Update on our commitment to anti-racism
Date Created: 31st Oct 2022
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Over the last month, the Artswork team have been attending a range of celebrations and events marking Black History Month. As October draws to a close, we are reflecting on our organisation’s anti-racism journey over the past 12 months.
Since publishing our Black Lives Matter statement in June 2020, we have been working to make the changes needed to ensure addressing racism is at the forefront of our work with children and young people, and those who work with them. Key steps taken over the past year have included:
Inclusivity and diversity pledge
As part of Southampton’s bid to be City of Culture 2025, we pledged to take several actions through the SO25 Inclusive City programme – a city-wide commitment to ensuring a more diverse, informed and understanding group of people in key organisations in Southampton.
Although Southampton was unsuccessful in its bid, we remain committed to fulfilling our pledge. This focused on two key areas that we think will really make a difference – increasing the diversity of our staff team and taking existing staff on an in-depth inclusivity learning journey, with a focus on race equity and anti-discrimination.
Find out more about our pledge here and keep reading for information on the steps we have already taken.
Learning and development for Artswork’s staff team
As part of our staff learning journey, we have been working together to build knowledge, challenge assumptions and gain confidence to be more effective change-makers and allies.
Several ‘listening conversations’ were curated with people who have lived experience of discrimination. Two of these – with speakers Jana Manuelpillai, Ama Afrifa-Tchie and Dr Tola Dabiri – formed part of a larger Race Equity and Anti-Discrimination programme hosted by specialist organisation No Barriers.
No Barriers led the team through a bespoke package of training and development from December 2021 to May 2022. Initial research into staff attitudes and understanding was carried out before the programme began, and evaluation shows that the team has significantly developed knowledge, awareness and understanding of racism, anti-racist practice, and how individuals can develop equitable practices to become more diverse and inclusive. Confidence levels have also increased, with team members feeling equipped with the resources they need.
Find out more about this programme here
Anti-discrimination charter
Following the programme with No Barriers, Artswork’s staff have committed to extra work to continue and extend this learning, including group work looking at a range of different areas and projects, and the co-creation of an Anti-Discrimination Charter for Artswork.
When working with Artswork, everyone can expect to be treated equitably and without discrimination. Our Anti-discrimination Charter is a set of commitments and expectations that we are signing up to as individuals and an organisation.
The full Charter can be downloaded on our website here
Review of programmes and practices
In 2021, we committed to a significant number of targeted, time-bound actions from Inc Arts’ Unlock toolkit that will make a difference to race equity in our team and our work overall. These include commitments around recruitment and induction processes, ensuring that Artswork and our programmes are as open and welcoming as possible. We are also working to challenge our assumptions, and constantly refreshing our learning so that we can proactively act as allies at all times.
Steps taken so far have included a review of our recruitment practices, implementing blind recruitment across the board and creating a checklist that all staff must follow when hiring. This checklist includes steps to ensure we are recruiting through diverse networks, signposting accessibility and providing meaningful feedback as standard.
We are also making changes to Artswork’s induction process to ensure new staff feel welcome and have an opportunity to complete their induction, and connect with key staff and business areas, before commencing work duties.
Training for schools and education settings
Through our Department for Education-funded schools programme, we continue to provide education settings with a range of training opportunities focused on equality, diversity and inclusion.
We partnered with the London Theatre Consortium and Cultural Learning Alliance to deliver the Representation in Drama project, supporting schools to embed anti-racist and representative practices in their arts curriculum. So far we have hosted workshops and CPDL workshops for teachers, with more resources to come.
We recently commissioned Race Matters to develop and deliver an interactive course with resources for primary school teachers that will grow knowledge, confidence and opportunity to develop inclusive practice and a representative arts and cultural curriculum. This will be delivered to a pilot cohort of South East settings soon.
Broadening artforms
We have been working to broaden the range of artforms and diversity of artists used in our work to include at least 4 different types of practice (eg Drill, nail art, fashion and makeup). In the last year, we offered Drill as a workshop as part of our Peer Action Collective work with young people in the Solent region. We also worked with African Activities to deliver CPD for teachers, and online workshops for children that received our winter creative gift packs, looking at adinkra printing and bead making.
We are passionate about challenging and educating ourselves further and look forward to continuing the conversation and strengthening our commitment to anti-racism in all aspects of our work. We still have a long way to go on our journey to true, meaningful allyship and would welcome any suggestions or guidance you would like to share with us. Please email info@artswork.org.uk with the subject line ‘FAO Artswork’s Race Equity Group’.
Tags:
Anti-discrimination Anti-racism Black History Month Black Lives Matter Equality and Diversity
