Hello, October!

It’s a fresh new month and I am pleased to welcome you all to this last quarter of 2024. I hope you are each well and flourishing in your various freelance disciplines. To those who may not be well, we warmly wish you a speedy recovery, love and light. You matter to us and we always appreciate you.

The past month has been a productive one as we hosted a successful webinar on Pitching to Editors by Lynne Smit. The webinar had great engagement in terms of questions and discussion points. I also picked up many tips on how to strengthen my work as a freelancer, especially in terms of business communication and emails that attract attention. Many thanks once again, Lynne, for a well-prepared and meticulously delivered session. Thanks also to the members who participated and contributed.

I’m excited to announce that this Thursday, we will have another webinar, this time by Whitemore Ngwira, on How to Set Up a Podcast. In the digital world, video is king, and the world is infatuated with podcasts and how they can provide us freelancers with an extra revenue stream. How? Join us on Thursday and find out more.

Also worth reporting on is that work on organisational restructuring is ongoing, and the proposal is being streamlined to take into account the views of all stakeholders.

As for the Rates Survey, we have received several quotes for creating an updated version – thank those who submitted one – and we are giving attention to raising funds to pay for this important project.

We also hosted a successful meet-up for our Randburg group. This meet-and-greet is our response to your requests for us to have more in-person socialisation. We hope to extend this successful pilot project to other areas shortly. We are also starting a group for photographers (we already have one for journalists). Please email admin@safrea.co.za if you would like to be included in any of these groups.

Our next newsletter is still in production and undergoing final reviews. This follows a request from our Communications Team to lead the production of the following newsletter to input a few ideas they had. Our apologies for this delay.

We thank your frank participation on the recent Google Group survey. You have told us that you are now happier with the positive interactions we have there. My email chair@safrea.co.za remains open for any concerns that we need to look into, to improve our operations. Thank you so much to those who have written to me with honest views on how we can do better.

Lastly, as we head into this last quarter, the entire Executive Committee is once again making a passionate plea for more hands to serve. We still urgently need people to volunteer on our Membership, Advocacy and Professional Development portfolios. Please get in touch with me so that we can have a chat about it in terms of expectations and what each role entails.

At our recent Exco meeting on September 29, 2024, we all agreed that inviting new members will increase productivity and output of our organisation, and we believe one of those people might well be you. We are stronger together.

With those few words, I wish you all a productive and favour-filled month.

Nathi Gule