Creative Equity Toolkit

Best Practice Flows From My Connection to Community: Libby Collins

Libby Collins, Tiwi Islander and Producer at GARUWA, gave her checklist:

Engage early with mob when developing blak-specific work
Value the information you receive and the people who have given it to you
Have the cash to pay people what they’re worth
Value the connections they bring that you wouldn’t have without them
Ensure that your people are with you throughout the whole process
Bring community in and find initiatives that allow for your finished projects to be accessible for community mob.

Embracing diversity through food in multicultural Malaysia

In Malaysia, Arts-ED’s ‘You Think You Can Masak’ (‘Cook’) program bring together young people to learn about their own, their friends’ and their community’s cultural beliefs and practices through food.

"One of the program’s main goals was to highlight the similarities, not just the differences, in the variety of dishes and cooking styles through shared ingredients."

First Nations First — Best Practices for Creating with Community: Genevieve Grieves

Worimi educator and storyteller Genevieve Grieves co-created storytelling and production company GARUWA with her brother Kieran Satour.

'We’re interested in shifting that dynamic by exploring new models of co-creating that bring the storyteller — the person whose story we are sharing — to the fore, giving them complete control over how their story’s represented… the person who would normally be the director takes the role of producer and the person whose story is being told is the director.'

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.

The art-ivism of Malaysia’s Pangrok Sulap

Pangrok Sulap is an art collective which engages with a diverse range of performers, civil society organisations (CSOs) and the public in their art-ivism. This group is famously known for creating woodcut prints to tell the unknown stories of Sabah’s rural community, helping to preserve rural culture and traditions as well as amplifying calls for environmental protection, democracy and human rights.