WELCOME TO THE TOOLKIT!

This guide is for people who use or want to use arts-based activities, techniques and practices to co-create arts interventions to bring together people from different backgrounds, dismantle hierarchies and to challenge and rebalance unequal power dynamics. It is for practitioners, researchers, funders and advocates.

What you’ll learn

  • promote and support creative empowerment within arts initiatives

  • Introduce the arts practices Stand & Be Counted uses to build wellbeing and transform lives

  • share activities, behaviours and values that have the potential to support sharing power with people from a migrant background, not as participants or ‘service users’, but as leaders and experts with skills, knowledge, experience and creativity.

  • offer practical tools for embedding safe, transformative collaboration in your work.

We have created this guide to support you to use arts-based methods to safely engage, empower and co-create with people seeking sanctuary ensuring that these communities lead on decision-making, personal and community development.

These modes of engagement can diversify workforces in the arts as well as delivering interventions to build the confidence and capacity for everyone to reach their potential in their own communities and spaces of education, work, home, family, and community.

Inside this guide are activity and care plans to take you right from conception of a project through to empowering creative evaluation of a programme.

The guide leads the reader through a session, from background setup, to welcoming into a space, to activities, and pointers on attending to the wellbeing of all involved. 

A vital element of this work is flexibility and remaining responsive to those we are in a room with at all times. Not every aspect of this guide will fit neatly with your work and there is no better insight than sharing a space together - we invite you to reach out and join us but we hope that this guide can support you to ensure every element of your practice is accessible, safe, ambitious and invigorating for people seeking sanctuary.

“We are inspired and we want you to be inspired!”

- Alina Aleva