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Background

This toolkit has been developed as part of CVAN The Contemporary Visual Arts Network Fair and Equitable programme, a five-year commitment to instituting equity within the visual arts in England.

The programme aims to cultivate a visual arts sector and ecology that supports its leadership and enables artists and arts workers from marginalised and underrepresented communities to thrive. You can read more about the programme here.

About this toolkit

As the visual arts sector strives to become more relevant, equitable and inclusive, your organisation may be thinking about delivering a programme of internal change work. This toolkit is designed to help you prepare or adjust for this work.

We recommend using this toolkit in conjunction with the Fair and Equitable programme research report, Fostering Equity in the Visual Arts Sector. The report includes 20 recommendations for organisations to take action around creating an equitable and inclusive visual arts sector, focusing on marginalised and underrepresented communities.

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How to use this toolkit

This toolkit has been created to be used by senior staff, such directors, trustees and chairs.

You can work through this toolkit individually or as a team, however, it’s important to collaborate with your boards and those individuals who make up your governance structure to ensure buy-in from all levels.

Take your time answering the prompts; revisit them, and repeat them on a regular basis.

There’s no single method of gauging if your organisation is well-placed to deliver this work, however, this toolkit is intended to encourage discussion and reflection on gaps and strengths.

Often the best source of information and recommendations are from the artists, arts workers and staff from marginalised and underrepresented communities, you already work with. When working (including consultation) with people from marginalised and underrepresented communities, ensure they are clear about the ask, renumerated and fairly paid.

Naturally, it is problematic to request that people from marginalised and underrepresented communities take on extra unremunerated labour to address issues that are not of their making. This needs navigating with respect and nuance.

There are other organisations that already deliver positive and impactful approaches who may have further thoughts beyond this toolkit.

It’s important to ensure that this work is taking place without waiting for direction from others.

It’s also important to have a good or outstanding approach to equality and inclusion internally, as this will naturally impact your organisation’s ability to deliver this work externally.

We hope you’ll find the toolkit useful to work through, even if you’ve been doing this work for a while.

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What this toolkit covers

Your organisation’s values and vision

Creating an organisational foundation

Power, and making space

The culture of your organisation

Prioritising and resourcing

Changing ways of working

Measuring performance and accountability

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Your organisation’s values and vision

To start off with, it’s always useful to question your organisation’s motivation for doing this work: what is your intention and what do you hope to achieve?

Think about your reasons for doing this work:

Why do you want your organisation to deliver equity and inclusivity work? Do your individual drivers align with those of your organisation?
Who will be the main beneficiaries �of this work?

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Creating an organisational foundation

You’ll need to ensure the basics are in place before you start your equity and inclusivity work.

Consider the following questions:

Do you have an organisational equality action plan and is it regularly revisited?
Do you have an equality impact assessment for each strand of work?
Does your organisation have a clear approach to and clarity around procedure when encountering non-inclusive behaviour?
Does your organisation discuss and develop equity and inclusion on a regular basis?
Is equity and inclusion embedded in your staff training and development programmes?
Can you foresee any people, processes and frameworks that may block change in your organisation? Can you think of any mitigations for these possibilities?

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Creating an organisational foundation Continued

How will you communicate progress to ensure accountability and visibility remains high?
Does your leadership lead the way in equity and inclusion work, embedding this in everything they do?

Note

People from marginalised and underrepresented communities can sometimes be invited into an organisation to ‘fix’ a problem, or to ‘be the solution’. However, for equity and inclusivity work to succeed everyone within the organisation needs to be responsible for it.

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Creating an organisational foundation

You’ll need to ensure the basics are in place before you start your equity and inclusivity work.

Use the following questions to prompt your thinking:

Are you and your team aware of sector equality reports and conversations around equity and inclusivity? Have you or your team read any relevant reports? Have you captured the learning and recommendations from these in a way that informs and improves your approach to diversity, equity and inclusion? If not, what’s your learning action plan?
Do you have multiple designated equity and inclusion champions and/or leads at board/senior level?
Do you have clarity, expertise and enough resourcing to ensure there are designated equity and inclusion leads for work that takes place in your organisation both internally and externally?
Do all staff have equity and inclusion goals or performance objectives included within their performance reviews?

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Power, and �making space.

Assessing the power dynamics within your organisation is key to this work. For example, sometimes well-paid, senior or permanent staff are often not reflective of the population of contemporary England. Unspoken or unaddressed hierarchies can also negatively impact this work.

Spend some time thinking about the power dynamics in your organisation �using the following questions to prompt you:

How much space is taken by senior colleagues in your organisation who are not reflective of contemporary England?
How are artists, arts workers and staff from marginalised and underrepresented communities invited to make decisions and to collaborate?
What benefits might overrepresented staff need to give away to make sure that those who have been overlooked have more?
Will doing this work benefit underrepresented people more than it benefits your organisation?
A representative workforce without an inclusive environment and culture will likely not achieve equality outcomes. With this in mind, does feedback demonstrate your organisation is both representative and inclusive? If not, where is a good starting point?

