Creative Equity Toolkit

Life Jacket Project

In Palestine, the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation developed The Life Jacket project, to collaborate with communities to restore threatened historic buildings and to repurpose them as community spaces.

“Riwaq prioritises protecting and using local knowledge when preserving history, and adapting it to contemporary societal needs. This creates a dialogue that considers young people, heritage and indigenous knowledge.”

Making music accessible to the visually impaired

Founded in 2001, the Wusate Birhan Abera Music Training Centre was created to offer music education for the blind and visually impaired in Ethiopia, enabling aspiring young musicians to follow their passion and work towards a career in the music industry.

Marginalised Voices in Midtown Cairo

El-Dammah Theatre has presented diverse and displaced musicians to mainstream Egyptian audiences since August 2010.

In the new era of economic openness, art became a commercial enterprise. I want to restore its spiritual value by establishing and sponsoring bands, producing albums and documentaries about them, and connecting them with other bands through international tours.” - Zakaria Ibrahim, Founder, El Dammah Theatre

Megan Evans: Owning her Colonial Past

This interview with settler artist Megan Evans, whose work explores privilege, oppression and the impacts of colonisation on First Nations people, and brings attention to the way that the violence and oppression of whiteness is layered. She questions the meaning of collaboration with Indigenous artists and Community, since it implies coming together on “equal” terms and overlooks the power held by non-Indigenous actors and entities in this dynamic.

Participatory Grantmaking Aims to Dismantle Power Imbalances between Funders and Communities

An interview with Urban Institute fellow Jasmine Johnson about participatory grant making. It provides insights into some of these knowledge gaps through a qualitative study of 10 funders in small, midsize, and large cities across the USA. Johnson gives key takeaways from her study in this interview, three things to consider before adopting participatory grant making and the challenges of using this funding model.