The Story Behind the Report
Jess and Euella presenting the report to an initial steering group alongside Stacey Olika and Sacha Mirzoeff from Channel 4 in their offices in 2023
Following the release of the updated Invisible Doors report Rising’s Co-Director Jess Bunyan goes deep on what it takes to research the reality of the cultural sector today warts and all.
partnership is hard.
Moving at the pace of someone else, or often in our case, of multiple people, demands, expectations and schedules in a larger institution, is hard. It’s also where real change can happen.
The reason a lot of larger organisations come to us is because we move quicker, can be more agile and have less layers to go through. It’s also partly – if we’re being really real here – the value for money. A day of a Rising team member's time (when we have agency to create projects, develop them and share them almost immediately) is different to how a day of time goes for a manager, leader or assistant in an institution where there are multiple moving parts and layers to go through to get anything done.
Over our almost 9 years of existence we’ve worked with countless partners navigating countless challenges, but it never gets easier when a project takes a long time to come to fruition. Our reputation is for responsiveness and so when we enter into a partnership where we’re engaging our community with an institution, we’re upfront about the timelines for change. But sometimes, this is out of our control.
The updated report
This week (July 2025) we launched the research report Invisible Doors which was commissioned by Channel 4 in 2022. They initially came to us with the suggestion to build a platform for young people entering the sector but we suggested getting the evidence for the change that would be made first. We commissioned Priyanka Raval and Siobhan McCluskey to conduct workshops with our community and wider network about their experiences of entering and re-entering the cultural sector.
The report details the bleak and unforgiving nature of the creative industries, the relentlessness of finding meaningful work opportunities and the struggle of keeping employment. The sentiment of the findings are bleak, and unfortunately for many of us, they are not new or surprising.
Putting a report out about how bad everything is, isn’t fun for anyone and so with Channel 4 we went about inviting people into the conversation about what we could do to action the recommendations of the report and start the hard work of change before releasing it into the world. After six months of hosting a steering group to implement the recommended actions we have planned and postponed a launch event – for the initial report in 2023, the steering group in 2024 and then the final updated report following the steering group in 2025 – several times to be told again and again it wasn’t the right time to shout about this work.
Steering Group Launch in October 2023
It’s important to note that the bleakness of the sector has not changed in the past 3 years, but it’s frustrating that we haven’t been able to share this work and start to build toward action publicly.
Research is important because it makes the intangible stuff tangible so we can move towards change. As global leaders disparage equality, diversity and inclusion work and funding for research into poverty can be randomly revoked, data to show the state of our sector and society is more powerful than ever.
This work is not over, and we’re excited to finally be sharing this report with an updated ending and a stellar creative commission by our community and Board member Tay Aziz. We wanted to share how this process has gone because it matters in the context of the report and because alongside this work we also conducted research into and produced another report all about Power in Partnerships.
We know what good partnership looks like, we know how to get there so our question for you is why so often does it go wrong? How can we hear each other more from our different perspectives in the sector? Aren’t we all just trying to make things better anyway?
If you’re interested in doing more of this kind of work or looking for solidarity, get in touch with the co-directors Euella and Jess at euella@rising.org.uk and jess@rising.org.uk
