COMMUNITY ALERT
In Chapter 6, I mentioned how, at the company where we were misclassified as independent workers, my coworkers created a mock union called The Transient Workers Union, with the slogan “The Union Makes Us . . . Not So Weak.”
It was truer than they knew for freelancers. While unions grew up around certain trades, until Freelancers Union came along, no organization spoke for all freelancers as a group. Getting the government to adopt freelance-friendly policies is a numbers game that can be won only if freelancers come together across professions as a diverse yet unified community and become a voting force to be reckoned with.
There’s a bonus when they do: They find one another!
Freelancers Union is part of a growing wave of grass-roots solidarity among freelancers to share workspace, ideas, skills, strategy, and energy. In this chapter, we’ll look at how community helps freelancers succeed as individuals and as a group—and how freelancers can start creating this community right where they are. Indie workers are amazing people. Get them together and there’s no limit to what they can do.
The image of freelancer-in-café-with-laptop is a cliché for a reason. Most of us do better when we hang with others at least some of the time. After all, our ancient ancestors shared brains and brawn to outwit predators, thrive in tough environments, and live to procreate another day. Community and productivity go hand in hand in humans.
But despite many examples of profitable cooperative communities (trade guilds, work and farm cooperatives, credit associations, and communities in developing countries and in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna), until recently experts have mainly focused on how hierarchies and markets drive profits.
Lately, though, the link between profit and community has gotten a closer look—I think because the 2008 Great Recession was an excruciating lesson in how markets and hierarchies gone wild can land us in a steaming pile of trouble.
The recession was a tipping point for other reasons, too: The freelance population explosion due to layoffs, the strain on social safety nets such as unemployment and Social Security due to long-term joblessness, and Americans’ crisis of confidence in the ability of large institutions to serve their economic and political interests all collided with the rising viral power of the Internet.
Result: People are creating their own communities, from local to global, to help one another in the times we live in now. We’re returning to a pre-industrial model of human-scaled, self-caring communities that were the norm in the United States for generations—but with a new awareness that our solutions must be cost-effective in the short term and sustainable in the long term, and with technology accelerating the pace, breadth, and depth of our contact. At Freelancers Union, we call it New Mutualism.
New Mutualism is everywhere.
Local love. There’s been a resurgence of food co-ops, farmers’ markets, and the demand for local products where our dollars fuel the economy where we live.
Artisanal production. We want to know the people behind the products we buy.
Trading, lending, and giving communities. Our hunger for the handmade and the personal has been scaled up into giant Internet communities of people exchanging goods and services on Craigslist, eBay, and Etsy. Credit associations have surged in popularity as a more local, personal way to do banking and get loans. There’s even a trend toward peer-to-peer lending through sources such as Lending Club, bypassing the bank as economic gatekeeper. And with grants for local projects hard to come by, locals are stepping up. I recently learned about “soup groups” springing up in major cities to fund local projects. People donate a small amount to gather and enjoy a tasty soup meal, listen to short pitches for community project funding, and vote at the end to decide who will receive the collected donations. At this writing, microgrants from the Brooklyn-based group exceed $17,000.
Online review sites and customer forums. These spaces afford public oversight of companies and products.
Democratizing of resources. Technology makes open-source software available to the smallest start-up, as well as crowd-sourced ideas and funds for business innovation.
Mutualist organizations. Freelancers Insurance Company (FIC), is one example. wholly owned by a membership association and obligated to respond to members’ needs.
A new, super-connected, local-global age has arrived. And freelancers are poised to lead and gain from the change.
Freelancers are the perfect group to both demonstrate and benefit from this rediscovered connection between community and profit. We’ve been talking in previous chapters about the Love Bank—freelancers helping, informing, teaching, networking, strategizing, and advocating for and with one another. The Love Bank is New Mutualism in action; it’s the antidote to freelance isolation and the path to sustainable freelance success.
While traditional employees can bond just by walking down the hall or prairie-dogging over the cube partitions, freelancers have to consciously connect. And it starts with you. It’s nice when others contact you and start the ball rolling, and that certainly happens. But the reality is that everyone’s busy—and sometimes people (freelancers included) are a little leery of trusting one another. A community can become giving only when the individuals in it give.
