Welcome! Come in and join us.

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

This guide takes you on a journey through a session with Stand & Be Counted where you will find ideas for how to embed four values in your practice we consider vital for building equity.

  • WELCOME

  • OWNERSHIP

  • FLEXIBILITY

  • LISTENING

We made this guide because we want to promote and support creative empowerment within arts initiatives. The guide shares values, behaviours and activities we believe 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. 

We want to support the use of 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 and deliver interventions to build the confidence and capacity for everyone to reach their potential in their own spaces of education, work, home, family, and community.

Each section of The Welcome Toolkit answers the following questions to guide the implementation of our four key values with fun, warmth and joy:

  1. Why is this value important?

  1. What does it involve?

  2. How can we create this value?

A vital element of this practice 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 context and there is no better insight than sharing a space together. We hope that this guide can support you to build your capacity to deliver accessible, safe, ambitious and invigorating arts engagement for people seeking sanctuary.

The Welcome Toolkit leads the reader through a session; the behind the scenes planning and setup, the welcoming into a space, the activities, pointers on attending and the wellbeing of all involved.

Our guide to welcoming and listening aims to:

  • Promote the value of co-creation and listening

  • recognise aspects specific to co-creating with people seeking sanctuary

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

  • Acknowledge the resources, time and care needed to engage in co-created arts in an ethical and supportive way 

  • Highlight how developing creative skills builds valuable interpersonal, leadership and communications skills that support education and employment outcomes

  • Humanise, ensuring people seeking sanctuary have spaces to be themselves removed of that status

  • Ensure audiences of art created by people seeking sanctuary understand shared beliefs, values, and connections.

The guide was created with Soap Box Collective - a collaboration between people who came to the UK from around the world to seek sanctuary from persecution, alongside arts practitioners, film-makers and university researchers. Read more about us in the ‘About Us’ section at the end!

The approaches we share in this guide may also be useful to developing arts-based practices with a range of groups of people who use different languages and ways of communicating and who have a range of cultural and racialised identities. 

This guide focuses on best practice when working with young people and adults. Stand & Be Counted deliver similar programmes for children and offer insight and guidance for this work elsewhere.

This practice exists at the exciting intersection of arts and social justice. We know effective change and progress is made in collaboration with one another. Transformation thrives when hierarchical structures are reduced. Our approaches are designed to generate equity and build spaces within which a balance of power and autonomy can be achieved. 

Let’s get into it!

The Welcome Toolkit

Start Course Continue Course Retake Course Preview Course Learn More
Retake this course?
Retaking this course from the beginning will reset all of your tracked progress.
Retake