It has been just over a year since we launched the mad yellow book! Thank you for an incredible year. We have loved meeting lots of you at our events, meeting some of you as we hand delivered some of the orders and posting out nearly 900 books! You made this project happen and now we are ready to share some news about what happens next!

We are getting in touch to let you know how your pledges were spent, what we’ve been up to in recent months and what we are planning to do next with the Collective! We want you to stay involved and help us create even more opportunities for working class creatives.

When we started this journey we promised transparency with how your donations and pledges were spent. Today we can tell you exactly what we raised and where it went, and we can also tell you what we are doing to keep up the transparency as we develop the Working Class Collective!

Through the Kickstarter pledges we raised £12,891.

After the fees taken by Kickstarter and the credit card companies, we actually raised £11,685.39.

It cost more than we raised to design, print and deliver the 1000 books. Inflation and the UK war meant our costs kept going up, but the volunteer efforts of those involved in the collective and the risks we took with our own money meant we delivered a beautiful book beyond our expectations. The extra money we needed was raised through sales of the book, using our own money to help us get there (we have been repaid but not made any profits ourselves).

In total, over the last year we have spent £19,287.16 and raised £20,977.58 (including the Kickstarter money).

That means we start the next project with £1,690.42 in the account. More on that below.

Some of the income from the books was used to register The Working Class Collective as a Community Interest Company, meaning we can raise funds, develop projects, support working class creatives and reinvest any funds raised into furthering our mission to ensure working class stories are heard and seen in all sorts of art forms!

Now we’ve established our social enterprise - we are going one step further to commit to transparency. We recently signed up to The Social Change Nest. The Nest is part of the Open Collective network which allows groups like ours to manage funds, raise funds, and be transparent in how we do it and how we spend it! If you visit our page you can see every penny in and out - what it was spent on and why.

You can now back the Working Class Collective through our Open Collective page here. We are now applying for grant funding and supporters to help fund our next project, with all the funds coming into our Nest account.

We have one last event for the mad yellow book - as promised, we are coming to Greater Manchester, the region who got behind the Kickstarter more than anywhere else in the world!

Come and meet us and celebrate the book on the 11th May 2023, 6.30pm - 8.30pm at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. We’ll have a Q&A about the book with the creators, artists and Directors of the Working Class Collective and we’ll launch the next exciting project!

The next project is called: Working Class Fantastic Spaces! and we hope you will support the Working Class Collective and be part of what we do next - look out for our social media posts soon and how you can be involved in 'Working Class fantastic Spaces'   

Come to the event and follow us on social media to find out more on the 11th May!

Instagram & Twitter: @workingclasscol

Website: www.workingclasscollective.co.uk

Email: [email protected]