During the 2024 Heritage Compass Symposium ‘What’s Next for Heritage’, we considered what long-term resilience within the heritage sector looks like.
One area identified during the day was ‘Mission Resilience’, referring to the need to focus on growing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives to ensure the heritage sector is more welcoming and representative for all.
“Increasingly, organisations are thinking about their approaches to equality, diversity and inclusion, helping to make heritage more welcoming and representative for all. Educational work and outreach is also a focus for many organisations, strengthening the role of heritage in local communities and demonstrating the wider impact that heritage can have.”
This is a vital area for improvement in the sector, and the UK Arts, Culture and Heritage: Audiences and Workforce report from the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre (Creative PEC) published in 2024, shows just how concerning the situation is.
The report found that the overall percentage of White people in arts, culture and heritage occupations was higher than in all other occupations (87% compared with 84%) and, by contrast, Black and Asian people were underrepresented in the sector when compared with other occupations (2.8% compared with 3.8% for Black people and 4.5% compared with 8.7% for Asian people).
As such, it is important that organisations champion and engage diverse voices. However, in the current economic climate and with the pressures facing charitable organisations, finding the time and resources to concentrate on positive EDI-related action can be a lot easier said than done.
To help navigate good practice when it comes to diversity, we’ve explored some examples of best practice in the sector, offering ways for organisations to engage wider audiences and amplify and advocate for diverse, marginalised voices in the future.
Sweet Patootee Arts
Sweet Patootee Arts, a non-profit arts and heritage organisation founded in 2017, offers an example of how organisations can adapt their work to champion diverse voices. The organisation creates projects that are rooted in Black heritage and its artwork project, TURNING POINT, uses archive sources and oral testimony to inspire interdisciplinary storytelling through workshops, screenings and exhibitions.
In 2021, a group of teachers from the Schools History Project teamed up with Sweet Patootee Arts to create lessons and local partner-led heritage activities for school students, using TURNING POINT as inspiration. Lessons responded to the question ‘Why was there a TURNING POINT in the Caribbean identity in the 1920s?’ and used the TURNING POINT film (SPA 2022) which focuses on four short real life stories set in Barbados and Jamaica in 1920. Each lesson focused on different characters within the film, interrogating how their experiences overlapped with historical circumstances at the time and related to Black identity and pride.
After three years of collaboration, the resources are now free and available online to teachers and students alike on Dropbox. Lessons feature topics that easily fit into the existing school curriculum, such as histories of decolonisation and the legacies of slavery, and these digital resources can be easily disseminated via Dropbox – a cost and time effective option that enables you to store and share resources with a broad audience.
Queer Britain
The nation’s first and only LGBTQ+ Museum, Queer Britain is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the stories and art of LGBTQ+ people. Its community residency showcase, ‘We Are Queer Migrant Men+’, exhibited creative work in which participants were able to explore their histories, communities and selves. People from across the globe, including Gabon, Taiwan, Chile and Poland, shared their experiences through audio-visual content.
The success of this showcase lay in its ability to exploit digital resources. In October 2023, the museum set up a month-long online Amplify crowdfunding campaign to fund the development of a community residency series, focused on championing marginalised groups within the LGBTQ+ community. Participants were given a platform to tell their own stories and create artwork for public display and the campaign’s original £26,000 target was surpassed, with the final total amounting to £28,927.50.
Although the community residency took place within the gallery space in London, a video featuring the stories and voices of participants was made available to all via Vimeo. Through this open access content online, the creative output of the project can be shared with a much wider audience than just museum-goers.
Alliance Inclusion Fund
Following an external EDI Audit carried out in Spring 2023, Alliance magazine – a space dedicated to offering insights on the global philanthropy sector – announced that it was implementing changes to how it operated.
The EDI audit had been conducted using qualitative research – including interviews, document reviews and focus groups, run by consultants from Impact Culture and Social Justice Collective – and discovered that certain voices were excluded from the magazine due to language constraints and financial barriers. Global contributors had been put off working with the magazine as only submissions written in English were permitted and it had also not been economically feasible for members of grassroots organisations to participate in philanthropic conversations, citing a lack of “resources, time and capacity to contribute to Alliance”.
These findings triggered the establishment of the Alliance Inclusion Fund, which aims to support non-English native speakers/writers, enabling them to submit articles in their own language, pay for translations and pay writers £250 for articles of up to 1,500 words directly.
Eligibility to access the fund is based on rolling applications and the fund has just been launched so data around its impact is not yet available. However, in line with its commitment to a transparent editorial process, submissions guidelines are now offered in French, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese and Arabic, indicating the magazine’s growing inclusive approach.
Although 78.5% of people interviewed for the audit agreed that Alliance was doing a good job when engaging writers from underrepresented regions prior to the creation of the fund, the initiative will ensure that Alliance remains an open, accessible resource and publication for all.
So how can the heritage sector champion diverse voices?
Inclusive practices may differ from organisation to organisation but, crucially, they can be implemented without significant time and resources. Sweet Patootee Arts and Queer Britain are both useful case studies for this, demonstrating how digital platforms can be utilised cost effectively and by organisations of all sizes.
The Alliance Inclusion Fund also offers an example of good practice, demonstrating how resources can be ring-fenced to support and champion marginalised voices. This approach secures funding for projects addressing diversity, allowing more representative networks and audiences to be formed.
Is your organisation championing diverse voices? Do you have an example of best practice? Let us know @OfficialCause4