Hello everyone and welcome to 2021!
We hope that everyone was able to get some rest over the transition into the New Year, and that hopes are high for the unpredictable year ahead.
Thanks to Arts Council England, we are able to continue our work over the next six months, but we want you to help us shake things up a bit!
What are we doing differently?
We’ll be having monthly ‘Coffee Table’ meetings as well as smaller working group meetings, and will be saving the bigger, more formally structured Alliance meetings to once every couple of months.
We’ll keep on with our Who’z in the Zoomz (my new spelling, what do you reckon?) and our campaigns, and want these to be guided by our hundreds of members.
We’re re-launching our working groups and are looking for new ways to get everyone involved.
How can you get involved?
Coffee Table
If you’d like to be involved but are not sure how, or just want to keep up with what’s going on, our new monthly coffee tables are the perfect space 🙂
We had one pilot coffee table last year, and it was a really nice and relaxed atmosphere where we were able to talk about anything and everything. We’ll be posting dates for the next one shortly, so look out for that here on our Noticeboard, our mailing list and on Twitter.
Conveners / Steering Group
The conveners or ‘steering’ group are the group of volunteers who set up the #WeShallNotBeRemoved movement in May last year. They meet monthly and discuss all aspects of business, funding, news in the disability world, manage the Seven Principles and more. We really want to expand this group and include a wider variety of professionals, so if this sounds like your type of commitment, please email ellie@weshallnotberemoved.com
Specific Working Groups
We have a range of working groups which are a smaller group of members who focus on campaigns or issues to do with a particular subsect of intersectional disability arts in the UK. We’ve previously had working groups for Campaigns, Access, Black Artists, Screen Industry, Visually Impaired Artists and LGBTQIA+.
These groups are organic in that they’re set up and created by you, our members, so if there is a particular issue you’d like to find out more about or a skill you’re interested in developing/sharing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Ellie, our new Project Coordinator, or come along to one of our Coffee Table meetings to see what’s going on.
We currently have Beacon Films coordinating our Screen Industry group and the lovely Dr Jessi Parrot coordinating our LGBTQIA+ group. The other groups are ‘up for grabs’ as it were, so please do get in touch if you’re interested!
Email ellie@weshallnotberemoved.com
Click here to subscribe to our mailing list
Follow us on:
Twitter @WSNBRUK
LinkedIn We Shall Not Be Removed
We also have a shared space on Slack, where members can chat to each other and share new opportunities for disabled artists. This isn’t our main area of communication and is more of a casual space. If you’d like to sign up and join the space, please email access@weshallnotberemoved.com
