Creative Equity Toolkit

Cultural education has to be about improving outcomes for mob, not making white people feel better

'I don’t think the problem of racism, now or at any point in history, is because of a lack of ‘cultural awareness’. The myth that colonisation happened to us because the colonisers didn’t understand us...
That isn’t a ‘cultural awareness’ problem, it’s a colonisation problem; a white supremacy problem. If you want to understand why colonisation happened then you need to learn about racism and colonisation, not about Indigenous cultures.'

DARTS Community Arts and Cultural Development presentation

A presentation for Arts Tasmania by Diversity Arts Australia which gives the basics on community arts and cultural development, the backstory and nuances of the terminology, principles of community and cultural development practice and the critical elements of the practice: practice, empowerment, responsiveness and relevance to community.

It includes guiding questions to help you ensure cultural safety, respecting agency - giving resources for building a more critical practice.

Engaged Communities

Infographic with top tips on engaging respectfully with communities, including outlining different types of community engagement (such as the difference between collaborations, co-creations and consultations) and tips on managing power, responsibility and the project's legacy.

Ethics and engagement in community art

A discussion of the difficulties of getting engagement right, particularly in rural communities. "An ethics of mutual learning and openness" must offer not just "representation, but also ownership". Shuvangi Khadka adds "outside artists must remain open to their own vision being radically changed via community critique."

Exploding traditional ideas of leadership

Styled as a ‘leadership program for non-leaders’, Front & Centre works with creative women and nonbinary people with disability or who are d/Deaf. Central to the program is a total reimagining of the concept of leadership. The program encourages looking beyond the usual suspects to affirm and support potential leaders.

"When people are feeling safe, they are empowered to speak up about what matters to them, what is meaningful to them, what is passionate to them."

Eugenie Lee

Filmmaking and Worldmaking: An Interview with the Karrabing Film Collective

This interview details the process of filmmaking undertaken by the Karrabing Film Collective, a grassroots Indigenous based media group, which moved away from initially engaging non-Indigenous collaborators and usual ways of working in film production, to a methodology that suited the collective’s needs and goals.