When you do, everyone benefits. How else can freelancers hold the line against downward mobility through lower and lower pay? How else will you all know, for example, if a company misclassifies freelancers or strong-arms freelancers into accepting substandard contract terms? How else will companies stop exploiting freelancers unless freelancers out them and insist as a group on being treated with respect? I believe freelancers must connect. If they don’t, they’ll be less successful and their collective voice won’t be heard in the workforce debates going on today.
Because the Love Bank emphasizes giving over getting, it turns the market model on its head. In a market-driven world, community is the end result of the members getting their material needs met (i.e., no need to compete for resources). The motto might be: “Prosperity breeds community.”
In New Mutualism, community around shared interests fosters collaboration, which advances success. New Mutualism’s motto might be: “Community breeds prosperity.”
New Mutualism isn’t about group hugs or grand gestures. It’s boots-on-the-ground stuff, and unless you have the social conscience of a sea slug, you’re probably already doing it—if, for example, you’ve helped a fellow indie in any of these ways:
• Referred someone for a gig
• Warned about a deadbeat client
• Helped negotiate a contract
• Talked through a professional problem
• Brainstormed ideas
• Called a new freelancer to ask how it’s going
• Posted a testimonial or linked to others’ websites or other online content
• Explained how you did something
I’m sure you’ve done all these and more. I’ll bet you know exactly who’s done them for you, too: “When I lost my job, a number of people called offering to console me over coffee or lunch. But one person, Rob, whom I’d met just two weeks earlier, called with a very different offer: He said he might have a project for me and wanted to know if the payment he was offering was acceptable (it was more than I would have charged!). I started approaching others and got other projects. That call was the best thing that could have happened to me. I wouldn’t have considered freelancing if it hadn’t been for Rob’s offer and his confidence in me.”
A single act of giving—in this case, someone trusting a new freelancer with a good gig—can change someone’s life. We all know this is true; I’m just suggesting we all be a bit more conscious about it.
Giving makes the giver succeed, too. Reciprocity’s part of it—people we give to often return the favor. But in today’s local-global world, eventually your giving reverberates and is sensed on a larger scale. You get that to-die-for marketing result: positive branding. When your giving touches hearts and minds, you become truly golden, the kind of person everyone wants to work with, recommend, and befriend forever.
Mutualist relationships can have different levels of formality and structure. The least structured might be just building a great network. Medium structured might be cultivating subcontracting relationships or teams. The most structured could be a co-op or partnership with a legal structure.
What’s your experience of Love Banking and New Mutualism?
Has it been all too rare:
“Honestly, I find the community of freelance writers a bit difficult. Understandably, everyone’s trying to survive out there. But in the twenty-five years I’ve been engaging freelance writers, only one ever returned the favor.”
Too networky:
“I’d love a casual, social way to meet other freelancers, not necessarily focused on talking about work or ‘networking.’ ”
Too one-sided:
“I find I’m giving more help than I’m getting. I don’t want to take advantage of people or deny advice to those I can help, but I do need to take a closer look at how and where my networking is helping or hindering my income.”
Or a good place to be:
“I’m always afraid about sharing too much information with other freelancers about what I’m doing for who, and for how much, and I’m always a little nervous about others sharing too much about all that with me. Usually, though, it turns out to have been a good idea.”
“I like that other freelancers—particularly those with young children—really get the crazy, irregular pace of working in this way.”
When freelancers help one another navigate market changes big and small, every freelancer finds more stability, and the group becomes more resilient and self-sustaining, too.
Imagine your ideal freelance community. What would it be like? What kinds of people would be in it? What would help you most (work leads? industry news? business advice? contacts for subcontracting or team-building? help at home? good listeners? all of the above?)
What can you do to build the kind of community you’re looking for? I find that when I have a need, the best thing I can do is to give. Big needs? Give big. It’s what people least expect—and most value and remember.
Start by creating your community wish list.
• I’d like to connect with people who . . .
• I’d like to be in a community that . . .
• Some things I can do to find or build the kind of community I’m looking for . . .
Here are two very different sample lists—one from a new freelancer; one from someone who’s been freelancing for a while.
