While for many within the circus sector, increasing levels of diversity and inclusion is a priority, it’s hard to know where to start, and it’s a large undertaking, that is both urgent and will take time to grow.

From the start, all members of the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group have shown themselves to be extremely passionate about learning how to be more inclusive in their work and the sector generally.

Being aware of how many facets there are to this topic, in regards to disability, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity and many other intersections. Our members are a very diverse group themselves, and we’re drawing on their expertise and experiences in life to go forward.

As a group, we’ve spoken at length about the importance of the sector acknowledging some of the amazing learning that has happened in other sectors, such as dance and theatre and even beyond.

There is a lot of knowledge and research out there on best practice and challenges that have already been done, while circus as a sector is unique, and has it’s own strengths and challenges, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to adapt it to suit us. At the moment the working group members are gathering examples of case studies, guides and reports that are useful and interesting, that we can feed back and help disseminate among the sector.

We’ve also discussed at length what we as a group feel we need to do more, as a group almost all of our freelancers have expressed a desire to learn more about inclusion, and to be able to attend diversity and inclusion training, both for our practices and to carry onto future projects with other.

Our next step after gathering the research and disseminating within the sector to discuss, using the feedback from that to plan the next actions we can take.

In order to effectively increase the levels of inclusion in the sector all of us, artists, producers, organisations and freelancers, need to play a role, look at our current practices, the barriers others may face in joining us but also the barriers that we face in increasing our reach, our networks and becoming more inclusive ourselves, which will be an ongoing process, for the working group, Circus Change Up and far beyond.

Co-Conveners Sascha Goslin and Vicki Amedume facilitate the Inclusion and Diversity Working Group.