Creative Equity Toolkit

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.

Preserving indigenous heritage and showcasing the arts of the Agta people

The Agtas are the aboriginal Filipinos who have been driven out of their lands to live on mountain tops and far-flung lakeshores. The Savage Mind Bookshop and its offshoot, Kamarin Art Gallery, have reached out to the Agta people of Lake Buhi to provide a means for them to create art, preserve their language and history, and ensure that their heritage and culture are not erased by the country’s rapid industrialisation.