Collaborate, be curious, rest: Building inclusivity

Sometimes equality, equity, diversity, inclusion, inclusivity, belonging, othering and acceptance (EEDIIBOA or EDI for short) can be hard to grasp and embed into our everyday roles at work. EDI as a way of thinking and practising is a useful way to remind us that society is continually evolving.

The ways the Arts Marketing Association (AMA) has found to explore EDI are:

• To collaborate with people with different lived experience from us.
• To be curious, to research processes or behaviours that are unfamiliar to us.
• To look after ourselves by being mindful and intentional about rest.

To help to address these three areas that make EDI both accessible and innovative, I want to share some people and resources with you. Great EDI work comes through leadership, taking action and being open to conversations in your organisation. It can be tough, hard and repetitive.

It also flips the script on how we deliver the practical elements of AMA’s Equality Impact Assessments – to drive actions with more sustainable investment outcomes.

Even if you feel you have nothing to invest in EDI, I hope to inspire you to spend some time discovering how to apply this to your personal and professional learning.

Address gaps in your organisation

Where there are gaps in knowledge, it can unintentionally lead to cultural erasure. This happens when cultural practices and customs are forgotten or abandoned by a given community as they adopt customs from a dominant cultural group.

The Quilt – a documentary podcast series from Aunt Nell and Queer Britain – sees queer people from across the UK share long-ignored stories from the queer community. Episode 3 uncovers previously dismissed tales of queer culture from across Scotland and gives them a platform.

It is useful to review these knowledge gaps through the lens of another person’s lived experience. For example: how aware are you of the devices, tools and technology that support people living with disabilities including neurodiversity? Do you relate to people living with physical needs different from yours by making reasonable adjustments for them?

Five disability hacks for living is an excellent resource from @ChronicallyJenni – aka Jenni Pettican – an EDI educator and model who raises awareness of chronic illness, disability and mental health. She shares how simple tools make daily tasks easier, demonstrating how small adjustments can go a long way to transform access for your audiences and your team – now and in the future.

Collaboration gets you out of your silo

My role is to bring EDI and access into everything AMA does, collaborating and encouraging consistency in the team’s approach to communications and external working. Marketing, communications and inclusion consultant, Elma Glasgow, produces the Included newsletter on LinkedIn that comments and shares insights on inclusive engagement, communications and storytelling. Resources like this help to build connection and reaffirm you’re not alone in this work.

Our Accessible Marketing Guide was co-created with the disability arts commissioning organisation, Unlimited, to support intentional approaches to reaching audiences. Co-creating policies, processes and resources helps people avoid working in a bubble when communicating and working through EDI/EEDIIBOA.

Use of language is not only vital in making messaging accessible to disabled audiences, but also to taking account of the historical context around disability. We want audiences and teams to feel supported, remembered and treated fairly in our communications with them.

I’m very drawn to the brave conversations EDI educators share, particularly when arts and culture are not the medium to tell the story. In our sector, we’re accustomed to using books, films, theatre performance and visual arts to communicate the political and social environment of the day.

Social media creator, Benjy Kusi, an inclusion and wellbeing consultant, keeps conversations going across intersectional EDI and arts, lived experience and cultural themes, with relevant content such as this video: How cultural snobbery towards art & rest creates barriers to inclusion, selfcare and wellbeing.

Rosemary Campbell-Stephens coined the term ‘Global Majority’, which positively reframes the fact that people of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American and mixed-heritage backgrounds are the largest group of the world’s population. She is a significant voice in EDI and her work influences policies like the Equality Act 2010 and offers practical strategies for inclusive practises. At AMA, we have actively adopted this term in our work.

Keeping mindful

I make time to do intentional breath work every day – either alone or with the AMA team at our weekly meetings. Without it, we would struggle for the words, the energy, and to make meaning of embedding and underpinning EDI work. It’s work that arts, culture and heritage collectively must do for the benefit of everyone working within it and of our audiences.

AMA has published a book of wellbeing exercises that help us be mindful. We are offering this to readers to download for free in pdf format or PowerPoint for screen reader users.

We invite you to bring your senior team on a journey that will help your organisation make an intentional breakthrough in your internal practices and strategies towards your EDI goals. Join the AMA’s Breakthrough programme.