I’d like to connect with people who:
1 Are starting out or have been freelancing for a few years.
2 Have some skills I don’t have.
3 Aren’t super-competitive.
4 Like to work but also like to play.
5 Have the types of clients I’d like to have.
I’d like to be in a community that:
1 Shares work leads.
2 Talks about how to deal with clients.
3 Shares negotiating strategies.
4 Brings in new people to network with.
5 Stays in touch/gets together regularly.
Some things I can do to find or build the kind of community I’m looking for:
1 Get active in my alumnae group to meet new or recent grads in my field.
2 Join a professional association and get to know the local members.
3 Join Freelancers Union and go to the member meet-ups.
4 Start a Friday Night Freelance group to meet at my place and talk about about the week.
5 Join some professional discussion groups online.
I’d like to connect with people who:
1 Have been doing this as long as I have, in my field and related fields.
2 Want to kick their business to a new level.
3 Work hard but make time for family.
4 Are interested in teaming up for new ventures.
5 Can be trusted with confidential info about my business.
I’d like to be in a community that:
1 Shares work leads.
2 Discusses industry trends.
3 Collaborates well.
4 Likes to talk about new business ideas, especially for marketing.
5 Is hand picked and not too big.
Some things I can do to find or build the kind of community I’m looking for:
1 Be the person I want to attract to this group: Step up in my professional organization(s) to head committees, organize events, and be visible.
2 Go to seminars and conventions to meet people in related fields.
3 Sign up for Freelancers Union workshops on marketing, legal issues, and finance to network and learn about growing my business.
4 Start a small monthly coaching group of freelancers looking to start new ventures.
5 Mentor some younger freelancers I could eventually subcontract work to, freeing up time for Level 4 projects.
Ready to build your ideal community? You already have communities to draw from. There’s your Brain Trust, with whom you can be totally frank about what’s happening in your freelance life. But don’t stop there. Pull from other groups: family, friends, alums, former coworkers, parents at your kids’ school, volunteer groups, your spiritual group, even your workout mates: “Last night I started talking with a guy before our cardio class. We went from workouts to work. Turns out he does exactly what I do! It just proves the right person could be right next to you—but you have to connect.”
Think of online discussion groups, too, where you can connect with freelancers worldwide to get and give info and support: “Someone posted a question asking if anyone had ever had to fire a client. There were tons of interesting, informative responses. I’ve had members send me private messages saying they liked my comments and asking about my work.”
No one freelances alone. You have lots more connections than you realize.
In Chapter 8 we talked about a Love Bank ground rule: Think give, not get. Go there if you’d like a refresher; then read on for more ways to give to fellow freelancers:
Teach. Teaching’s a great way to prospect in your community, but freelancers can learn from you, too. Yoga instructor? Give some yoga love to your computer-contorted, smartphone-spasmed cohorts. Accountant? Offer a workshop on tax deductions for freelancers, tax-record keeping, or using tax-prep software. Lawyer? Talk to creatives about intellectual property protection. Running a formal freelance group or hosting a more ad-hoc Jelly group (described below)? Invite freelancers to give talks, or pool your resources and pay someone to give a training workshop.
Do good, do well. Get behind causes and events in your neighborhood, school district, religious community, or town. It’s a great way to meet like-minded people, including freelancers.
Get smarter with barter. Bartering lets you trade skills with other freelancers even when money’s tight. While you have to track the value of the exchange for tax reasons (see Chapters 11 and 15), there’s something refreshingly pure about bartering: You feel like you’re working against the tyranny of the dollar.
Start your own freelancers group. Could be your smartest give ever. Complete the My Community Wish List above to figure out your goals. Make it a virtual group if you want.
Consider joining Freelancers Union. For one thing, it’s free! And through our member platform, you can find Freelancers Union members anywhere in the United States. Maybe you’re looking to increase your freelance network in your neighborhood, town, or city. Or maybe you’re traveling or moving and want to connect with freelancers in another city. You have a ready-made way to reach out.
Get involved in the groups you’re in—though be careful about spreading yourself too thin. Joining online professional discussion groups lets you bond with freelancers far and wide. Answer questions and ask them. If there’s someone you feel a good vibe with, send a direct message to ask more about their work or just to say you really appreciate their posts. “I joined too many groups at first and got overwhelmed by the number of discussions!” Pam says. “I’m realizing that the ones I enjoy most are the ones I participate in the most. I’m planning to winnow down my groups and go for quality over quantity.”
