Developing a resilience framework and toolkit for UK creative micro-businesses as a route to recovery from the Covid 19 pandemic.

The proposed work will design as well as assess the efficacy of a resilience framework and toolkit for creative micro-businesses (CMBs) across the UK as a way to aid in the creative sector's recovery from the Covid 19 crisis. Between May and December 2020, a survey of 322 creative and cultural organisations across the South West of England was conducted, led by Dr. Tarek Virani, and funded by the AHRC's Bristol and Bath Creative R + D Clusters programme. It showed that between 18% and 22% of organisations were either not affected by, or became more productive than prior to, the pandemic. Further and ongoing analysis shows a number of shared characteristics across these respondents. They are: diverse, smaller in size, have an online business model, able to pivot quickly, in collaboration with other sectors, engaging with support and anchor organisations, from a range of sub-sectors ( digital, hybrid and non digital), clustered in certain locations, and able to access some type of government support. Based on these findings, the proposed work seeks to: (1) develop a framework of resilience based on testing the accuracy of the above findings across the UK. This will be achieved by: First, distributing a survey to 1040 creative micro-businesses (CMBs) in nine city regions across the UK; second, analysing the survey results and then refining them further through a virtual focus group designed for a cohort of 90 CMBs from across the UK. The proposed work will then (2) design and test a resilience toolkit for CMBs based on the findings of the framework analysis. The toolkit will be presented, refined through a virtual focus group with the same CMB cohort, tested again (using a Randomised Controlled Trial) and then presented at a final resilience workshop. These outputs will aid the recovery and rebuilding of the creative sector across the UK.