Diversity & Difference

Anti-Racism Statement

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the resulting advancement of the Black Lives Matter movement, we have renewed our commitment to being an actively anti-racist arts organisation, serving, representative of, and accessible to all communities across Norfolk. We acknowledge that whilst great strides have been made in recent years to platform the works of Black artists, we have much to learn and unlearn in our current practices, both as an employer, and as an arts festival.

In October 2019, we established a Diversity & Difference working group, to oversee the delivery of the Festival’s Diversity Action Plan (see below). This group reports quarterly to our Board, and is working across departments to ensure that internal procedures (from recruitment processes to staff training) are reflective of recent anti-racism learnings.

The Festival’s artistic management will continue to ensure that external processes, such as Festival programming, reflect our aspiration to root diversity at the heart of our artistic work, as championed in Arts Council England’s Creative Case for Diversity.

Diversity and Difference

As well as anti-racism action, the Diversity & Difference group’s remit includes our commitments to ensuring that disabled artists and audiences, and artists and audiences from lower socio-economic backgrounds, are platformed and represented across the Festival’s work.

We are currently updating our learnings into a new Inclusion policy, whilst implementing a series of intersectional procedure changes aimed at improving our offer for audiences, artists and our workforce.

We commit to honestly updating this page as and when we have meaningful changes or findings to report.

Read our 2021-2022 Diversity Action Plan in full

Please note that the Diversity Action Plan includes terms that we now understand to be hurtful or inappropriate, such as BAME (as was highlighted in IncArt’s #BAMEOver campaign). Although we continue to use these terms for consistency’s sake, we will replace these terms in future documents and reporting.

Visit our Access Page