Join or start a coworking group. Freelancers need to create the water-cooler conversations employees have all the time to get advice, trade gossip, or share a laugh. We’ve talked about coworking in other chapters as a great way to build community with other indies, plus have workspace outside your home without the expense of renting turf. There are coworking spaces to fit all kinds of professions, practical needs, budgets, and personalities.
Want an arrangement that’s free and more fluid? Join a Jelly group—indie workers hanging at someone’s house, sharing couch, tables, and Wi-Fi, or meeting in a coffee shop or other Internet-accessible space where they can talk and help one another while getting on with their work.
Interested in starting a coworking group? Try starting a Jelly group—just an informal but focused group—to see if you like running the show and to test the mix that makes it work. Starting a coworking space is more complex (getting space and figuring fees and such). You might read up on it (see the Appendix for selected coworking and Jelly group resources) and join one to see how it works from the inside.
Mentor. You’ve probably got a metric ton or two of wisdom to offer a start-up freelancer or someone new to your field. Employees have wall-to-wall help. Freelancers have to find, teach, and learn from one another.
Get involved in your alumnae association or school career planning office to help new grads get started in your industry. Start a mentoring program in the professional group you belong to: “My professional group mentors young women studying or interning in the business. We meet for coffee, answer their business or job-hunting questions; whatever’s on their minds. A lot of what they need is tips on being professional and how to deal with businesspeople.”
Involve interns and new grads while they learn the ropes.
Have there been layoffs? Find out who’s been let go and ask if they’d be interested in some subcontracting work. You never know where this kind of team-up can lead.
Advocate. Shine a light on what freelancers need as a group. We are, at Freelancers Union, and it’s working. We’re also having a lot of fun—pizza-fueled brainstorming sessions, gangs of freelancers ditching their gigs to work the phones and take field trips to the state capital, launching click-’n’-shoot email campaigns to state representatives, crowd-sourcing our Contract Creator tool for freelancers.
COMMUNITY ALERT
GET A GROUP
Can’t find a group that’s just right? Start your own!
Choose the mix of social to professional, who and how many you’ll invite, where and how often you’ll meet, and how structured it’ll be:
• Purely pro: Want to ramp up your career? Form a group that helps members meet business goals. Keep it small and build it by group invitation as you meet freelancers with solid reputations who can be trusted to respect confidentiality, who are ready to grow, and who can support others in doing the same. Write up some group guidelines, so everyone’s on the same page.
• Mostly pro: “I belong to a group of local freelancers in my industry. We meet for a monthly brown-bag lunch and keep membership to the max that’ll fit around our dining-room tables. We swap news, deals, who’s working where, and negotiating strategies. Every few months, we order in sandwiches and invite industry guests to speak—people who could send clients our way, but sometimes experts in a field we need to learn about to serve our clients better. We invited a social media consultant to speak at one meeting. We have a brochure, a website, and started a blog. Anyone can suggest a new member. We meet them, look at their creds, and vote. The main requirement is that everyone’s been in the business at least 15 years. There’s a modest new-member fee. Otherwise we hit up members when we need money to print more brochures or fund the guest lunches. I’ve gotten a number of work inquiries through the website. Although we refer prospects to one another, everyone’s completely independent. It’s a great blend of community and autonomy.”
• Semisocial/semipro: “A bunch of us who worked together on staff at one company meet for dinner every few months. We’ve met at restaurants and at people’s apartments, where we order pizza and everyone brings wine. Some of us are sole proprietors; some work in big companies, some run small businesses, so it’s a great industry cross-section. We talk about work news, world news, gossip, vacations, and personal stuff, amid much laughter and wine. It’s never about getting work, but I landed a major project thanks to a referral from someone in this group.”
Freelancers have always had to make their own safety nets—most notably in finding health insurance and saving for retirement—while employees have long enjoyed these benefits by law. And a few late-paying or deadbeat clients with a “so, sue me” attitude can decimate a freelancer’s livelihood, whereas companies that don’t make their payroll get major legal smackdown. Those are just a few examples of how freelancers are vulnerable in ways other workers aren’t.
The lack of affordable health care for freelancers was my main reason for starting Freelancers Union, because freelancers repeatedly told me this was a huge mental and financial stressor. I wanted to see whether addressing this issue could help stabilize freelancers’ lives, and whether we could do it in a way that was accountable to freelancers themselves. So we set up an insurance company wholly owned by a membership association. We’ve been able to offer group-rate health plans to freelancers at prices unavailable on the individual market without relying on government institutions, and group benefits for dental, life insurance, and disability. The state of New York now recognizes our model. We’re scaling it up for other states. And we’re building the same thing for retirement and other benefits.
