Musicians, coders, artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and more…the C+C family continues to grow, and 2020 is no exception. 

Since the year is already moving quickly, we wanted to share some news in a few areas… 

1. Updates To C+C Community Guidelines – a significant part of our work as a member driven community involves feedback, and we recently sat down and worked through a few changes to our guidelines. 

Effective immediately, we no longer allow individual posts or any content that promotes or requests spec work or design contests. This is an addition to our existing policy around unpaid internships, jobs, and gigs, and reflects both feedback from our community as well as industry standards in design, illustration, music, and more. 

These types of contests or requests often pit students or emerging creatives against mid to senior level working creatives seeking to grow their craft and make a living. You can learn more about how and why these types of requests create conflict and devalue the work of all creatives via the links below: 

NoSpec.com 

AIGA position on spec work

Additionally, we no longer allow individual posts that are promotional or advertorial in nature in the Facebook group. If you are new to the group, please feel free to introduce yourself and include a link to your work! 

Outside of that, we ask that you use the “weekly events” thread and/or our regular “share your social media, showcase your work” threads which are posted 2-3 times per month by group moderators. And, you can also chime in on recommendations posts (see below) with information on your products/services etc. 

Posts that seek recommendations for creative services continue to be welcome, though we might occasionally ask you to consolidate and/or reference existing conversations (for ex. if someone posted “who are the best illustrators in New Mexico?” yesterday we might decline a similar post the very next day and ask you to chime in on the existing thread).

Although we have always limited promotional content at the in-person meetup group and Facebook group, we do not make this decision lightly. 

We’ve had tough conversations about this over the last year, and we believe it is important to stay focused on our mission. From the start, Coffee + Creatives was aimed at providing feedback and resources by creatives, for creatives, to help you grow your projects/practice/business. 

As the community scales in size it simply isn’t realistic for us to sort through promotional content (and we certainly don’t want to pick favorites and/or accidentally share some things and not others). 

We believe the regular showcase threads provide more than enough opportunity for creatives to connect, but as always we are open to feedback and welcome questions/comments/concerns now or later at coffeeandcreatives@gmail.com 

2. Land Acknowledgement – as part of our 2nd annual Unconference from this past October, our team lead Madalena Salazar worked to create a land acknowledgement, and today we’re expanding that to cover all of our activities.  

We’ve added this acknowledgment to our website and community guidelines to reflect our appreciation and understanding that our activities take place on the homelands of the Tiwa people. 

Here is the acknowledgement in full: 

Coffee + Creatives is a group driven by the needs of our diverse members. Based in Albuquerque, we acknowledge that our events happen on the traditional, ancestral, and occupied homelands of the Tiwa people. This land was a site of trade, gathering, and healing for numerous Pueblos and Nations, including but not limited to Diné, Apache, and Comanche. 

With this truth spoken, we hope to build mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. We recognize Native and Indigenous peoples are an integral part of our community, resilient in responding to and healing from a legacy of violence, displacement, and migration. We are grateful and offer our thanks to Native American and Indigenous members of Coffee + Creatives that lead, inform, collaborate and create together. 

3. Strategic Planning – we’ve talked a little bit about this via the online group and in-person meetup, but for folks who haven’t heard, we are currently in the process of putting more structure around our work with help from Peri Pakroo and Annie Sanchez. 

While we are still working out some of the details, this will likely include incorporating as a 501(c)3 and creating a clear operations structure to ensure we have capacity for all of our work today as well as future projects. 

As Peri has so elegantly noted, with the help of our community we’re already doing the work and it’s time to get a framework in place as we continue to grow! 

One thing we do want to openly share is that we envision Coffee + Creatives as a cooperative model, consistent with what you see today and informed by the lived experience of creatives. 

This may look a bit different than some companies/organizations you are used to. For example, one thing we’ve discussed already is creating a partnership agreement with clear criteria for accountability. 

What happens when a partner we are working with engages in racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic etc. speech or actions? 

We want to be able to answer that question before we engage in partnerships, and willing to hold our partners and funders/customers accountable as well as speak publicly about why and how we make those choices

This is just a slice of the conversation we are having, and we look forward to sharing more as we better resource our work this year. Our plan is also to open source as much of our conversation, guidelines, and frameworks as possible, so that creatives and creative businesses and organizations of all kinds can borrow, edit, and remix them as appropriate. 

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Last but certainly not least a HUGE THANK YOU for being part of this community, and for contributing to our mission of providing feedback, resources, and opportunities for creatives of all kinds. 

We look forward to continuing to put our weight behind an amazing community of creatives across New Mexico!

Yours in the spirit of creativity and partnership,

Ruth, Jaycee, Ayanna, Madalena, Joe, Zach, and Andy