EMCC Guest Post

Why spaces led by racialised creatives matter

Creative Balance started with something a lot of us already knew from experience but rarely saw named in the sector: racialised creatives in Scotland are carrying more, and the structures around us rarely account for it.

The evidence backs this up. Racism, financial precarity, stigma and the barriers to getting support all take a toll, and that toll lands harder when you are working in industries that are still overwhelmingly white-led. When your position is unstable to begin with, your wellbeing pays for it.

So the question we keep coming back to is a practical one. What actually helps? Not another strategy written about us without us. Not a tick-box exercise that changes nothing on the ground. What we return to, again and again, is the value of by-and-for spaces: spaces created and led by racialised creatives, for racialised creatives.

That is what our current research sets out to understand. Why these spaces matter, what they could look like, how they might work, and the difference they could make to both the creative practice and the wellbeing of Black and Global Majority creatives across Scotland.

We are working on this alongside EMCC, and our researcher Loa Pour Mirza has been leading the thinking behind it. Loa sat down to talk through where Creative Balance came from, why we chose creative and participatory methods over hard data alone, how we landed on the language we use, and why the experiences of racialised women and gender minorities have to be central rather than an afterthought.

It is an honest conversation about what we need, rather than what we are told we should want. If you want the full picture of the project and where it is heading, it is well worth a read.

Read the full guest post from Loa Pour Mirza here: