Imagine having a team of brilliant, inspiring coaches - working with you to help you with the big decisions you need to make - and you’re in the right ball park. That’s what you’ll get if you join our new virtual action learning programme - that, and the chance to develop your own facilitation skills.

Action learning involves working on real problems, focusing on learning and actually implementing solutions. It can really stretch your thinking and is great for tackling the isolation that often goes with being a writer – even in normal times, never mind these uniquely challenging times. And it works brilliantly online, using Zoom to bring peers together.

We’ve teamed up with creative social enterprise the hub to deliver this programme. Through it, 8 writers in education will have the chance to come together as part of a new action learning set, to help each other develop new insights, plans and understanding that will help weather the ongoing Covid-19 storm. They’ll also receive support to set up their own follow-up action learning sets with other writers later in the year. By the end of 2020, we hope that plans will be in train to provide action learning support for a further 60+ writers.

Our initial action learning set will meet weekly on Zoom, on Wednesdays (2-5pm) between 23 September and 11 November 2020. Each session will be led by the hub’s Director, Julia Payne, who’s run sets for hundreds of artists creative freelancers up and down the country.

To get you more inside how action learning works, the hub has put together a short video and we'll be holding a Zoom Q&A on 1 September (10-11am).

The programme is fully funded by NAWE, thanks to national lottery support through Arts Council England, so costs nothing to take part.

Find out more here

The deadline to apply is 6 September 2020.