Embracing Parenthood as a Young Leader
Navigating Transitions and Redefining Leadership
I wasn’t sure if I should write about this or make a big thing about it as it feels like something that contradicts a lot of what we stand for here at Rising Arts Agency. When I said this to people they massively disagreed so here I am trying to articulate my thoughts on why I felt like that and how I’m working on unlearning it.
As I write this I am about 9 months pregnant and last month I turned 32. In the context of being a leader at Rising, a youth-led creative agency, those things don’t feel super authentic.
I’ve always been a little bit older at Rising. I didn’t realise I wanted to work in the cultural sector until I was 25 but I very much found a home at Rising where my ‘applicable skills’ were valued and seen as a strength rather than a weakness. And I was a ‘young leader’ before that when I managed a bookshop and team at 22. I was used to being the youngest person in the room and since I’ve started at Rising that’s not been the case.
We’ve seen our community’s average age rise
Our community feels similarly. I’ve had several conversations this year with people turning 30 and reassessing what that means having been the ‘young person’ in these spaces for so long. Increasingly it’s taking until the mid-late 20s for people to realise they want a career in the creative sector and to get to the point where they’re even looking for somewhere like Rising that can support their career. The gutting of creative education is a lot of the root cause for this but so is the continued narrow representation in the sector that makes people think it’s not for them.
We’ve seen our community’s average age rise as the funders continue to talk about ‘young people’ as 16 to 25 years old.
We even lost out on a bid recently due to having too many 31-33 year olds in our leadership. And yet – on average our leadership is still much younger and of broader lived experiences than most other cultural teams. We’re still rooted in the challenges that young people face today because for all of the shared crises we’re experiencing as a society (housing, cost of living, mental health etc.) young people are always some of the hardest hit by this. They’re (we’re) also the ones who are best placed to lead us out of them and imagine a new more equitable future.
what it means to do leadership differently
At Rising we’re always thinking about what it means to do leadership differently. From me and Euella taking on the agency from our founder Kamina in 2021, to the next transition that we’re already planning to start thinking about from January 2025. The concept of transition – of beginnings, endings, change – is firmly embedded in our leadership and how we think about things. Our non-execs often joke about how early me and Euella started talking about legacy and yet we just passed our halfway marker of our leadership with the launch of the Rising Fund which is something both of us wanted to pilot as part of our time leading the agency. Parenthood in a lot of ways is just another transition.
Being young – young leaders, young creatives, young revolutionaries – is of course only one part of the Rising ethos. The systemic change we want to see is essentially about acknowledging explicitly the rich multidimensional lives that people lead outside of work but that also contributes to it. The radical notion that you don’t have to pretend you’re fine and then go to work and do a performance about childhood trauma, or be on a panel about the legacy of slavery in your city. We practice this within the team when we tell each other to take a holiday or offer to cover one of our regular newsletters this week when someone’s plate is fuller. So why would impending parenthood be any different?
Leadership and care responsibilities
Yet it often feels like leadership and caring responsibilities are mutually exclusive. This includes parents but also the young people in our community who care for family members and miss out on opportunities because as a freelancer you need to be consistent in a way you can’t always be as a carer. Or the many conversations I’ve had with women in their 40s and 50s in the sector who are stepping down from leadership, not to relax or try something new but mainly to care for aging parents.
It makes me think about how we can create space for these kinds of care in our leadership in a way that is a strength not a weakness, in a way that is shared. I’m excited to find support in other mums in the sector and have already had so much love and support from them, podcast recommendations, returning to work recommendations and everything in between. I’m excited to bring the lived experience of these new caring responsibilities into Rising’s leadership and continue wrestling with this dynamic of what young leadership means and looks like.
I’m also so excited to meet this little person who’s been growing and shifting around inside of me whilst I facilitated a steering group with Channel 4 on how we can remove barriers for people entering the creative industries, pitched for work in London, hosted an event about power in partnerships, supported storytellers to have their say on Bristol’s Harbour, wrote a cultural strategy for a town in Devon, advocated for young people at the National Trust and an absolute ton more. Pregnancy has made me think about my essential needs more than anything else but that doesn’t mean these things are less important, it just puts everything a little more in perspective.
Having a baby feels like a statement of optimism about the future, which though it’s incredibly hard to have right now, is something that working at Rising has given me in bucket loads. However, it also feels like an incoming divide between me and our community, between my claim to being a young leader and only being able to advocate on behalf of young people. It will also bring a completely new perspective to the work in a way that I won’t understand until I’m in it.
Jess will be on shared parental leave from 19 April 2024 and plans to be back fully from November 2024.
