Funding ‘criteria’ tell you what a funder will or won’t support, but organisational ‘constraints’ ultimately determine what gets funded, says Kevin Osborne.
A new strand of political correctness is reshaping conversations on race: the idea of ‘lived experience’ driving the debate. While the intention is good, Kevin Osborne argues it throws up new questions.
A reluctance to share opinions openly is a significant block to achieving racial equity. But as Kevin Osborne argues, without understanding prevailing attitudes to racial inequity we are unlikely to reach effective solutions.
The fight for racially equitable funding in the creative industries is what drove Kevin Osborne to set up Create Equity. Here he argues the need for Black and White leaders to work together to make it happen.
Covid, the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement all led to an outpouring of statements committing to action on racial inequality in arts funding. Kevin Osborne’s initial optimism about that has since been tempered.
Can using public money to make BAME* entrepreneurs successful be in the public interest if it makes them wealthy too? Kevin Osborne sets out the challenge.
Kevin Osborne has long been exercised by systemic racial bias in UK arts funding. Last month he produced a panel discussion aimed at ‘digging deep’.
With a Government report recommending the dropping of the term BAME, people have been challenging Kevin Osborne’s continued use of it. He remains ambivalent about the proposed change.
The distribution of Arts Council England’s Culture Recovery Fund has attracted widespread criticism, not least from those campaigning for greater diversity. Kevin Osborne calls for urgent action.
To future-proof the creative sector we must root out systemic funding bias against BAME organisations, says Kevin Osborne, starting with an equitable sharing of the £1.57 billion bailout package.