A Vicinity Agency Initiative
You were trained to think.
Because the system is very good at making you forget what you’re actually capable of.
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↓There is a specific kind of erosion that happens to good creatives. You enter the industry eager to bring strategic thinking to the table, but the corporate assembly line quickly takes over. You get cut out of real business decisions and turned into an execution machine, while your mind is capable of so much more. This constant devaluation tricks you into believing your thinking isn’t worth a premium: until eventually, you stop fighting and start producing exactly what they pay for: average work.
Founded by
Claudia & Cameron
Vicinity Agency
of college graduates are underemployed within a year of finishing their degree.
STRADA INSTITUTE / BURNING GLASS INSTITUTE
of CEOs say their top freelancers deliver more value than employees: yet only 1 in 3 feel confident about their future.
UPWORK / LEAPERS
of creators earn over $100,000 annually in an industry now worth $250 billion globally.
G2 CREATOR ECONOMY REPORT
Most creatives graduate into a system that immediately undervalues them. Despite the industry generating billions, there is a workforce that is consistently underpaid and underutilized.
Reclaim your value from an industry that treats strategy like a commodity. We teach you how to position your expertise to the right clients, ensuring you never have to compromise on your pricing power.
Scale up without selling out. When a significant brief arrives, collaborate with a trusted ecosystem of vetted specialists from within the community to deliver high-impact work on your own terms.
An annual showcase of our collective creative growth. We curate the best strategic and creative work from our community into a limited-print lookbook, placing your capability directly in front of independent founders, owners, and global decision-makers.
Our creative sector drives over R270 billion of national GDP, yet rigid ecosystems are exhausting the very minds behind it. Today, our finest strategists and creatives are slowly shrinking and we simply can’t afford this talent drain anymore if we want to build our economy.
"South Africa does not have a talent shortage. It has a system that wastes its talent. The creative sector cannot keep losing its finest minds to bureaucratic, undervalued roles and expect the economy to grow."
If you graduated with the ability to think strategically, and then watched that ability get slowly ignored, underused, and eventually switched off; this is for you. The Circle exists to make sure that part of you doesn’t disappear permanently.
Partner with us or join as an industry mentor to help protect South Africa’s finest creative minds.