Words by Eman Bhatti, Impact Lead
Following our last Action Plan update in January 2024, we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge some of the successes and the ongoing work we plan to do over the next year.
You can find our detailed Anti-Racism Action Plan here if you would like to explore exactly what we are committed to doing for the next two years. It features a mix of short to long term goals to cover the easy wins that will spur us on to make the deeper change and lay the groundwork for an accountable, transparent journey.
Key Successes from the Last Year:
- Successful recruitment of two additional Board members, one of whom is of the global majority, to ensure we have a broad diversity of voices that represent the demographics of Sandwell.
- Established quarterly check-ins on our action plan at team and Board meetings, to maintain focus on the subject and hold ourselves accountable.
- Commitment to bi-annual progress sharing. We shared a blog and social media post in January with an updated Action Plan, and this blog will be our second touch point of the year.
- Refining our Discrimination Policy to ensure it is intersectional and covers all protected characteristics. We decided not to make a separate Racial Discrimination Policy as the topic is well covered in our existing policy and, with accessible and inclusive governance in mind, we try to limit the number of policies we have.
- Our Environmental Book Group has been meeting twice a quarter since October 2023, and all of the books so far have had a thoughtful intersectional lens that considers the climate crisis and its links to racism, colonialism, and justice. See our blog post ‘Reflections on a Year of Environmental Action’ for more information on these books.
- Accessible and inclusive recruitment processes including: asking short, simple application questions; interviewing anyone who identifies as being marginalised provided they meet our minimum standard for the role; and seeking new networks and ways of advertising.
- ‘Understanding Unconscious Bias, Microagressions and Microinterventions’ training by Strawberry Words, undertaken over two days with the whole staff team and a variety of our freelance artists. This training was energising and has started conversations about how we want to continue to centre this work, perhaps with regular meetings to reconvene, similar to our Environmental Book Club.
Looking Ahead
Our key priority actions for the next 12 months are:
- To clearly track the progression of our artists from Artist Development Opportunities. This work has begun, so we hope to have some robust information over the coming year that we can reflect on to do better if we find there are improvements to be made.
- To increase the inclusion of Black and Ethnically Diverse people by 15% across our artist development and recruitment opportunities. This is an ongoing action, and we have detailed success measures for specific projects in the Action Plan.
- Undertaking an ‘audit’ of our existing delivery partners to ensure that we are staying true to our mission and guiding principles and focusing our energies on working with communities most profoundly marginalised.
- Continuous research on relevant training and learning opportunities!