Suffolk Artlink is a participatory arts charity that brings creativity into the heart of communities in Suffolk.

Our approach to equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging includes a person centred approach, artist and sector development and aiming for staff and board with diverse lived experience.

We take a person centred approach. This is essential to meet the needs of everyone we work with and enables us to work with some communities whose needs are less embedded in wider culture e.g. learning disabled adults attending Brave Art sessions or adults living with complex health needs attending Curious Minds sessions.

Part of the way we ensure we are person centred in by having project development officers involved in all stages of a programme including the design, delivery and evaluation of a programme. This creates a direct link between project design, learning through incidental conversations with people we work with and structured evaluation. We highly value the benefit that project development officers gain through face to face contact with people we work with, partly because communities include diverse ranges of individuals and it is through this approach that we can achieve the level of nuance to help people feel like they belong.

We join this with aiming to remove barriers before participant involvement and not expecting individuals to be educators. An example of this is our approach to accessible communication. We use functionality such as alt text on our social media posts, human made open and closed captions on our videos and and asking venues about parking, toilets and other physical access information to have on our session pages. A success of this is ensuring that our Extra Time project Footballing Stories include both text and captioned audio versions.

We have artist development projects such as Little Beats for musicians, facilitators and early years providers. We have artists from a diverse range of backgrounds and develop their practice for under 5s. This includes CPD sessions which are delivered by professionals, artists and academics. An example of CPD is how to be person centred with pre-verbal participants. Practice developed includes examples such as an artist developing drumming based on their Cape Verde heritage.

We have learning disabled artists who are board observers.

Our person centred approach includes encouraging our staff to have a sense of belonging. We know this involves being able to openly talk about when things go well and when things don’t. We are a female led organisation with neurodiverse staff team that includes a mix of cultural heritages, genders, sexualities and is neurodiverse.