer Hat - writing timetables, booking artists, remembering to publish the tickets so people can actually buy them!
Fundraiser Hat - submitting 15-page applications for grants, pouring our souls into them and then waiting six months for a no (sometimes they only make us wait three!)
Graphic Designer Hat - discovering Canva is our new best friend, but also our worst enemy at 2am.
Tech Support Hat - untangling a mountain of cables and pretending we know why the projector won’t connect (we don't).
Social Media Hat - frantically uploading Instagram stories in between soundcheck and running to Lidl for riders.
Finance Hat - aka “Spreadsheet Fear,” where every cell somehow adds up to a different number.
Therapist Hat - supporting each other (and sometimes our artists) through burnout spirals, imposter syndrome and post-event crashes.
Cleaner Hat - because yes, we will be the last people in the building, sweeping the floor at 1am while everyone else is at the afters.
DIY Hat - climbing ladders, rigging lights, blu-tacking things to walls, and learning the fine art of “making it work” with no budget.
And that’s just the event side. Add in being friends, flatmates, partners, employees at our actual day jobs, and sometimes even trying to be artists ourselves, and… yeah. There are a lot of hats.
The reality behind the joke
It’s easy to laugh about it (and honestly, if we didn’t, we’d cry), but there’s also something bigger here. Grassroots organisers don’t just “make events happen.” We’re carrying the labour of entire institutions - programming, producing, comms, finance, HR, marketing, cleaning - without the resources those institutions have.
And we’re doing it because we care. Because we know what it feels like to be excluded from the mainstream. Because we want to build the kind of spaces we wish had existed for us when we started out.
Why we keep the hats on
It’s not sustainable forever - we know that. Burnout is real, and we’re learning how to pace ourselves. But there’s also a joy in the chaos. In being scrappy. In the backstage laughter, the shared snacks, the relief when a plan (finally) comes together.
And honestly, sometimes the best part of wearing all the hats is realising we don’t wear them alone. We swap them around, share the load and hold each other up when it gets too much.
A little solidarity
So if you see us at SPLINTR Festival running around looking a bit frazzled, just know we’ve probably changed hats five times that day already. And if you’re a grassroots organiser too: solidarity. We see you and your ever-growing hat collection.
Being a grassroots organiser isn’t about having the perfect hat. It’s about juggling them all with care, humour and a stubborn belief that what we’re building matters.
And maybe - one day - we’ll even get paid enough to buy a real one. 😉
