Everybody’s in the forest!
Stour Valley Arts’ equality and diversity policy
What are we aiming to achieve?
We work in partnership with artists and arts organisations, scientists and health professionals, environmental organisations and stakeholders to create high quality art that engages the public in the natural environment.
We believe that art has a stake in the stewardship of nature as do scientists, politicians and commercial organisations, and that we can more directly engage with the public and bring these stakeholders together through creative exploration.
Our values are
- Creativity in the natural environment
- Collaborative and communal
- Sustained and open dialogue
- Experimentation and discovery
- Change and regeneration
- Responsive and responsible
- Excellence and reflection
We believe that diversity is culturally productive for artists, audiences and communities, as it is ecologically productive in natural environments. The arts sector is beginning to use diversity as a way to increase the adaptive resilience of organisations, making them less vulnerable to unexpected change. Having undergone significant change over the last few years, Stour Valley Arts are seeking to develop our resilience through diversity in our work, in our thinking and operations, in our audiences and in the excellent art which we produce.
There are three areas in which we can meaningfully act with regard to equality and diversity:
- Creative diversity: a range of inclusive approaches to the arts and artists rather than a single dominant aesthetic, methodology, technology or framework
- Workforce diversity: an inclusive, representative range of people, with particular reference to gender, race, religion, class, ability, age, sexuality and education rather than a place where people look, sound and think the same as each other
- Audience or market diversity: markets or audiences for the arts which are inclusive rather than excluding any particular groups or communities; and different from each other rather than essentially very similar to each other.
Creative diversity
We will aim to work with a wide range of artists and artforms, ensuring our recruitment, development, commissioning and production processes are open to diverse practices and approaches.
Workforce diversity
We will develop our workforce where and when we can, enabling an inclusive, representative range of people with a range of skills, experiences and processes.
Audience or market diversity
We will develop our audiences and markets as inclusively as possible, and support audiences and markets with different needs from those of the dominant or majority audiences and markets.