COVID 19 — KIONDO Autumn Update (2020)
By: Andre D. N. Reid
Tags: Diversity And Inclusion, Discrimination, Wellbeing, Equity, Community

Earlier this year (2020), KIONDO moved to begin work in Walsall within the height of the UK’s COVID-19 pandemic. In spite of fears and apprehensions, we felt it necessary to use the situation as an opportunity to ‘pause’, and re-establish who we are as an organisation, what we do and why.

Within this time, we have made small strides in embedding ourselves more deeply into the Walsall community. Some of this work includes:

Securing 2 out of 3 units which made up the Old Hog Head Pub

Hosting UKBFTOG & the UK’s 1st Black Female Photographers Exhibit in Walsall.

Joining the Walsall Cultural Compact

Seeding a working partnership with the local authority, Walsall For All, Lord Wei & WHG

Pitching a £1.5mill expression of interest for the £25mill town fund coming to the region

Forming a small community group to share project updates & progress.

Although we planned to do much more within this time, our pace has been slowed by the national lockdown measures, so we have adjusted our working speed, as the world embraces living with COVID.

In this time we have continued stay present; learning about Walsall’s local organisations and their approaches to building and working with the local community. Despite their willingness toward openness, opportunities for all and sensitivity to different community groups and backgrounds, without avail, some organisations remain unaware of the unhappiness stemming from those same communities they serve.

For example, African & Caribbean communities in Walsall feel locked out of local opportunities. This is felt because some of Walsall’s larger organisations have tended to create experiences and opportunities for this community with little or no representation, nor consultation from those people from this background. Organisational finances in some areas are directed towards internal budgets for staff, which often do not reflect the external communities suffering from well-established inequalities. The local community register this behaviour as a haemorrhaging of resources that could be better directed into the hands of the people themselves.

The wider community often feel disconnected from local initiatives, and local ‘champions’ representing points of contact for the entirety of their perceived social group. This makes it easier to pigeonhole resources and can, at times, imply an entire community has received support when in fact a bottleneck has been created, with community champions, often unwittingly, becoming gatekeepers to groups they may not fully represent.

We must find a way to ensure that local underrepresented voices are able to access positions of influence in order to make the changes that will benefit all communities in Walsall.

Why is this important? Jennifer Blake said it well in her BHM talk with Walsall for All (Oct 26th 2020) — diversity & inclusion is more than a social good, it possesses benefits far outreaching moralistic measures — creating vast opportunities for the global economy, as well as providing the platform for greater community cohesion, health & wellbeing. These are all necessary components of the resilient communities of the future.

We cannot afford to be left behind //.

In spite of misconceptions, Walsall borough has a larger population and land area than neighbouring Wolverhampton and is home to approximately 285,500 residents who cannot afford to be left behind (Walsall Insight, Walsall Borough Council 2020)

Walsall already presents incredibly low levels of social mobility, with it being ranked 276 out of 326 (326# being the worst socially mobile places to live; Social Mobility Index 2017) and existing within the top 10 most deprived places to live within the entire UK. Another misconception is the demographic makeup of Walsall. There is a 70/30 split with 70% of the population of Walsall being White, and other ethnicities approaching 30%. Despite white residents possessing an institutional and economical advantage, they, as with every other group resident to Walsall, still suffer from the same disadvantages in quality of life, based on the level of local deprivation.

Walsall must embrace those from other ethnicities, backgrounds and cultural beliefs and unlock almost 90,000 potential problem solvers and solutions available from within the town, as well those who fall outside the statistics — like asylum seekers and the unregistered homeless. A staggering £127bn is lost every year in the UK based on discrimination to gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, when we could be benefiting from a £24bn boost by simply investing BME, according to the McGregor-Smith review, 2017.

Where we come in ///.

As we proceed, bringing to life ‘The People’s Studio’ — our project to create a sustainable, and most importantly, community-led creative village in the heart of Walsall town, our responsibility to address inequalities grows ever more imperative.

We feel an insatiable appetite to undertake work that directly serves to address local concerns and challenges — creating spaces to amplify residents, tenants and asylum voices to be the lead on recreating our town. Our venue, Blank Canvas as named by the people, and central to our creative village proposal, will act as a tool to aid Walsall’s underserved to reshape the town, by providing the space, tools and equipment to host experiments and create new experiences.

Before this year ends, we will be launching a programme of activities centred around local authorship, story-telling and citizen led knowledge production — creating space for unheard voices from the Walsall community to gather, share lived experiences, grow knowledge and build collective power. We are not doing this alone.

Walsall for All have begun to lead the way in supporting our efforts to address diversity and inclusion in Walsall by investing in our fund to help activate grassroots social change and create experiences led by Walsall’s migrant and BAME communities as part of their BHM contributions. We need to see more. We want to build a consortium, calling together Walsall’s leading organisations to collectively contribute to a pot that will have Walsall’s underrepresented, given the resources they need to address the challenges we’ve identified.

These efforts MUST extend beyond Black History Month, and become a staple practice in Walsall continuing into the new decade. We are talking to WHG and will be approaching Homeserve and Walsall’s other main employers to see where they stand in this agenda.