Oral History: Anna Niland

My name is Anna Niland and I’m Associate Director at NYT and my pronouns are she/her.

In the very first pilot year, um, we didn’t… We lost quite a lot of… It was a year of quite difficult time at NYT. There was, um, we, we had to shrink from an organization of about 25 to an organization of 12. Um, and we, in the first year, the pilot, I had to sort of not pay anybody on the rep, so a lot of people volunteered. So it was a very… It was a, a sort of first try at it. Second time, we decided, we got a partnership with the Ambassador’s Theatre and, and it really lifted. Um, it’s, I think it’s changed. We’ve, we’ve looked at the sort of model financially. How do we make it financially secure? Um, we’ve, we’ve raised more money for bursaries to make sure that people can also survive while they’re… You know, even though it’s free, it doesn’t mean somebody from Manchester would be able to access it, ’cause how are they gonna work and pay their rent? So we’ve, we’ve looked at the timetable and gone, “Okay, so you need to be able to work at weekends, so we won’t work, we won’t work at weekends. You need, uh, some bursary in able to move, and you need maybe some sponsorship from while you’re here.” We- we’ve added in, like, all the travel expenses. We’ve added in, you know, a lot of pastoral stuff, a lot of wellbeing stuff. So as, as, um, as we’ve become, uh, I suppose celebrating individual, you know, individuals and diverse and inclu- you know, inclusive, we’ve meant that we’ve… It could be much more bespoke so that we could definitely have a wheelchair user, and we can definitely have someone who’s deaf. We can definitely have, you know, a really wide variety, and that’s, that’s the important bit of rep. And what comes with that is that it has to be flexible. It has to be really well thought out with really individual journeys supported. In terms of what we’re delivering and the training, it’s also making sure that we’ve got the right directors who understand the ethos of NYT, who understand what this is so that it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not an ego trip for them. It is about a training a- and creating a brilliant piece of work. But it’s not like… Sometimes y- you have to be careful that a director isn’t seeing this as their showcase, and just their showcase. So there’s lots of nuance within it, I would say. So it- it’s always, it’s always developing.