Diversity & Inclusion Toolset
Just like the toolset you keep in your supply closet, this toolset is supposed to help you build something. Only, we’re not talking about assembling shelves and wardrobes here, but festivals. More specifically: festivals that are for everyone.
On paper, most festivals already seem to be open for everyone. But if we are really honest with ourselves, we know there are still people who don’t come to our festivals, although they would like to. For example, because we forgot to post access information on our website, because they feel as if they wouldn’t fit in, or they’re afraid they’ll be harassed for being different. The same applies to potential employees who would like to work in our teams and artists that would like to perform on our stages.
Please note: This toolset deals with discrimination in many forms, including sexual harassment and assault. Although we don’t talk about specific cases, the texts might trigger unpleasant memories or past trauma. Please consider if this is the right topic for you at the moment, and take a break from reading if you feel unwell.
This toolset is full of resources that can help you create more inclusive and diverse festivals – for the audience, artists and your own team. Resources include guides, tests, checklists, interviews, databases, toolkits, roadmaps, reports, games and action plans. Most were created by different expert organizations all across Europe and sometimes even beyond.
Other contents were created by the project team, e.g., 13 stories of festivals and projects that have implemented measures for more inclusion and diversity. We wrote these stories, so you can find inspiration and learn more about good-practices that you can replicate at your own festival.
Each resource and story is introduced with a few key facts, a teaser of the contents, and a link to yourope.org. There, you will find full texts explaining the tools and good-practice examples in detail, as well as download links of the resources.
Although different types of discrimination (e.g. relating to ethnicity, gender or disability) often overlap, we tried to give this toolkit a structure by dividing the tools into chapters dedicated to different forms of discrimination.
Three chapters cover strategies to counter ableist, racist, sexist and gender-based discrimination. A chapter is dedicated to creating more consciousness and awareness around diversity topics; another one talks about allyship – how can we fight discrimination, even if we are not the target of discrimination ourselves? The last chapter contains our inspirational good-practice stories.
In this toolset, we use some acronyms and terms that are not self-explanatory. Instead of explaining them each time we use them, we have assembled a glossary. If you don’t know what “FLINTA*”, “ableism”, “PwD”, and “BIPoC” means, don’t worry! We explain it to you in our glossary. You can even find a longer version with more terms online.
Plus, we have written a ‘Diversity Mission Statement’ that you are free to copy and adapt to your own festival. With this mission statement, you publicly declare your dedication to creating a more diverse and inclusive festival and set the course for your organization.
This toolset was developed by a team of event professionals and experts on different diversity and inclusion topics from the YOUROPE network. Although its members come from six different countries, we were painfully aware that our group consisted largely of white, hetero, cis-gendered people without disabilities. To check our own unconscious biases, we put together an advisory board of external experts from different countries and backgrounds that have experienced discrimination themselves, e.g., because they are black, queer or have a disability. They reviewed our texts to make sure they are representative of the groups of people this toolkit is dedicated to.