The Folk Union began in November 2025 and, a year on, it looks very different to the project I first imagined. Some of the changes have been planned, but others come from what happens when you discover that some things might work on a small scale but become a lot more complicated when tens of thousands of people are involved. 

My name is Mike Hankin. I'm an artist and a designer who, for the last six years has the OffBeat Folk Film Club. As it grew and gained a large audience, I began to think about how similar projects, with large followings, weren’t speaking more about issues I saw as being intrinsic to the survival of the folk culture they loved. I started The Folk Union to encourage those projects to talk about access to land and culture, racism, the commons and the responsibilities involved in representing other people's traditions. I chose the word ‘Union’ to talk about how, together, a collection of people interested in folk culture, might share a united, progressive and inclusive voice. It was never meant to be a trade union, but I knew that the connotation would help bring to mind a less romanticised idea of folk culture and a politics I share.

The original idea was that people and projects could sign a charter and use an emblem to show their support for the values I set out. I suppose I wanted to do what little I could encourage more collective responsibility from people interested in folk. And the project grew extremely quickly. Without advertising or buying followers, the account was gaining roughly 7,000 followers a month, and I was soon making decisions about a project much larger than the one I'd planned.

At first, signing The Charter was free. That felt like the right thing to do. But I didn’t anticipate that people whose conduct was at odds with the project’s values would sign it too. So I introduced a one-off £2 donation for use of the artwork. I think that, in part, this was a way to encourage a moment's consideration before signing up. It didn't solve the problem.

I felt that the moment I charged people, it was important to share their names. So, I published a list of those who had signed the charter. It wasn’t just the biggest names, but everyone. If you signed and donated £2, then I would add your name to the list. People began to recognise individuals they believed shouldn't be included though and I was suddenly in a difficult position. I needed to investigate allegations, make judgements about people's conduct and decide who was in or out. I neither had the means nor the interest to be a fair arbiter. It was anathema to the ideas I started the project with. And, after all, who the fuck am I to say whether one project is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?

Despite this, removing their names from the list raised another question. If nobody knew who had signed, what was the point? A lot of people were interested in helping me solve this problem. Plans were mooted to have a revolving council to help determine who was worthy of inclusion. But folk doesn’t need that. I hated the idea. And so, eventually I stopped the sign-up model altogether.

Despite this, I wanted to continue to platform other people’s views where I could. I organised Folkmoots, these were free discussions about contemporary folk culture. The plan was to get people talking openly about their interests and disagreements. Some of the conversations were great and very useful, but others quickly became combative and exclusionary, the opposite of what I'd hoped to create. 

That's one reason my illustrations hardly ever try to represent or catalogue traditional customs or even really represent the real world. I'm much more interested in the ideas behind folk and what they might mean for people now. 

I think folk can stand for collective action against power, it should stand for access to land and nature, and I think that it should be inclusive. That is my own politics and the politics of the project and the artwork I create for it. I’m delighted that people share the opinions and ideas expressed in the art I share through The Folk Union. 

I am, after all, an artist… To have your work appreciated by so many people in an enormous thrill and privilege, but any artist will tell you that appreciation alone isn’t always enough. Whether you get money from Arts Council England, other jobs, or from selling your art, artists need to be paid. 

I’m not oblivious to the tension in selling object which refer to collective struggle though. However, I don't necessarily think it can be resolved by pretending that money isn't involved in making things. Nor do I think that political artwork becomes insincere the minute somebody pays for it. I never see it as paying to have access to folk or be part of a club. Instead, you’re paying the artist. But come one, I know that ‘being an artist’ doesn’t make me immune to critique and, in fact, I welcome the good faith questions being asked of what the work says, how it's produced and whether the project's conduct is consistent with its values.

I haven't always explained the changes behind The Folk Union as they’ve happened. In fairness, it has always been explicitly an individual and illustration-led project and, ultimately, the changes are my decision to make. But I recognise that the thing I’ve created means something to people and so have been less forthcoming because, in part I was making decisions while still working out what the consequences might be. 

Today The Folk Union sits somewhere between an individual art practice and the beginnings of a cultural institution. Almost all of the work is mine, but the project has an identity and a set of ambitions that extend beyond me. It couldn’t be a collective badge that represents best practice in folk revivals forever. That was an idea that was always pretty poorly thought out, and which was always going to change – albeit more slowly that it’s had to. Who am I to decide what is best practice anyway?

Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I hope that this latest iteration of a changing project gives people the freedom to engage with the work without being asked to join anything, and it gives me a clearer responsibility for what is published under its name.

There are things I'd still like to do including develop a more sustainable way of commissioning writing, work with other artists, and find uses for the audience that don’t just turn old traditions, and other people's practices and stories into content. I don't yet have the structure or resources to do all of them well though. 

The Folk Union is not a trade union. It never has been. What started as an ambition to create a union of folk-projects standing together has changed, by necessity, into a broader collective identity which people are free to engage with or not. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have a strong personal connection to the trade union movement, to the politics of collective action, to access to common land and nature. 

I also believe, strongly, that to expect (or even require) anyone to demonstrate any qualifying characteristics, academic credentials, proximity to folk, class background, financial situation, or knowledge of the culture before they can freely share their interest in it with other people, is completely at odds with folk.

I feel that a project of The Folk Union’s size can’t, in good conscience, simply represent and share all the little actives in the folk world. For one, they may not want it, but if they do, being shared might be read as favouritism, gatekeeping, unwittingly representing bad actors or just boosting certain profiles over others. At any rate, there are countless projects out there who share Instagram content about small folk projects, forgotten stories, myths, legends and customs. We don’t need another one.

I'm grateful to everyone who's read, contributed, attended, shared or bought something over the past year. The project has grown more quickly than I could have ever imagined, and I've had to change my mind about several things along the way. The values that prompted it haven't changed, but my understanding of what it takes to act on them has.

Mike Hankin