Slought is pleased to announce the launch of the Pandemic Uncertainty Fund and make $10,000 available to our extended community for mutual aid. Current and former staff, as well as artists, activists, and those with whom we have directly worked on past projects, are invited to seek aid. We hope these funds, though modest, will be helpful to our colleagues who are vulnerable at present. If you are in need of funds, please request them here. Requests and disbursements will remain confidential and multiple requests are permitted as circumstances change. We will fulfill requests in the order they have been received until all funds have been distributed.

The massive economic uncertainty and pervasive health inequities of this moment compel us to ask: are we doing all we can to help each other? Many civic institutions were already chronically under-resourced before the pandemic, and all have had to rapidly adapt their organizational structures, finances, and programs in order to survive. Nevertheless, many organizations are far more secure than their employees and the communities they serve. Has the cultural sector fully acknowledged this pervasive precarity? How can we work together to scale mutual aid from the interpersonal realm in which it typically operates to the institutional?

In launching this microfund for our extended community of past and present collaborators, we also purposefully challenge the transactional nature of interpersonal working relationships. In a financialized society, we must resist the tendency to reduce people to their economic function, and to structure our relationships around principles of contract law and the service industry. Indeed, as a volunteer-driven organization for nearly twenty years, Slought intimately understands the value of collaboration and has long been committed to the power of mutuality and mutual aid. Though chronically under-resourced, we also recognize the necessity of just compensation, and in recent years have offered modest wages to those without full-time employment elsewhere as our resources have improved. Yet healthy working relationships require more than compensation alone; we hope this microfund embodies this expanded understanding of relationality and offers additional material support to the many individuals who have, all these years, supported us.

Recent projects at Slought such as "Beyond the Financialized Public" have investigated how the language and values of financial institutions have creeped into the arts and society at large. Indeed, the work of mutual care is often in tension with the nonprofit model itself, which encourages organizations to adopt the terms of the marketplace and engage in labor practices that contradict their own values. We hope this project contributes to a larger conversation about how practices of mutual aid and community care can be inscribed within the non-profit sector. Small non-profit organizations in particular have a unique reflexivity and experimental disposition which makes them particularly suited to rising to this challenge.