By Josephine Reichert, Ort Gallery.
Creating a welcoming community space
Ort Gallery is a visual arts and poetry organisation based in the residential area Balsall Heath in Birmingham. We started in 2011 with an arts and community cafe in an old warehouse. There were three of us at the start: Ridhi, Noemi and myself. In 2011, the highstreet lacked spaces for people to spend time in. It was important to us to create a space where people could spend time, be warm, meet others and do all this for no money or at a very low cost (a cup of tea cost 50p). We never asked people to leave or consume more. Very quickly people came to our space and felt safe there, people who were local to the area and some who travelled here. It had a unique, relaxed atmosphere that not many spaces had at the time.
From the beginning it was really important to us to be welcoming to the local Muslim community who live on our doorstep and make up almost 80% of Balsall Heath residents. At the time we had no Muslim team members. So, when local homeschooling families told us about a need for arts provision for their children in the area – we listened. We worked with local artists to create free or low-cost workshops, events and exhibitions that were culturally sensitive and always responded to the need we were told was growing.
It worked – of course – so when we took over the gallery space upstairs from the cafe in 2012 to explore more artistic opportunities with artists, we knew that we would need to use the same approach: let the community lead. It took us a few years to get it right, but we are now led by a team of creatives, with the lived experience of the community who not only design our projects but also lead them. Developing this community leadership has been really important as it shows our audiences that we take them seriously and that we genuinely care about their experiences and safety within our space.
Discomfort and challenge
A key turning point occurred in 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement resurfaced and many artists felt empowered to finally speak out against the oppression they had previously experienced in arts organisations all over the country. At Ort Gallery, we also received a number of complaints. One, which was aimed directly at me, was particularly hard to digest because not only was the complainant right, but I had been sitting on this knowledge and feeling of discomfort for over 3 years without acting on it. Although we had been working towards becoming more community-led for years, it was clear the time had come for us to address this situation formally as an organisation and think carefully about our internal policies and processes. I also knew that I personally had to do some serious work and be held accountable for what I had done wrong and that we needed to work together to put protection mechanisms in place to stop this from happening going forward. In therapy I worked through the defensiveness and white fragility I was feeling. What I realised, too late, was that systemic barriers affect us all. I had been holding up the ideals of professionalism and what it meant to be productive without realising that in doing so I had discriminated against someone whose life experience was so much different from mine that I could not see how my behaviour was racist.
I had been holding up the ideals of professionalism and what it meant to be productive without realising that in doing so I had discriminated against someone whose life experience was so much different from mine that I could not see how my behaviour was racist.
It became clear to me, quickly, that I would need to step down as the artistic director. After 10 years of leading the organisation and growing it, I realised that I was also holding it back from becoming equitable.
Moving from equality to equity
Collectively, we then embarked on an internal review to ask ourselves whether we could truly be an equitable and inclusive organisation. For us, the need to move from equality to equity was urgent as equality assumes everyone comes to the table from the same starting point and when offered the same opportunities fairness can be established. But we had learnt, first hand, that this was not the case and many of our team members and participants came from very different starting points. Instead, equity addresses the systemic barriers that are put in people’s ways and puts forward ways to support people’s needs. Our starting point for achieving equity was recruitment. We knew that recruiting people to an organisation that is not a safe environment for people usually excluded from the arts would not be successful. Having worked in other, larger, arts organisations, I knew that the staff turnover amongst Black and Brown staff was often much higher than amongst white middle-class ones.
In those organisations, Black artists and Black-led companies were only invited or supported if there was a clear financial gain to be had. Often the programme was talked about very inappropriately both publicly and informally amongst the staff and audiences were treated differently as well. Despite publicly championing Black and Brown creatives no one even tried to understand their needs internally.
It became important to us to think of recruitment as embedded amongst all of our working methods and with a clear plan of implementing equity across the board. We started by (re)writing several other policies (safeguarding, pay parity, equitable opportunities and complaints policy). We also already had a board of directors (we are a CIC) that showed prospective applicants that we were serious about changing the landscape of white faces in leadership across the sector. Moreover, we had a track record of working with people from our community and listening to them, so we involved them in this process by paying them to review our organisation, feedback on our work, design and lead our next steps and make decisions as part of the team.
