Like many people across the world the team at China Plate were deeply shocked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The event itself, and the ongoing response to it, continues to make a deep impression on us all.
We want to re-confirm our solidarity with our Black colleagues, friends and family in trying to ensure that this moment in time has a lasting impact and that China Plate as an organisation contributes to making a difference.
To this end we have held a number of meetings with the management and wider team to interrogate what we can do to be an actively anti-racist company.
Over the course of the next 6 weeks we will be undertaking an audit of our past and planned activity and reflecting with our team and board as to how we go further to ensure that our mission, “challenging the way performance is made, who it’s made by and who gets to experience it,” is delivered in support of Black Lives Matter.
We will interrogate board, staff, artist, creative team and freelance diversity, the objectives of projects past and present, programming policy, the values that the company holds and the overall picture this creates. We will be aligning this process to the region-wide programme that Culture Central is leading through July in order to amplify and embed our findings. We anticipate that we will need to bring in outside expertise to help work through this and will identify what that is as the picture becomes clearer.
We expect that this process will result in change and we will commit to a carefully scheduled plan to deliver that change which we will share.
Image © Black Lives Matter organisation
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