Freelancers Union encourages community by making membership free. Members can connect via our job board, through our blog, at member meetings, and through affordable workshops and webinars on taxes, finances, and other freelance need-to-knows. We’ve made alliances with retailers for member discounts on everything from office supplies, billing services, and coworking spaces to gym memberships, car rentals, and ordering flowers.
Ten years in, Freelancers Union is financially self-sufficient and membership at this writing is nearing 200,000.
So I can say with some conviction that community and New Mutualism are alive, well, and proven effective at Freelancers Union. Which is a really good thing, since we’ve entered an era where the new normal is, “If it’s broken, fix it yourself.”
In the new economy, our best chance of securing what freelancers need is to provide as much of it as we can ourselves through the groups freelancers are connected to—organizations like Freelancers Union, professional associations, faith-based communities and other nonprofits, and micro communities formed by freelancers themselves—and then approach lawmakers as a collective unit and let them know that it’s really getting to be ridiculous that freelancers continue to grow in number, continue to pay all these taxes (see Update the Tax Code, below), continue to proactively develop sustainable, cooperative ways to achieve security—yet continue to get no consideration in the safety net discussions where change has to happen at the policy level.
I believe in many cases we can form cooperative solutions to solve freelancers’ problems better than government can. I’m sure freelancers could teach everyone a thing or two about belt-tightening. But there are some things that lawmakers need to do.
For starters, the government must do a better job of counting freelancers. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has eight different categories of independent workers, the Current Population Survey only tracks part-timers and the self-employed, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) usually doesn’t include freelancers in its reports at all! Could the left hand please talk to the right hand? It’s actually kind of weird, considering its fiscal interests, that Uncle Sam doesn’t have a better handle on exactly how much freelancers’ work contributes to the economy. And since BLS numbers are used for budget- and policy-making, how else will freelancers get a fair slice of the pie?
The tax code is way, way too complicated—for everyone, but it’s even more complex and costly for freelancers. Employers pay payroll taxes for their employees, but because they’re both boss and worker, freelancers have to pay taxes as both. And while employers regularly withhold tax from employees’ paychecks, freelancers have to make quarterly estimated tax payments, adding to their paperwork and accounting costs. Employees get a nice neat W-2 from their employer at tax time; freelancers get (and may have to prepare and send) fistfuls of 1099s. Keeping the required records for all this, plus tracking tax deductions, pulls them away from paying work and often requires the purchase of tax software and hiring accounting and bookkeeping help. Yes, freelancers expect and want to pay their taxes. But do you have to make it so hard? Freelancers Union successfully reformed the Unincorporated Business Tax (UBT) in New York City, so people earning under $100,000 per year no longer have to pay, and those earning up to $150,000 pay a reduced tax. However, similar taxes still exist in Philadelphia (as the Business Privilege Tax) and other cities. Do taxes really have to be so onerous and so complicated?
The Small Business Administration (SBA) does a huge amount of good work and provides amazing information. But freelancers really need a lending program scaled to their finances. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is just one model of successful microcredit. Talk about looking bad on paper! Grameen violates pretty much every standard practice of a loan program: It offers collateral-free loans to the very poor, repaid in very small installments with limits on the interest that can be charged, and the bank is 95 percent owned by the borrowers themselves. Borrowers’ loan repayment is overseen in part by their peers and exceeds 96 percent, with more than 8 million borrowers (all statistics as of October 2011). The bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
As a large and growing sector of the economy, freelancers could contribute even more if there were loan models that didn’t penalize them for the episodic income that is the norm for most freelancing. I believe freelancers have to start looking for—and we need to start building—new institutions that give freelancers funding options beyond simply going to a bank for a loan. These new institutions need to be based on the idea of self-help and mutuality. We need to pool our economic strength because if we don’t, there will be no other institution in place to help us. As the rural poor in India learned, without Grameen, no one would give them a loan. Freelancers Union wants to enable these new institutions—whether we build them, partner with others who do, or help tee up the idea so some budding social entrepreneur can make it happen.
