What the Crafts Council is doing to erase racism and inequality in the craft sector

The murder of George Floyd and subsequent outpouring of pain and protest has brought the urgency with which we need to tackle racism and inequality into sharp focus around the globe.

Ongoing conversations within the Crafts Council about the need to take a stand as an actively anti-racist organisation prompted our response to these events.

This stimulated a great deal of discussion and debate about our own actions in tackling racism. And the need for us to take a greater stand in challenging the craft sector to address its racial inequality and lack of diversity and take an actively anti-racist stance.

It was clear that there needed to be a more in-depth conversation than social media allows and for us to explore, agree and act upon the ways in which we can work to tackle racism in the craft sector.

We held a public meeting with the aim of discussing how we:

• Publicly acknowledge Crafts Council’s responsibility for deconstructing racism, both within our own organisation and the craft sector as a whole and commit to addressing this.
• Frame and outline some of the ways that racism has shaped the craft sector.
• Begin to explore the structures, processes and actions that will enable ongoing, meaningful change within the sector; and how Crafts Council will commit to taking these forward.
• Discuss how Crafts Council can share our organisational power with others in order to embed anti-racist practice.

A subtitled recording of this meeting is available below.

We would like thank Dr Karen Patel, Rose Sinclair and Jay Blades all of whom gave important and compelling contributions to the debate; Amanda Parker of Inc Arts UK who facilitated the meeting; and all those who attended.

Since then we have:

• Updated the commitments the Crafts Council was making to take on board the comments made at the meeting and are redrafting a plan for the year which will be uploaded onto our website.
• We have also surveyed all attendees to the event and will be contacting anyone who would like to be involved in further work to tackle racism and inequality in the craft sector.
• We have advertised a seminar in September to discuss the post-COVID-19 recovery in education including decolonising of the curriculum.
• We will continue to work on delivering our commitments to tackling racism and inequality in the craft sector and will provide an update in six months time.