Recruitment is an especially important aspect to get right on the journey towards equity. It is the only time when we welcome new people into our organisation allowing us to be warm and supportive and it’s a time to show that we are serious about equity. Often this is the only time people thoroughly scrutinise an organisation to find out if the way this organisation presents itself online and in the vacancy call out aligns with:
– who sits on the board and since when,
– who is in senior management positions and since when,
– do we transparently share policies, funders, pay rates and partners,
– is there a high staff turnover,
– is there an acknowledgement of our anti-racist journey and a clear plan on how to improve this,
– are policies up to date?
We wanted to support people in feeling safe to ask these questions and so we started by making this information readily available on our website. We have pictures next to our team members, we share who our funders are, we share our policies publicly and we try to be as honest as possible online about when we mess up.
Moreover, we invited people into the organisation as part of the recruitment process, we met people on the phone, in person, in workshop settings and via zoom. We made them feel welcome and started a conversation that was honest and to the point. For example, we were clear about how the salary advertised was too low for what we would like to be paying and how our fundraising efforts going forward would be about improving salaries, access budgets and creating more long-term contracts. We tried our best to not ignore or be defensive in response to difficult questions.
We kept the information in our vacancy pack clear, jargon-free, transparent and simple. We also replaced all requirements for work experience or education with relevant life experience. We wanted people to feel like skills they may have made in other areas could be transferred to working with us and that we value lived experience beyond tokenism. We made sure that our panel for selection and interview was broad so we had diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, disability and faiths and we also invited people to join who were not part of the team but part of the bigger Ort community: participants, member artists for example. Ahead of the interview we sent out questions and we began each interview with a 5 minute informal chat to acknowledge nerves and make people feel more confident. If we felt they were too nervous or struggling to answer questions we made sure to take breaks. We also reassured people throughout and made it clear why we were asking questions. We wanted to get to know people and see if they were a good fit, not catch them out or trick them into making a mistake.
The last three rounds of equitable recruitment at Ort have been hard. They require extra energy on top of day to day work, they require generosity with time, they require us to open up about areas we would maybe prefer to hide away. However, for all the hard parts there were many more moments of joy and success: People from different walks of life applied for our roles, they fed back that they enjoyed applying to us even when they were not successful in getting the role, we met people we would have never met and proceeded to work with them in other ways later (they became directors on the board or we commissioned them for projects, etc.). Our team and panel enjoyed this long and hard process as it is more relaxed for all involved. This also had a knock-on effect for our working culture more generally.
Building radical empathy
What we have found within our team is that the move from equality to equity – in recruitment and beyond – requires real listening and a willingness to understand people with different backgrounds to your own. The first sign of defensiveness or martyrism clearly shows that things are not as smooth as we’d like to think. The radical changes required to make a place of work equitable are actually tiny, even minute, but often they go so far against the status quo that they seem unsurmountable. When a team member doesn’t pull their weight, for example, it is easy for the rest of the team to moan about how their work load is now falling on their shoulders. When a shareholder puts pressure on an organisation it is easy to pass this pressure onto those who are the most vulnerable. What we need, however, is radical empathy with those in our team who are struggling. We need to trust that they are not being productive because they have good reasons for not being able to, we need to support them the most when they are the least present. This is not an easy task.
The radical changes required to make a place of work equitable are actually tiny, even minute, but often they go so far against the status quo that they seem unsurmountable.
We can however make it easier on us by making adjustments within our team that are beneficial to all. For example: making access adjustments for all team members, being flexible, ditching a definition of professionalism that doesn’t serve us and replacing it with trust and understanding, asking people with lived experience different to our own for their thoughts, actually listening to them and paying them for their expertise, seeing people as holistic human beings, not machines or monolithic tropes and always being curious instead of judgmental.
It is also important to be aware that we can only support others if we have something left to give. Being overworked and glorifying busy-ness is not warm and it’s not healthy. Being humble and discerning takes a lot of mental and emotional energy: you can only do this if you have capacity. For most of us this means to do less, to produce less, to be less present online, and instead to think more, talk more, listen more and rest more.
Going through this process at Ort Gallery has been hard in many ways. I, myself, had to learn/am learning to shut up and just listen to the others in the room, especially when I am the only white person present. What I have realised is that my words hold power and often people will listen to me over others because of internalised white superiority. So, I try to shut up. As a team we had to remind ourselves not to follow the status quo just because everyone does it and instead had to reinvent, for ourselves, what it means to be professional or to be successful.
