Inside Catalyst — 16 January: back at work, kicking off comms projects, looking ahead
Weekly reflections from the Catalyst team on the value of rest, starting new work and looking at impact reporting and being prompt paying people in the network.
Returning to work…
It’s always interesting re-entering work after a winter break. I’m feeling very grateful for our three week winter shutdown. This was really important for me as I was approaching burnout at the end of 2024. The three weeks off allowed me some rest, get over illness, spend time with family, and process some important stuff to do with my cancer journey following an important meeting with my consultant in early December.
: It’s so lovely to be back in such thoughtful and supportive meetings chewing over important things with wonderful people :)
Caring for people’s financial wellbeing
Megan: My focus this week has been on two urgent areas:
Finance — the work to keep on top of finance never stops, especially when you have a break. We worked hard to get a payment run completed as quickly as possible, for anyone that missed the deadline for our last payment run in mid December. It’s always important to us to pay people as promptly as possible, while recognising we’re a small team and all working part time. I’ve also been reforecasting the budget and making sure all the bookkeeping is accurate — there’s a lot of different bits of money being paid out to members of our network, from small reciprocity payments for taking part in research, through to large amounts for leading Catalyst activities — it can all get a bit confusing and complex so I have to keep a keen eye out for where things have been miscoded in our books.
Launching new comms projects
Megan: Comms is the other area. We have a number of exciting and linked projects underway, all of which are moving at quite a pace as we try to get ourselves set up as well as possible before this phase of Catalyst ends at the end of March and we move into a new phase. This includes:
- migrating our website
- updating all our website copy
- updating our visual identity
- developing a language guide, tone of voice guidelines and guidelines for how we use images
- updating our content strategy and workflows
- finalising our brand storytelling work.
Supporting colleagues to keep this work on track will be a big focus for me in the next 10 weeks.
Kate’s month ahead
Kate is an interim executive co-director, while Ellie is on sabbatical.
I’m trying to maintain the sense of spaciousness from the winter shutdown with balancing getting everything done by the end of the financial year
Prioritising! And making sure that we keep checking in with each other about capacity. Lots of communication.
I’m excited (and a bit challenged) to start thinking about this year’s impact report and how we can make sure we learn the most from it.
See you next time :)