The 2011 Freelancers Union survey found that 44 percent of independent workers had problems getting paid in 2010, which comes to billions all told. Our grass-roots Get Paid, Not Played campaign and Client Scorecard both raise awareness, outing businesses that rob freelancers of rightful pay (and the government of taxes).
But this problem also needs pressure from the top. Lawmakers need to recognize the economic contributions and rights of freelancers by supporting payment protection for them, just as they do for employees.
It’s great that the Department of Labor and the IRS are playing hardball with employers who misclassify workers. But they’re missing that tricky other type of misclassification where companies set up ersatz temp agencies and hire workers from the agency (hey, no need to pay benefits—the agency takes care of it, wink, wink). Well, the agency doesn’t always. And freelancers can’t take any tax deductions for this work because they’re employees, not independent contractors. Penalized for having steady work? What kind of labor policy is that?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned from founding Freelancers Union is that the best help to freelancers comes from freelancers themselves. They are the experts on what they need.
Advocating for better quality of life for freelancers doesn’t have to take a lot of time. In fact, you’re already advocating by taking good care of yourself as a person and a professional. That’s the self-advocacy part. It starts at home. Advocacy for others happens when freelancers help other freelancers. Community advocacy happens when freelancers advocate as a group.
Every day that you handle your freelance life like the pro you are, you’re strengthening the freelance community, such as when you:
• Have written agreements for your gigs.
• Negotiate fair terms for yourself.
• Work on balancing your Freelance Portfolio and avoiding misclassification.
• Set reasonable limits with clients.
• Get the professional and personal insurance you need.
• Stay on top of your billing and bookkeeping.
• Pay down/limit your debt and set up savings and retirement programs.
• Learn about health insurance options and get the best you can afford.
This is one or more freelancers helping one another, such as when you:
• Help another freelancer in any way.
• Share work leads.
• Share info on freelance-friendly banks, insurance programs, and other services.
• Join professional associations, Freelancers Union, discussion groups, and other communities where independent workers can connect and share resources.
• Start your own professional group.
• Swap negotiating strategies with fellow freelancers.
• Work to establish industry standards for independent contractor agreements.
• Talk about fees in your industry and what constitutes fair payment.
• Share information about clients (nonpayers, 3-Ders), including using Freelancers Union’s Client Scorecard.
• Set up codes of ethics and best practices if your profession doesn’t already have them.
When freelancers act together to represent their interests to others, that’s community advocacy. It’s speaking with one voice and knowing and using your political and economic power, such as when you:
• Complete the Freelancers Union annual survey to help us plan initiatives to make laws, systems, and the work world more freelance-friendly.
• Get involved in working for positive change in freelancers’ lives through Freelancers Union and/or a professional group.
• Fill out the Freelancers Union Client Scorecard and share it with others.
• Talk with other freelancers about what freelancers need.
• Talk with nonfreelancers about freelance life.
• Support political candidates who advocate for freelancers’ issues.
• Buy products and services that offer special discounts or incentives to freelancers.
• Contribute to the Freelancers Union Political Action Committee (PAC) and volunteer to contact elected officials.
New Mutualism isn’t just a feel-good thing. It’s a survival thing. Everyone—not just freelancers—has to do for themselves and one another what government and social support systems can’t do, weren’t designed to do, or don’t yet exist to do.
So while we advocate for change, we have to make changes where we are. With New Mutualism, we can set up small experiments and models, see what works, and then grow and show them as models to scale up. As we try them out, they become:
• Plausible—rooted in lived experience.
• Durable—able to withstand challenges and integrate change.
• Elegant—containing the greatest possible complexity in the simplest possible way.
That’s how informal groups grow into coworking spaces, which the Internet magnifies into vast virtual hives like Etsy. That’s how neighborhood babysitting co-ops become Time Dollars communities and barter exchanges. That’s how the Get Paid, Not Played campaign becomes the Client Scorecard. Micro meets macro.
And that’s where you and community meet. What you do as one freelancer affects all freelancers. What all freelancers do affects you. Take it as assurance, if you needed it, that while you’re independent, you’re never alone.
1 To answer the question, “What should I do?”
2 To share where there’s work.
3 To recommend you.
4 To listen.
5 To laugh with.
6 To brainstorm with.
7 To celebrate with.
8 To warn you about clients who aren’t freelance-friendly.
9 To march with you in support of freelancers’ rights.
10 To give you the opportunity to help someone else.