Photo by Jeffrey Beall via Flickr.
Freelancers can find all sorts of tips and resources on AHCJ’s Freelance Center, but there’s nothing like one-on-one interaction. Now AHCJ freelance members have a monthly opportunity to trade advice and share expertise.
Members of AHCJ’s freelance committee, including independent journalists Jeanne Erdman and her co-chair Andrea King Collier, have organized monthly Zoom meetings called Lunch and Learns. These informal sessions, designed to build skills and community, occur at 1:00 p.m. EST every third Thursday of the month.
Each session highlights a specific theme. The first session in January focused on how to plan work for the year. Forty-seven members attended, and many joined the discussion.
“I thought it was great. There were over 40 people on the call — some I knew, some I didn’t — and many seemed eager to participate and share knowledge,” said Karen Blum, an independent journalist and AHCJ’s health IT core topic leader.
The January session spotlighted strategies for revising current business plans. For example, some freelancers used Quickbooks to see which clients paid the most or had the worst contracts in the previous year. One writer took three weeks off in December to come back fresh. Another freelancer said she makes a list of objectives each January detailing where she wants to be at the end of the year.
