In early June, Create released a public statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In early July, we published a pledge outlining how we will deliver our own organisational change and promising to publish an update on progress in October.

Over the past three months there have been a number of changes.

We have appointed David Bryan, a consultant who has been working within the arts, voluntary and public sectors for over 30 years, to assist and guide us in this process. David has been involved in anti-racist work for many years and is committed to supporting and delivering real and measurable culture change. His work with us is wide ranging and includes change management, organisation reviews, leadership training, equality and diversity and much more.

David is beginning with individual confidential consultations with all staff.  In response to these sessions, David intends to design a specific programme for his work jointly with the team and to spend at least 12-18 months working with us. We will also invite other specialists to facilitate workshops and discussions.

After this initial consultation period David will make recommendations for actions to tackle structural racism and inequality pertaining to our organisation’s structure, recruitment and HR policies, the composition of Create’s Board of Trustees, our fundraising and partnership policies, our curatorial and project initiation processes and commissioning of artists, creative practitioners and working with grassroots organisations.

Sitting alongside this review, we are now actively recruiting for a new Chair of our Board of Trustees, with up to six new board members to be appointed over the next 12 months. 

We have prioritised time each week for discussion of our action plan with the whole team and introduced tackling structural racism as a standing agenda item for board meetings. We have also taken actions to bring our staff and board closer together, holding focused discussion sessions on the programme and organisational change with board and team members, to more adequately and openly reflect the changes to our organisation, and to specifically review our progress on anti-racism.

David’s review and recommendations will continue over the next months and we will provide another update on our progress in January. In the meantime, if you have any questions, reflections or feedback about this process, please contact us on change@createlondon.org