The Inclusion Agency CIC (TIA) is a community interest company championing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in the arts, heritage and education across the southwest region. We were founded in July 2019 by Co-Directors Louisa Adjoa Parker and Louise Boston-Mammah. This financial year, 2024-2025, we have benefited the community by: Continuing to provide our consultancy services online and in-person to enable the community to access our EDI work which includes meetings, training, resources, projects and support. Our website www.theinclusionagency.co.uk continues to provide access to our services for anyone who needs it, providing both online and in-person services. We have worked with our clients with care, empathy and understanding. We continue to attract new clients in the southwest, and nationally. This year we have worked with the Royal Cornwall Museum, now called Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery; the Poetry Society; Stockland Bristol Trust; and River Action UK. We offer all potential new clients a free 30-minute meeting online to assess their needs and match them with the services we provide, or refer them to others that might be able to support them better. Any critical feedback is dealt with swiftly, adjusting training and resources as we go, and outlining any improvements to our clients, continually improving our offer. Professionally supporting black and brown people of the southwest, and beyond, ensuring their voices are heard through our work. This year, we were appointed as specialist advisors on the legacy of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans (TTEA) and its abolition for the Stockland Bristol Trust in the development phase of their project, Parallel Pasts – Connected Futures. We helped them engage with African Diaspora and Global Majority individuals and organisations in the southwest for their proposed National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) project based in the village of Stockland Bristol and the Church of St Mary Magdalene. We held 8 conversations/consultations with 10 people, 3 of whom were from Somerset African Caribbean Network (SACN) and a key partner for the project. They are all intersected with key areas for activities such as education, faith, community, culture, heritage and equalities sectors. We asked questions on how best to engage authentically and sensitively with Stockland Bristol’s connections with the TTEA. One of the main findings that emerged from our conversations was the need to put the story of the 4424 enslaved Africans whom Thomas Daniel, a Bristol-based merchant, was compensated for, at the heart of all activities. Too often stories are told about the slave traders and not the Africans who were enslaved. We strongly recommended their histories were at the centre of Stockland Bristol’s interpretation of their connections with the TTEA. One participant said: “My focus would be more on the 4424 rather than on the Daniel family. The idea of enslaved lives, compensating a community. There might be a few of us who feel if we're going to have a conversation, let's start with talking about the 4424.” Another participant said: “Talk about the numbers but also the value of one person. So many enslaved Africans are not named – try and find the names. Who were the 4424 enslaved Africans? What do we know about them? Need more research to tell the story better.” We attended a project open day at the village of Stockland Bristol on 10 May to share our findings so far, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting all the project stakeholders including members of the village, church, nursing home, social club and fellow project workers. Our findings and recommendations for activities have become part of the project’s TTEA activities plan and we look forward to seeing them come to fruition. Co-creating and developing high quality EDI training with a focus on anti-racism. We continue to cover all protected characteristics when working with many of our clients building on our previous listening circles training with Natural England. But our lived experience mainly covers "race", racism and anti-racism in the southwest. This year we worked with a new client, the Poetry Society and co-created a new online training session for 30 stanza reps across the UK called Exploring equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) through poetry: a webinar with The Inclusion Agency (TIA). We included an exploration of the work of diverse and under-represented poets, as well as some free writing, which was very well received. “We've had lots of great feedback from the session and the slides were also appreciated by those who weren't able to attend.” Billie Manning, Learning and Participation Co-ordinator, The Poetry Society We also worked with another new client, River Action UK, and co-created a new online training course for 20 environmentalists working across the organisation consisting of 2 sessions: one called Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Environmental Justice; the other called Community Engagement and Environmental Justice. This exciting new course has led us to hire a specialist trainer, Jenny Thatcher who currently works for Friends of the Earth. The first session was successfully delivered in June, and the second session will be delivered in September. We are looking forward to where this new training course and partnership might take us. "You’ve both put a lot of thought and energy into preparing for it, so thank you. We’re really looking forward to the [second] session when it does go ahead.” Chloe Peck, Senior Communities Coordinator, River Action UK Auditing organisations’ EDI work, sharing feedback and actions for change. We worked with another new client, the Royal Cornwall Museum (RCM), now called Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery, to carry out an EDI review of their website and social media; marketing and publicity; policies and action plans; and to gather staff feedback on their EDI journey. Together we co-created questions for 1-to-1, in-depth staff conversations, and for a hybrid group consultation. We held four 1-to-1 interviews; received 3 written responses and one focus group attended by 6 staff. We received a fascinating insight into one heritage organisation’s journey through change. We created a working document, with a 6-month action plan that featured some key quick wins and longer-term goals creating a common framework and language for inclusion, which was gratefully received. Quotes from staff consultation participants: “I would encourage us to shout about it a bit more if we're taking that stance and supporting everybody. It's always good to tell the public as well, this is a place where we try and promote EDI and inclusivity and try and challenge any discrimination.” “whatever policies we're putting in place need to run from the front door all the way into the offices.” We hope to continue our EDI journey with Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery in the future. Evaluating our own services for feedback, improvement, research and development. We continue to work across all protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 and go beyond into all lived experiences of prejudice and discrimination including socio-economic and rural factors relating to the southwest. But our perspective is through an anti-racist lens so our clients know our own lived experience is reflected in our EDI training. We continue to offer a blend of online and in-person services in response to clients’ needs and increase our accessibility using online facilities and technologies to improve how people can engage with, and respond to, our work online. We currently use Zoom but have experience with Microsoft Teams and Google Meets. We keep ourselves up-to-date with current conversations around EDI and are open to learning each client’s unique perspectives and journeys to co-create training, consultations and research. We continue to listen to those with diverse lived experiences which enriches and challenges our understanding of EDI, as well as others, using real world case studies to workshop real world practice. Recently, with our work with River Action UK we reflected on the relationship between "race" and the environmental sector to develop new training, bringing in new expertise to help us deliver this bespoke training. We reflect on any critical feedback which is dealt with swiftly, adjusting training and resources as we go, and outlining any improvements we will make to our clients. We reflect on how we deliver our work, as well as our content, ensuring that empathy, respect and listening is at the core of what we do. We always encourage those we work with to look to members of their own staff teams to embed and sustain good EDI practice in their own organisations. We continue to build a network of EDI practitioners and Black and Global Majority individuals and organisations who have a body of lived experience around "race", racism, anti-blackness and anti-racism in the southwest. We recommend them to clients as partners, or as alternative trainers, if outside our expertise. We still want to develop more online services in the future, including potential training packages, webinars, blogs, etc., which will take more research, development and investment. We will continue to research funding opportunities and partnerships to do this.

