I want to tell you about a story where I see the focus on perceived deficits in communities when really we should be looking for abundance. I want to talk to you about how we need to rethink spaces, so strength, service and be celebrated. A story of New Vables. So I’m a Yorkshire girl born and bred in the northern city of Leeds in England in an area called Chapeltown. Now growing up in Chapeltown in the 90s was an interesting time, not least because of the experiences of me and my family living there, but also because of the history and the dominant narratives at play. If you mentioned that you were from Chapeltown in Leeds, people would respond with one of three things. They’d say, ah, I remember when taxis would refuse to drive through that area at night because of fear of being attacked. Or they’d say, you know, oh, that’s the location where that awful serial killer in the 70s, the Yorkshire Ripper, would hunt his victims. Or they’d say, ah, yes, I remember when the council demolished that notorious local pub, the Hayfields, which was a home to local crime. Now these references are not wrong. These things did happen and they were covered extensively in the news. Chapeltown had high deprivation and it was really hard for the community living there who were understandably fed up with the crime and the lack of investment made to the area. But there was and continues to be so much more to Chapeltown than those stories. And there’s lots of great culture, creativity, and innovation. For example, Chapeltown is home to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, one of six world leading schools forming the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama. Chapeltown is also home to the Leeds West Indian Centre, a venue visited by many across the UK to attend their renowned dub, bass, and reggae night, sub dub, started by famous local sound system artists, the Aeration Steppers. Finally, Chapeltown also hosts the largest West Indian carnival outside of London’s Notting Hill. In fact, Leeds West Indian Carnival is Europe’s longest standing, authentic Caribbean carnival, the first to feature all three essential elements of a Caribbean carnival, so costumes, music, and a mass grade procession. And there were so many more great achievements by this community, many of which I heard about whilst working at my mother’s market stall, which she ran for over 35 years. So why am I telling you all this? Because years later, after I left Leeds to go to university, and I began a career in public engagement with science, performing science demos, and setting fire to things and all sorts, it slowly became clear to me how deep dominant narratives are, and the impact it has, and how we engage with, involve, and invest in communities. So let’s go back a decade to 2010s. In the science engagement world, there was a noticeable lack of engagement with members of this community, and that was across all of our as well established science museums, science centers, and science festivals. The term used to describe these communities was hard to reach, and much of the sector talked about how to get these audiences through the door. Why weren’t these communities engaging with our content? Well, leaders in the field suspected that perhaps it was a lack of engagement, or awareness perhaps, so we needed to do more marketing, or perhaps the issue was financial, so we needed to lower cost as a barrier to engagement. There was little discussion as to whether members of this community had something else more important or more valuable to prioritize with their time, and I must admit, as somebody who was quite new in the field, just entering the sector, and very eager to learn from the leaders in the fields, I didn’t question it, and this was despite feeling comfortable, because in some ways, the language that they were talking about, it all kind of reflected the experiences I had in Chapultown. In the social change world, things were remarkably similar regarding engagement with initiatives and services designed for this community. Starting by placing this group in the need help space, with the implicit question of how might we, the outsiders, fix it, professionals went even further in defining people by their problems. Solutions focused either on driving behavior change, so, campaigns for healthy eating, healthy lifestyles, or they’d invest in initiatives to improve access to resources. Just like the science engagement world, most leaders around these tables, developing thought leadership, setting the future direction of the sector, and speaking with a sense of credibility about what society should look like and what needed to change, very few, if any, came from the communities they wanted to support. And again, in the early stages of my career, I struggled to articulate why this felt wrong, despite being exposed to a very live and local example of this type of intervention simply not working. Do you remember the Hayfield pub I mentioned earlier, the one that the council knocked down? Well, they built a library and a health center in its place. Great idea in principle, and really hard to argue against, but it took years for the local community to enter its doors and use its services. There was such a lack of trust and fear about the real intention of the council. Jumping ahead a decade, although things have improved today, so, you know, there’s less use of the words how to reach, and there’s definitely more active listening to the living experience of communities. In some ways, things have gone a little bit too far the other way. We’re seeing a deep scrutinizing of people. Sometimes it feels like we have these communities under a microscope with leaders in the field armed with an eagerness and a sense of empowerment to understand what these communities think, feel, and do. And despite, yes, you know, there’s been some positive shifts in the last 10 years, most strategies are still starting with the deficit model for change. In both sectors, the narratives by these communities overall is driven by insights from one lens of their lived experience, the pain, the barriers, the challenges, where solutions are set by experts from science and the civil society sector and not really by the community themselves. There’s little recognition or investment into strengths and assets, so the layers of culture, networks, the ideas, the ambitions, and the innovation within these communities. To make matters worse, civil society organizations are failing to make space for members of these communities to sit around their tables and help decide how society should improve. Leaders continue to lack diversity and indicators of success continue to be orientated towards white cultures. Institutions are doing little to tackle, less alone recognize, the larger systemic challenges that hinder the success of these ideas. Although there are people working hard to drive change within these institutions, helping them angle that microscope inwards, it goes without saying that this work is exhausting and just simply quite hard. The dominant narrative and white framing is so strong, it is quite hard to challenge it, especially early on in your career. And unfortunately, this is where most diversity lies and when leaders in the field don’t look like you. Naturally, many of us are wondering what might be possible if we could imagine equitable futures outside of white systems and that are driven by dominant narratives and deficit framing. Going back to memories of leads and the people I met through Remedies MarketStorm, I was reminded of the many leaders driving change and how these individuals don’t have a seat at the table to develop thought leadership and to help set the direction of the social impact sector. And I wondered, what if there was a space to bring together change makers, all united by their experiences as people of color navigating the world today? What might we surface? What opportunities might we spot? What stories might we be able to share about our collective strengths, experiences, and ideas? And what might our collective visions for change look like? New fables was born out of exploring these questions. And by hosting a nurturing, reflective, and restorative space that speaks to our narratives and experiences as people of color, we are creating the conditions to see what might emerge when we lean into our intuition. Since this foundation, our 12 members are driving change within their own respective fields, sectors and industries have been coming together under these three outcomes. So collective being, holding space for care and togetherness, collective sense making, so tuning into what we see, think, feel, and do, and collective envisioning, so exploring future ways of being and again driven by our intuition. And although we’ve not been up and running for long, we are already sensing some real value for our members. We’re even more confident that new ideas and opportunities will emerge from more professional yet safe spaces like new fables where change makers can come together, connect, share experiences, and learn and support each other. We’re already seeing the benefits from having a space to have critical, nuanced conversations about our collective experience on our own terms and for our own purposes. And although we welcome the recent awakening and commitment to tackle racism and systemic oppression in our workplaces and sectors, conversations are often starting from a different place with different levels of ambition for change. We really value the space outside of white systems and structures where we can set our own ambition and pace alongside prioritising care and wellbeing. So over the next year, we will continue to meet as a collective and my promise to this community is to share our visions and explorations with you. My request to you, going into the future, is to consider how you might encourage organisations to prioritise assets, to point that microscope inwards, or even to explore playing a role in supporting new spaces for new tables. Thank you for listening.