– Do we have to meet this deadline or can we ask for an extension?
– Can we tell the funder that their demands are causing our team stress and that they do not align with our ethos?
– Isn’t a project successful even if only 3 people benefitted from it?
– What boundaries do we each need to protect our mental health and how do we warmly communicate to those who overstep them?
– Are we leading by example and practising what we preach?
Creating sustainable ways of doing collective care
Unlearning is exhausting and triggering of past trauma, so it needs to be done slowly (think years, not days) and with care for each other. What we have found was that by asking creatives, team members, volunteers, interns, workshop participants and audiences to bring their whole selves in often also means they open up. This can mean some end up sharing their trauma which can be horrifying stories of their lived experiences. Whilst we want people to feel safe and know that we genuinely care about them as people, we are not qualified counsellors, we do not have weekly supervisions and we do not always know how to deal with what we hear and see.
Unlearning is exhausting and triggering of past trauma, so it needs to be done slowly (think years, not days) and with care for each other.
As a team we explored how to establish healthy boundaries and when and how to remind others, warmly, to respect them. We had to do it wrong in order to learn to do it right. The issue with trying out radically new approaches means there is no guidebook to reference. However, we often find that we already have the knowledge within us on how to handle these situations and to trust our gut feelings (with the help of therapy and research). It just takes a lot of time and energy to get there.
We now make this work part of our everyday work day. Instead of seeing equity as a separate issue we need to think about when required and an extra workload we have to carry on top of everything else, we ensure it is part of our job roles and therefore part of the work. It gets easier and we feel more confident with each month that passes!
Read our Equitable Recruitment Policy and other policies.
Find out more about our work.
Pictures:
- De’Anne Crooks CPD Workshop | Summer 2022 | Pic credit: Anisa Fazal
- Hayati Poetry Night Audience | Summer 2022 | Pic credit: Anisa Fazal
- Sumaya Ali at her Exhibition Opening with Artistic Lead Aaisha Akhtar | Autumn 2022 | Pic credit: Anisa Fazal
Thanks for posting this - really interesting and gets at the subtle ways in which power dynamics play out in organisations. Totally agree with your comment think years not days! I wonder if you could say a bit more about the accountability process which led to you stepping down as artistic director? It sounds like you engaged in that process amazingly well. When questions were asked about how myself and other co-founders were making decisions in our group we ended up feeling (and being) quite upset and defensive - and I think missed the opportunity to use our accountability process to properly explore the frustrations that people were trying to express. You mentioned getting therapy personally, but can you say a bit more about the collective processes you all went through? Thank you! @ortgallery
Hi Pero thanks for reading and engaging with the blog post!
I think it’s understandable to be defensive at first and I was very defensive myself too. It took me 3 years to get to a point where I realised that defensiveness wasn’t doing me/us any favours. Along the way many people supported me in my defensiveness and justified my own wrongdoings. In the end I trusted my gut that was telling me that there was more to be done that just find an excuse and move on.
Therapy helped in many ways. It allowed me to find empathy with my own actions and to see through structural inequalities. We are all part of a racist, unjust system and it can be very hard to understand how we, ourselves, are upholding injustices. So working through that on a personal level allowed me to see past my own issues and for the first time have enough mental space and capacity to hear what others were saying to me.
As a group we then explored what accountability means for us. Often words like “accountability” are very difficult to apply in practice so it’s important to break them down into digestible parts. On top of that many of us have our ego standing in the way. So we worked together, as a group, and made decisions by consensus about how to proceed. We continue to struggle with this. We remind ourselves every week to be kind to ourselves, not to martyr ourselves. We always start with the individual. Often we stand in our own way. When others remind me to be kind to myself, to take time, to process, then I realise that I am falling into old patterns.
We have set up a kind of collective therapy approach to work. And within this we have 11 rules that we stick to for every issue we come across (more often than not we get stuck on no.1):
Good luck to you and your group!
Thanks so much for this reply Josie and for sharing the detail of how you work through these complex issues together at Ort Gallery. I agree, as you say in the blog, that the radical shifts are often in the tiny day-to-day things. I think the rule of decentring yourself is particularly important - and so hard to do