TIA’s stakeholders are: -Black, brown and ethnically diverse individuals and organisations in the southwest who we enable to share their lived experience through our consultations, research and training -Wider communities and organisations in the arts, culture, heritage and education sector in the southwest, and nationally, including the private and voluntary sector, who are committed to embedding EDI in their policies and practices -People from all backgrounds living in the southwest who seek to make it a fairer, happier place to live, work and study. Co-directors, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Louise Boston-Mammah have lived experience of issues of rural racism having lived in the southwest most of their lives and being of Black African and White British mixed heritage. We share our experiences, and the experiences of others who have suffered discrimination through lived experience of a range of protected, and non-protected characteristics, in the training, support and guidance we give. For any Individual’s lived experience we use as part of our training, we seek permission and/or anonymise to protect their identity. We co-create bespoke training and services with all our clients and ask all clients, service users and project participants for feedback and how they might want us to improve and develop in the future through evaluation activities or interviews. This has helped us develop our knowledge of all the protected characteristics and other areas of disadvantage and discrimination and improve, or remove, our training. We now co-create bespoke training and consultations with others who have lived experience of different characteristics from our own and this is enriching our training, services and our own professional development. This year we worked with Jenny Thatcher who is from an environmental background. We keep up-to-date with new facilities on Zoom to keep our online audiences engaged, and work in partnership with others to engage new audiences. Our work with Stockland Bristol Trust this year has been developed in full consultation with their project team to develop appropriate questions for our conversations. We also met all project stakeholders at an Open Day held in the village of Stockland Bristol where we met people living in the village, church members, those who live in the local nursing home and attend the local social club, as well as fellow project workers which gave us the opportunity to exchange our ideas about the project and answer any questions about our own work, and ask questions of others. We particularly reached out to Somerset African Caribbean Network (SACN), who work to promote the culture and heritage of African and Caribbean communities in Somerset, to be a delivery partner on the project going forward. They joined the consultations, helped reshape the focus of the TTEA activities and gave us valuable feedback in our approach to talking about the TTEA. Quotes from feedback from SACN: “Focus also on the personalisation of the 4424 [enslaved people] as much as we can, finding the individual stories; need to be very sensitive about certain aspects of the history. [e.g. enslaved people sold not captured]” “Important to tell the other part of the story, some of the enslaved people that were actually in the UK who were brought over here; little Black boys that were trendy at the time. You can go to e.g., the National Trust houses, and see photographs where there's one of these children. Those voices and those stories. Landowners brought them over, as servants, some would have stayed in the local area.”

£13588

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