YAS. We have been awarded resourcing racial justice funding
Back head shot from Whose Culture lab - taken by @Shamphat
Euella & Roseanna from the Rising team talk resourcing racial justice all the while asking, 'whose culture?'
What a whirlwind it’s been. In 2018 we asked the city a question, a question that brought young people together to have conversations about creativity, culture, identity and belonging on their terms. That question was ‘Whose Culture Is It Anyway?’.
Before long, the question that had started in our minds and in conversations with creative ally Zahra Ash-Harper, had morphed into a two-year long project. Working with young POC (People of Colour) groups and individuals, Creative Producer, Roseanna Dias, Social Media Manager, Fatima Murtala Safana, and the wider Rising team developed an in-depth programme of online and offline activity to initiate conversations and explore ‘culture’ from a community perspective. At the heart of this exploration was our explicit challenge to the hegemony* of culture and cultural gatekeeping that exists in our sector: and the unwritten, but very real, rules about who gets to create, what, why and for/with who, and who gets to decide.
"There is a great arts and cultural vibe in Bristol but not necessarily for people of colour"
– Whose Culture Survey Respondent
We’re gearing up to publish the Whose Culture report that details the journey we took as a creative community to embark on that flagship project, and some of the lessons, challenges and reflections we have taken from it.
The learning from Whose Culture has gone on to inform everything we do, including our transforming leadership programme, ‘BE IT’, ‘Whose Future’, our radical billboard campaign and ‘Our Culture’, a Co-Creating Change commissioned project working with different groups of young people in the city to explore social justice in the arts (but we’ll save the details of that for another blog post).
In many ways the learning and relationships from Whose Culture armed us with the power to interrogate and rewrite the narrative. It helped us understand what Rising’s role in supporting POC creatives could and should be: how important it is to us to do in-depth engagement work that moves at a pace that is in-step with our communities, helping us co-create alternative blueprints for working with people that the sector defines as ‘other’. Its legacy also helps us actively resist cultural sector initiatives led purely by numbers or outcomes and not the people it should serve; the community. Whose Culture also prepared us for some of the more difficult challenges that come with doing this critical work; through the power of reflection.
2020 was tough. But you don’t need us to tell you that. We’ve been doing the work to fight against racism and systemic oppression in the creative sector since we were founded in 2016. It soon became clear, however, that with the impact of racial trauma on our team and community; the disproportionate threat of COVID-19 on POC communities; widening structural inequalities; and the mainstreaming of these issues, that we needed to reflect on how we can strategically sustain ourselves and our work whilst responding to the needs of our community.
“I want Bristol to know that there are plenty of us, that we’re talented and we’ve got a unique flair - that you probably need.”
- Olumide Osinoiki - Rising Featured Artist
Why Are We Not Here? Exhibition
In light of this, we put together a successful bid to the Resourcing Racial Justice fund - a coalition of POC innovators, change makers, activists, artists and social leaders dedicated to social change. Together, they established a UK-wide funding pool to support 52 individuals, organisations and communities working towards racial justice. Rising’s bid focusses on bolstering our anti-racist activism work and intersectional approaches - centring care, reflection and critical interrogation. It covers Creative Producer, Roseanna Dias’, time to work two days a week as a critical thinker/provocateur, and one day a week for our Engagement Producer, Euella Jackson, to support this work. It's also enabling us to offer spaces for our POC community in ways that work for them - through 121s, gatherings and creative commissions and collaborations. Over the next few months, we will continue to focus on how best to support our team and community and how we can continue to develop more intersectional strategies for all our work. We’re also really looking forward to having strategic conversations with our allies in other organisations and regions of the country
We want to be brave with this work and will use this fund to carve out space for:
Prioritising Care and Nurturing Communities
We hope to develop a methodology for care that is true to our mission as an organisation - and that alleviates the burden of POC members in the team.
Challenging and informing
We want to interrogate our own systems and privileges as well as those of others. We hope to contribute to how anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice is understood and practiced, and hold the city/sector accountable - in similar ways to our Whose Culture pilot.
“The instances of cultural connection are usually felt from other individuals in the same boat as myself in the creative sector. The actual cultural sector does the opposite. I like it because I get real work opportunities I wouldn’t get outside of these spaces but I see it all as just work mainly, not actual connection with real people. Real artistic and cultural connection is felt with my friends, family and people, not a disconnected sector that pushes ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ (hate those buzz words btw) as a trend so as not to receive backlash from a growingly conscious and loud audience. That was a rant and I could say a lot more on the subject but it tires me if I’m honest”
– Whose Culture Survey Respondent
Through the Resourcing Racial Justice fund, we are able to build on the powerful mandates from Rising’s POC communities and our friends and allies in the sector to keep pushing for change - and most importantly understand how we can make this process a sustainable one.
We see change all about us and we’re incredibly excited and inspired by some of the incredible POC-led initiatives that are new like Mena Fombo and Mike Jenkin’s Bristol African Caribbean Cultural Space, and those that have been around for a longer time, like BSWN and Malcom X Centre. We also know and hold in tension the fact that change, in particular radical change, is slow but we’re in it for the long game.
This work is about imagining, articulating and building the future we’re fighting for - cultural lives and industries which embrace young people and young people of colour, which recognise them as the cultural leaders of TODAY, one which welcomes them with open arms and allows them to take up space, develop ideas and have impact on their terms.
If this sounds like something you’re interested in too, we urge you to sign up to our newsletter to find out when the Whose Culture report is published. We are putting everything into ensuring this report will document some of the challenges, opportunities and practical steps you can take to move towards this, and you can contact us roseanna@rising.org.uk and euella@rising.org.uk to chat about how you can support or how we can work together.
“I’ve never been proud of Bristol until today. Because now I see there is stuff going on, and maybe I can have a creative career here. People say you have to go to London, but I don’t want to - this is my home, my life is here. I want to stay here. I feel like I could do that now”
– Whose Culture Lab Participant