Budget issues

How to manage an ADA budget...

Obviously the price of ADA hasn't been doing well since we were first funded and paid in November - the price then was around £1.68, and it's now hovering around 70p. Less than half.

As a new funded proposer, I was a bit green - I left the money in ADA. I wasn't exactly thinking it would go up again (although I thought it might); I just felt like it would be almost "disloyal" to Cardano to take the funding straight out to fiat. Also, I felt a bit unnerved by doing it, especially as I had no information on the tax implications.

All of that is still an issue, but I just think I am less scared of it now - but it makes me think proposers do need more advice and support on how to manage funding.

Recalibrating...

All that aside - the facts are that Homeless Hub funding is now worth less than the project budget.

And although I should probably have managed it differently - I didn't, and I can't go back and change that.

So this means the project will have to tighten its belt.

My priority is the commitment I made to participants of paying them £20 per session in recognition of their contributions and input. If my own fee has to drop in order to protect that, OK; or if I have to fit the documentation in where I can, rather than allocating paid time for it, then OK.

The proposal originally planned to work with 10 participants and 3 organisations. But given that Salford Emmaus is part of a much bigger organisation of Emmaus as a whole, so in a way, we're reaching wider than just one organisation; and also taking into account the wariness around crypto that I've faced from the Mustard Tree and from some other organisations I spoke to initially; it feels best to focus on the group of 10 to 12 participants that we have at Emmaus, and not try at this stage to pull in any other organisations.

But I think the 10 sessions I originally planned for won't be enough to cover everything we want to cover, and produce a good final output. This group are quite deep thinkers, so we're not just whipping through things superficially; but I think I also underestimated how new blockchain technology is to people, and how we need time to unpick it a bit. So I want to increase the project to 15 sessions.

• We had some money in the budget for paying extra to participants to also function as translators; but as it turns out, everyone taking part at Emmaus has English as a first language, so it's not needed; it can be reallocated towards increasing the number of sessions.

• I also think we can adjust how much we spend on the project's final output, and reallocate some of that budget to the participants' stipend. We have mentioned arte povera in sessions, and have talked about how the idea of making art with whatever materials you have to hand - for example, artists like James Castle - is something that homeless and poor artists often do anyway. And a couple of the group have already pointed out that this fits Salford Emmaus - they run a second-hand furniture shop, so always have a lot of interesting scrap materials at their warehouse. It occurs to me that this whole approach of making with whatever you have to hand (which is how I worked when homeless, and how every homeless artists I've ever met has worked too) is pretty much in line with asset-based approaches...

So I will suggest to the group that we take that as a creative decision, and aim to use scrap materials in whatever we produce. We're not sure at this stage what the project's final output will be - but the budget situation would have made it impossible to do a big, physical public event anyway, whatever reallocating we did. So we are looking now at ways to stimulate public discussion in other ways than a big event.

I think these budget tweaks will enable us to have 15 sessions at Emmaus, and also produce an interesting final event or product.