ABOUT · STAFF · TRUSTEES · AIMS · VALUES · DECISION-MAKING · POLICIES
Anti-Hate
We are currently revising our Anti-Hate Policy and will publish a current version soon.
Fair Work
Alchemy Film & Arts follows the Fair Work framework, and is committed to fair working practices related to: effective voice, opportunity, security, fulfilment and respect.
This policy should be seen in conjunction with our policies on Inclusion, Environment, Privacy, Anti-Hate and Safeguarding, as well as our organisational Values and Vision.
Effective Voice
As an organisation that values dialogue, transparency, and community, we support and encourage everyone working within and with Alchemy Film & Arts to speak openly. Every worker has the right to be heard for the purposes of open and constructive dialogue.
Within Alchemy Film & Arts we have a number of structures that encourage individual and collective conversation to take place: Investment in dialogue and exchange throughout practice
- Regular and clear communication
- Weekly team meetings
- Regular project meetings
- Annual staff reviews
- Quarterly Board meetings
- Additional support meetings
- Annual away day
- Regular evaluation with staff, partners and artists
- Maintenance of safe and supportive environments
Alchemy also contributed to the creation of Creative Scotland’s Culture Collective Our Voices: Diverse Artists’ Guide, which focuses on ensuring effective voice when working with artists and workers from a range of communities.
Opportunity
Alchemy is committed to working actively towards an equitable, inclusive and cohesive society, addressing the challenges experienced by specific groups and individuals in accessing and progressing in work. Our policies and practices to better support equal opportunities include:
- An active Inclusivity Policy
- Maintaining a diversity-led Board and staff team
- Annual review meetings with staff to discuss goals
- Relevant training provided around: first aid, unconscious bias, EDI
- Maintaining budgets for access-related costs
- Access plans for each project
- Flexible/hybrid working when required
- Recruitment processes that invite alternative formats of application
Fulfilment
Alchemy aims to ensure employees are fulfilled and engaged in their work, with an understanding that this impacts health and wellbeing, both organisationally and individually. We are committed to using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community – and we work to ensure all staff and stakeholders find agency within this. We do this through:
- Delivering projects that are meaningful to all involved
- Producing projects that are practically deliverable within staff and resource capacity
- Platforming a breadth of diverse and high quality artists’ work
- Maintaining training and skills development opportunities for all staff
- Providing transparent career paths and professional development plans
- Recognising and challenging the cultures of overwork and burnout within the creative sector
- Ensuring mental health and wellbeing are prioritised within all working structures and support frameworks
- Reducing lengths of screen-time, including online meetings and public screenings
- Encouraging regular breaks and monitoring lengths of working days
- Encouraging outdoor or offsite meetings when appropriate
- Maintaining research and practice around supporting artists and staff with lived experience of displacement
Respect
Alchemy works to ensure everyone we work with is respected, treated with dignity and feels safe. Our workplaces and sites of activity should enhance health and wellbeing, and be free from bullying and harassment. We address this through:
- Policies around Inclusivity, Safeguarding and Anti-Hate
- Maintaining values-led practice around mutual respect
- Encouraging work/life balance through measures such as: providing work phones and discouraging use of personal phones or WhatsApp for work; TOIL policy; regular breaks; regular hours; advance communication of event-specific hours
- Confidential systems of disclosure and communication related to concerns
- Maintaining reasonable turnaround times and clear deadlines that acknowledge workload and capacity
- Encouraging productive critical discussion and input at all stages of practice
Security
We understand that security of employment is essential to stability and Fair Work, resulting in improved wellbeing and more effective financial planning. We work to ensure we are addressing the culture of low pay and precarious work within our sector through:
- Paying above the Real Living Wage rate for staff
- Paying artists within industry pay rates and Scottish Artist Union rates
- Being transparent with artists and staff about funding, and not offering opportunities that funding is not secured for
- Providing clarity at all times around project-specific terms of employment
- Maintaining clarity around roles, responsibilities and paths for progression
- Offering only paid traineeships or internships
- Not offering any zero hours contracts
- All core staff offered PAYE contracts
- Freelance staff given clear briefs and fee breakdowns
- Respecting that staff and artists often have other work within freelance practices
Further Information on Fair Work can be found through Creative Scotland’s Fair Work Illustrated Guide.
Environment
From our annual report to Creative Carbon Scotland, Alchemy emitted 7.04 tonnes CO2e in 2022-23 – 89% less than average across the Creative Scotland RFO portfolio.
We are currently in the process of developing a five-year net zero route map (2023-28), and are meanwhile committed to operating in as environmentally sustainable a manner as is plausible, and aim to encourage the partners, volunteers, participants, artists and organisations we work with to do the same.
We recognise that, under capitalism, social inequality both structurally underpins and is exacerbated by the climate emergency. In approaching the climate emergency with an intersectional understanding of systemic oppression, we place environmental issues at the heart of our broader social justice work.
As both curators and producers of cultural programmes and infrastructurally complex events, Alchemy is placed to both catalyse behavioural change and instigate vital, critical conversations about the world in which people live, while leading by example in terms of how the world’s resources are deployed to generate those conversations.
To this end, as part of broader organisational practices, we annually revise this policy and our carbon mitigation and adaptation plans in line with the following areas:
- Energy
- Travel
- Hospitality
- Procurement
- Communications
- Administration
- Waste
Safeguarding
We are currently revising our Safeguarding Policy and will publish a current version soon.
Privacy
Alchemy Film & Arts collects, uses and protects any data that you provide when engaging with us, including:
- queries sent to us through this website
- purchasing tickets to our events
- completing our feedback and evaluation forms
- applying to any job opportunities
- submitting work to any call for entries, including our film festival
- subscribing to our newsletter
- participating in our creative learning programme
We collect such data to better understand how our work impacts audiences and the artists and communities we work with, to gauge how our website is used, to gather feedback on our events and activities, and to keep you informed about our projects and opportunities.
We will only use your personal data where we have a legal ground to do so, in compliance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Alchemy will never give or sell your personal details to any other organisation.
The information we ask for may include:
- Your name
- Your contact information, including emergency contact details
- Your pronouns
- Your CV and stills from or documentation of your creative work
- Screening links to your films
- Inclusivity monitoring information, including age, ethnicity, disability, gender, religion, and sexual orientation
We may share anonymised data, with no identifying details, with our funders. Such information allows us to analyse audience reach, artist and filmmaker reach, and the social impact of our work.
We use Google Analytics to learn how our website is performing and to help us to continually improve the site’s functionality. Any analytics data that is collected, processed and stored while you are on our website is anonymous, secure and kept confidential.
Our website may contain links to other websites. If you use these links to leave our site, you should understand that we do not have any control over that website. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on any external websites linked to from our own.
During your visits to our website you may be delivered cookies by third-party websites. When you visit a page with content embedded from, for example, Vimeo or Eventbrite, you may be presented with cookies from these websites. Alchemy does not control the dissemination of these cookies.
You may unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time, by emailing us at info@alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk. We will always do our best to ensure that any personal information you give us is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove information you think is inaccurate, and we will promptly correct any information found to be incorrect.
You may also request details of personal information which we hold about you by emailing us: info@alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk. You can also unsubscribe by clicking ’unsubscribe’ at the bottom of any of our newsletters.
Volunteer
We are currently revising this policy and will publish a current version soon.
Constitution, Accounts, Annual Reviews
ABOUT · STAFF · TRUSTEES · AIMS · VALUES · DECISION-MAKING · POLICIES