A tiny interruption

Psssst, Ryan.

I was going to send you a normal DM.

But I have a pretty strong aversion to being boring 😂

Also, I have a fairly big ask.

So I made you this little site instead.

Hope I succeeded.

Okay. The big ask.

I’d love to work with 85 South.

I know you don’t have a role open that I’m applying for.

I’m asking whether there might be room—now or eventually—for me to help with the coordination behind campaigns, partners, talent and production, while also making some of the admin and systems around that work run better.

If you can honestly think of things moving slower than they should because nobody quite owns them, admin work you suspect should not still take this much human time, or the strange little category of “an assistant could handle that” work that is too scattered to become a proper job description...

I got you.
A bit more about me is down here

I saw the job description and immediately thought, “Oh, yes! Exactly that.”

I came across the LinkedIn profile of someone who used to work at 85 and I LOVED her job description.

She was coordinating between talent, leadership, vendors and production; managing timelines, budgets and outreach; and handling whatever went wrong in real time.

TalentLeadershipVendorsProductionTimelinesOutreach

It was incredibly close to the kind of work I’ve been trying to find my way towards.

I’ve realised I want my next chapter to put me much closer to how a company like 85 actually works. I want to see it from inside, help carry the work and learn by being in it.

The experience is a big part of what I want. What I’m bringing into it is years of festivals, programmes, campaigns, client work and automation—and a brain that will absolutely start trying to make the work around me run better.

I’m less attached to the title than I am to the actual responsibility.

I want to be the person making sure the brief becomes a plan, everyone knows what they need to do, the follow-ups happen and the thing gets out the door.

01 / CAMPAIGNS + PARTNERS

Make sure campaigns don’t stall between the brief and delivery.

Turn the brief into a plan, keep partners updated, chase the approvals, track the deliverables and make sure deadlines do not quietly slip.

02 / TALENT + PRODUCTION

Make sure talent and production are working from the same information.

Confirm what is happening, who needs what, what changed and what still has to be handled before and after the show, shoot or campaign.

03 / OPERATIONS

Pick up the work nobody has time to properly own.

Update the trackers, send the follow-ups, prepare the reports, close the loose ends and handle the strange little jobs that still need to get done.

04 / SYSTEMS + AUTOMATION

Find the admin nobody should still be doing by hand.

If the same information keeps being copied between people, tabs, spreadsheets, voice notes and approval threads, I’m going to want to fix it.

I rarely finish a task without noticing three ways the process around it could work better.

Why are we chasing this every time? Why is that information living in one person’s head? Why did three people have to do the same update? Why does this need six different tabs?

I fix what I can as I go. Sometimes that means a clearer process or a better tracker. Sometimes it becomes an automation. The point is to save the team time, keep things from being missed and stop paying people to repeat work a system could handle.

Different jobs. Plenty of overlap.

I’m Millicent. Seven years across programme delivery, marketing, client services, editorial, creative operations and AI systems.

Millicent Yedwa against a terracotta wall
Festivals
I started around Bayimba International Festival of the Arts in Uganda and Theatre in the Park in Harare—supporting programmes, artists and speakers, sponsors, volunteers, publicity, documents and the reporting that came after.
Programme delivery
I’ve managed concurrent regional programmes across nine Southern African countries, with budgets, reporting, stakeholders and deadlines that did not care how many moving parts there were.
Campaigns + clients
Brand activation taught me how to get an idea into market. Client services taught me to stay close enough to the problem to know when the first version of it is not the whole thing.
AI operations
I now build workflows and internal tools for the annoying work teams keep doing over and over—rebuilding context, chasing approvals, copying updates and trying to remember what has already been decided.

Could we talk?

If there isn’t a neat role waiting for me, I’m open to starting with paid part-time work, contract support, or one paid project and seeing how we work together.