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The culture of your organisation

It’s useful to think about the existing culture of your organisation when it comes to equity and inclusion.

Take time to reflect on the following prompts:

Is your work around equity and inclusivity siloed, is it at the centre of your organisation, or does it not happen at all?
If this work is not currently at the core of your organisation, think about why this is. What has stopped this work from happening and how can this be addressed?
Are there regular and accessible opportunities for staff and trustees to feedback and inform the organisational culture?
Are the lived experiences of marginalised and underrepresented staff members centred in the development of an inclusive culture?

Note

Occasionally, organisations feel they need more money and resources to carry out equity and inclusion work, and of course, plentiful resourcing and funding would be ideal; however, some change can also happen using existing assets. If you’ve listed funding as a barrier, take time to reflect on how/if you can prioritise this work within your current budgets, and how you might work with existing partners and structures in order to create capacity and resource to deliver this work.

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Prioritising �and resourcing

Equity and inclusivity work can often get siloed or set aside when immediate or critical deadlines need addressing. Similarly, different stakeholders may or may not centre or prioritise this work.

Consider the following when thinking about prioritising:

How will you ensure that this work is always top priority for you and your senior colleagues?
How can artists, arts workers and staff from marginalised and underrepresented communities trust you to continue to focus on this work even when you’re stretched?
What might pull your attention away from this work? How will you mitigate this in your scheduling and workload planning in order to maintain equity and inclusion as an organisational priority.

How can you ensure that this work has sufficient resourcing to enable it to be successful from the outset?
Would you be willing to pause or stop other work so that you can redirect resources to equality or inclusivity work, and what might this look like?
Are there ways of working more effectively using task groups and/or networks to create increased capacity?
Can you identify any equality or inclusivity skills or knowledge gaps and how can these be addressed?

Use the following questions to support your thinking around resources:

Equity and inclusion work is often under-resourced

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Changing ways of working

It might be the case that your organisation has existing ways of working that need to change to ensure your equity and inclusivity work is successful. For example, you might need to alter your decision-making processes to ensure it includes a plurality of voices. You might also feel you may have to diverge from your organisation’s expectations to allow this work to evolve organically.

Take time to think about how bold you’re prepared to be. �Use the following points as prompts:

Would people from marginalised and underrepresented communities describe your organisation as safe, supportive and accessible and if so why, or why not? How do you know this? Check how up to date this information is.
Dissenting voices within a business are healthy and necessary. Does the culture of your organisation authentically welcome dissenting voices or only ‘positive feedback’ and is there a reason why? Are you confident and comfortable listening and responding to views about your organisation that are not reflective of your own views?

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Measuring performance and accountability

Once you’ve worked your way through the prompts above, you might want to think about how you measure your performance and accountability. Bear in mind that an inclusive leader or changemaker will likely require everyone in their organisation to be responsible for equity and inclusion.

Use the following questions as prompts �around your approach to measuring performance:

How will you and your team be responsible for ensuring that there’s positive equality and inclusivity change both within your organisation and the wider visual arts sector?
How are you visibly carrying out this work and communicating your commitment to equity and inclusion?
How are you holding others to account both within your organisation and the wider sector?
How will you ensure clarity around your inclusion and equity goals and vision?
Is everyone in your organisation undertaking this work or are some doing it more than others?

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Measuring performance and accountability Continued

Have you collated qualitative and quantitative inclusion and equity baseline data into an action plan so that you can measure the change and progress within your organisation?
How, and how often will you update and share your equality action plans, and who will you share them with? Think internally and externally – with artists, audiences, funders, stakeholders and the wider sector etc
Can you commission an external critical friend to assess your organisations progress and approach to inclusion and equity?
How will you share your own inclusion and equity learning with peers, and the sector as a whole, so as to contribute to a collective sector-wide step change?

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In conclusion

This toolkit was created and developed by Monique Jivram. Monique’s career spans more than ten years in arts organisations as a funder and practitioner in inclusive community, public engagement and visual arts programming. Operating at the intersection of curation and inclusive public programming, Monique’s work focuses on improved inclusion, more efficient distribution of resources, and supporting underrepresented people to thrive in the arts sector.

The toolkit was kindly edited by Dr Cecilia Wee FRSA. Cecilia is an independent curator, educator and agitator, addressing equitable infrastructures for art and social action. Cecilia’s work is concerned with our interconnectedness and relationships within and beyond capitalism, working with practitioners using experimental sound, performance, visual and design practices.

This toolkit builds on sections of CVAN’s 2022 research report Fostering Equity in the Visual Arts Sector, written by Dr Cecilia Wee and Veionella Spaine, with further programme support from Rukhsana Jahangir.

Footnote

There’s no single method of gauging if your organisation is well placed to deliver this work and its important to note this is work that needs ongoing self-reflection and resourcing. It is key is to ensure that it’s happening without waiting for direction from others. There are many resources that you’ll need to help you on your journey. We hope that this toolkit can be a useful starting point.

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