Faye Dicker: Building a Community Where Freelance Mothers Can Be Seen, Heard and Supported

A Foot in Both Camps

When Faye Dicker first started looking for a community of mothers in business, she was not trying to build a national network. She was trying to solve a problem in her own life.

At the time, Faye was a freelance voiceover artist, balancing motherhood with self-employment and trying to find her place between two worlds. Employed mothers were returning to workplaces. Stay-at-home mothers were building rhythms around home life. Faye had a foot in both camps, yet felt she belonged fully in neither.

"Whilst self-employment and motherhood are two amazing things, they both can be isolating," she says.

No sick pay. No holiday pay. And no real sense that anyone around her understood the particular shape of her days. She looked for a community built for someone like her and came up empty. So she did what any sensible, slightly frustrated broadcaster would do.

She made one herself.

That was twelve years ago. Today, Freelance Mum is a nationwide network with hubs across the country, a weekly online coffee morning running every Wednesday without fail, and a membership of women who show up for each other in the way Faye once wished someone would show up for her. 

Born From Her Own Need

Faye's background was in radio. For years she presented the Early Breakfast Show on BBC Radio Bristol, alongside building a career in voiceover work. When her eldest daughter arrived, she stepped back from presenting, but kept the voiceover going. The work was still there. The community was not.

She looked around and could not find a space that made sense for someone in her position. Not a mums' group, not a traditional business network, something in between that did not yet exist. So she went back to what she knew.

"I couldn't find a community for fellow mums in business like me. And I just thought, if I can't find it, I'm just going to have to create it," she says.

She started with a podcast, going out and interviewing other mothers running businesses, collecting their stories and trying to build something through shared experience. From there came in-person events where children were genuinely welcome, not tolerated, welcome. The early ethos was straightforward: come as you are, bring the kids, and trust that everyone in the room already gets it.

What she discovered over time was that the challenges did not disappear once children started school. They just looked different. The women in her community were still trying to grow businesses in truncated hours, still absorbing the majority of the mental load at home, still figuring out how to make it all work in a way that suited their actual lives. The community needed to reflect that, growing alongside its members rather than staying fixed at one particular stage. 

Digging Deep When It Got Hard

When COVID-19 arrived and everything shut down, Faye had one hub, in Bristol, and a long-held ambition to scale that suddenly felt very far away. Her members were homeschooling and trying to keep businesses alive at the same time, and she was doing the same.

Faye sat with the question of what she could actually offer and came back to the thing she had always been good at. Talking. Connecting people. Creating a room, even a virtual one, where nobody had to pretend they were fine.

"It was about creating a really safe space where we could all show up," she says.

She launched a weekly online coffee morning and it ran, and kept running. Six years later it still does, every Wednesday, because it turned out that what people needed during lockdown was the same thing they had always needed. A room where they did not have to explain themselves.

The coffee morning also gave Faye something she had been trying to work out for years: a scalable model. Hubs could open across the country, run by local hosts, while the online space held the whole network together. 

It has not all been upward from there. Faye is candid that this year has been one of the hardest. The cost of living crisis is squeezing her members, and she hates the idea of anyone leaving the community at the moment they need it most. 

But Faye's response is characteristic. If anything, it hardens her conviction that human connection is worth protecting, and that a community capable of holding people through difficult times is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole point.

The Warm and Fuzzies

Faye has won awards. Freelance Ambassador of the Year, a COVID-19 Success Story, and Top 100 Inspirational Women in the West. But they are not the thing she reaches for when you ask her what has made it worth it.

"When I see people collaborating and I see their businesses flourish, I get so much from that," she says.

She calls them her warm and fuzzies. The moment two members who have spent months saying hello on a Wednesday morning screen finally meet in person and the squeal that follows. There is the Freelance Mum Mega Meetup too, held each year at a site in Somerset, where members from every hub come together for a day with no agenda beyond being in the same place. Faye looks out at a field full of women talking, laughing and making things happen, and thinks: this is what it was always supposed to look like.

"It might have been me who started it, but it's not about me. It's about the members in this community and the amazing work they do when they get together," says Faye.

Dream Big, Start Small

Faye is, by her own description, an ideas person. which is a lovely thing to be, and also, in the early days of a business, a genuinely difficult one. The ideas came faster than any school day could contain, and she tried, repeatedly, to act on all of them at once.

