Artswork pledge to Southampton City of Cuture Inclusive City programme

As an Arts partner, Artswork has been supporting Southampton’s bid to become UK City of Culture 2025 from early in its inception and is excited by the opportunities it offers to put children and young people at the forefront of the city’s future development.

We are now pledging to take a number of actions as part of SO25’s Inclusive City programme, a city-wide commitment developed as part of the City of Culture bid preparation process.

Building on our Equalities Action Plan, Artswork’s pledges are part of a broader range of organisational work focused on making a difference to the inclusivity of our organisation and its work, which might, in turn, make a difference to the communities that we work in. This addresses governance, employment, our programmes, work with partners and supporters, audiences, participants, and communications – basically everything we are and do.

Our Inclusive City pledges focus on two key areas that we think will really make a difference when we change them. They’re both to do with our team – if we change ourselves, then everything we do will change.

Firstly, we pledge to increase the diversity of Artswork’s staff team. Our Board of Trustees is quite diverse, but our staff team isn’t, and that has to affect how inclusive our programmes really are.

Over the next 2 years, we’ve committed to 74 concrete actions from IncArts’ Unlock Toolkit, a resource that’s being made available to cultural organisations who want to be more inclusive in all aspects of their work. A significant number of these actions will help Artswork to recruit and make welcome a more diverse staff team, bringing in a broader range of voices that will shape our programmes and partnerships in more inclusive ways.

The other key pledge is to take our existing staff on an in-depth learning journey around inclusivity, in particular race equity and anti-discrimination. We’ll be undertaking a six-month programme led by specialist providers No Barriers, working together to learn, challenge assumptions and gain confidence to be more effective change-makers and allies.

We’re also curating a series of ‘listening conversations’ for our team with people who have lived experience of discrimination because of their gender identity, their disability, their sexuality, their religion, their age – any or several of the protected characteristics.

We’ll aim to open up these Zoom ‘listening conversations’ to other organisations in Southampton who are part of the City of Culture family. Artswork CEO Louise Govier says: “This is one of the great things about our actions within this piece of development work that’s happening right across the city – we can connect in with each other and amplify the impact of what we’re each doing. An opportunity for one team to develop and learn can be shared with others – then suddenly many more people have the chance to hear and understand what life can be like for someone who faces discrimination, and what each of us can do to make the world different.”

Our pledges, and the whole Inclusive City programme, will ensure that there are a more diverse, informed and understanding group of people in key organisations in Southampton. Artswork’s involvement will mean that we make sure that our young people are right there out front, leading the way.

Pledges have been created following a series of Inclusion Workshops launched early in 2021, by Southampton 2025 Trust with John Hansar Gallery, University Southampton as a response to the wider consultation for the UK City of Culture 2025 bid process. All participating organisations took away from the process the skills and learnings to begin the development of meaningful pledges to actively promote inclusivity throughout their organisations.

Visit www.southampton2025.co.uk for more information about Inclusion Pledges

More information about our ongoing Equality work can be found here

More information on our support of Southampton’s City of Culture bid can be found here

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Anti-racism City of Culture Equality and Diversity Southampton