It did not go well.

"Always dream big, but realise every dream starts with a small step, and it's not going to happen overnight."

Her advice now is to write everything down, every idea, every half-formed thought, and then choose one. Not because the others are wrong, but because none of them will work if you are trying to run all twelve simultaneously. Pick the one that matters most right now, understand why you are picking it, and work backwards. The rest will keep.

Showing Up, Tired Faces and All

Faye has a clear answer when you ask her what holds women back from starting businesses. Confidence. And the knock-on effect of not seeing enough people who look like you actually doing it.

She references the Rose Review, which found that the absence of relatable role models is one of the most significant barriers women face. She puts particular weight on that word. Not just role models. Relatable ones.

"You need to see more people who look like you," she says.

It is why the culture inside Freelance Mum is what it is. Members are actively encouraged to show up however they actually are that day. Barefaced and in tracksuit bottoms because the school run was chaos. Child off sick in the background. Exhausted and not hiding it. None of it makes anyone less of a businesswoman, and everyone in the room already knows that.

Every time a woman shows her face, Faye argues, she is doing something that goes beyond herself. She is telling the next woman watching that this is a place for her, too.

"Don't let a lack of confidence, don't let there being no one else out there who looks like you, put you off. Just go for it," she says.

More Than a Business Card

Faye is precise about what women are actually looking for when they seek out community. Women want to go deeper than the traditional version of networking: a handshake, a business card swap and a neat referral. 

"We're really looking to make meaningful relationships and to make change and make a difference," she says.

That is not to say business does not matter. It absolutely does, and Faye would find it patronising to suggest otherwise. Her members are running real businesses and trying to earn real money. But the connections that form inside Freelance Mum tend to outlast any single referral. 

They become the person you call when you have no idea what to do next, who knows exactly who you should speak to. That quality of relationship, built slowly over Wednesday mornings, meetups and years of showing up, is what she thinks women in business are genuinely searching for.

It's Still a Man's World

Faye is not interested in softening this. The world, she says, was largely designed by men and for men. She points to healthcare, to everyday objects, to the structures women navigate without ever being asked whether they actually work for them. That backdrop matters, because it shapes the experience of every woman trying to build something of her own.

"We're living in a man's world, and that's why, even more so, as women, we need to create communities that are designed to support us," she says.

The financial reality for self-employed mothers particularly concerns her. When a woman steps back to have children and then moves into self-employment, the earnings gap can widen quickly, and often quietly. The business takes time to find its feet. Pension contributions get paused, sometimes indefinitely. And all the while she is still the one absorbing the majority of responsibilities at home, for young children, and often later for older family members too.

Faye wants to see better signposting, better financial education, and more practical support for women trying to build businesses in those conditions. The ambition is there, she says. The infrastructure around it too often is not.

You Are Your Best Asset

Faye's advice for women thinking about starting a business is practical and comes from experience rather than theory. Start small, she says, and keep a record of the early moments as you go. The first client, the first order, the first time something actually worked. It sounds simple, but on a hard day six months in, those things have a way of mattering more than any business plan.

She is equally firm on looking after yourself, and means it in a more specific way than it might sound. "You are your best asset," she says, "so it's really vital that you look after yourself." Well-being is not something you earn once the business is doing well. It is part of how the business gets there. Whatever the thing is that keeps you feeling like a person rather than just a founder, whether that is a weekly walk, a swim, an hour completely away from a screen, protect it. Because the hard days will come and when they do, that is often what carries you through.

And when it gets really hard? Do not make permanent decisions. Step away, find someone you trust to talk to, and come back when you are ready. Talent will only take you so far, she says. It is determination that sees a business through the parts that do not go to plan.

One Word: Bonkers

When asked to sum up her founder journey in a single word, Faye considers messy and organic, and then lands somewhere that feels more honest.

"Bonkers. It's both messy and joyful, and it's a sideways look at life."

Twelve years in, still going, still surprising her. Bonkers seems about right.

The Takeaway

Faye Dicker set out to find a community. When she could not find one, she built it. 

"Keep the fire in your belly, but try to keep the joy," she says.

It is, in many ways, the whole philosophy of Freelance Mum in a single sentence.

To find out more about Faye and the community she has built, visit the Freelance Mum website or follow along on Instagram. 

Inspired by Faye's journey? 

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