Nott Normal’s No Nastiness Policy –  our Diversity and Inclusion Statement

Nott Normal is keenly aware of many of the dangers of exclusion. One of our founding principles is to uphold and increase inclusion and diversity. This runs through our core aims.  Whatever participants’ gender, race, ability, ethnicity, creed, culture or faith, national origin, age, sexual orientation or identity or income level,  we will do whatever is in our capabilities to make sure they feel safe, valued and respected. We are committed to a nondiscriminatory approach and actively practice and research methods to increase access and engagement. We always aim to honour and to celebrate diverse life experiences and heritages and ensure that all voices are valued and heard.

We’re committed to modeling diversity and inclusion for the entire arts industry of the nonprofit sector, and to maintaining an inclusive environment with honest, just and equitable treatment for all.

To provide informed, authentic leadership for cultural equity Nott Normal strives to:

• See diversity, inclusion, and equity as connected to our mission; critical to ensuring the well-being and dignity of our participants, our audiences and ourselves.
• Progressively challenge and dismantle any inequities and barriers to access within our policies and projects, updating what we do as our capabilities increase.
• Explore potential underlying, unquestioned assumptions that interfere with inclusiveness both within Nott Normal and in associated spheres of influence.
• Advocate for and support board-level thinking about how systemic inequities in the art world and in society impact our organization’s work, and how best to address that in a way that is consistent with our mission.
• Help to challenge assumptions about leadership and engagement through our organization, via a ‘doing with not doing to’ approach.
• Practice and encourage honest, considerate communication in all interactions.
• Commit time and energy to expanding more diverse participation, skills sharing, partnering, and co-leadership opportunities on different projects.
• Lead with respect and tolerance. We expect all participants to embrace this policy and to express it in interactions, creative collaborations, and everyday practices.

Nott Normal abides by the following action areas to help promote diversity and inclusion:

• Actively seek out participants and audiences that represent and reflect the rich diversity of Nottingham and beyond.
• Curate content onto our website so others to join in from across the world, ensuring content is as accessible as possible to as many as possible.
• Placing an easily visible google translate on our home-page, as standard.
• Celebrating and bigging up inclusion and diversity where we find it.
• Seeking out people who don’t look like us, talk like us and who have different experiences to us, as we seek out those who share both similar and different challenges and barriers to inclusion.
• Create and support projects and policies that foster human interactions to reflect the diversity of our city and our world.
• Pool resources and expand offerings for underrepresented groups by connecting with other arts and social organizations committed to diversity and inclusion.
• Develop and present projects, thoughts, and research on diversity, inclusion, and equity, providing information to the broader community, and the arts industry.
• Advocate for public and private-sector policy that promotes diversity, inclusion, and equity. Challenge systems and policies that create inequity, oppression, and disparity.
• Mediate and mitigate to the best of our capabilities in situations where discrimination or exclusion is shown to exist.
• Report or support the report of any hate crime if any participant experiences it. This also includes any hate crime and hate speech that may be directed towards ourselves, including in writing.
• Limiting the ability for anonymous comments on our online presence to avoid trolling and prejudice-driven abuse of our own and our participants’ work.
• Work towards our ultimate aim of becoming completely irrelevant as an accessible arts organization if and when all art and society are more fully inclusive of all people irrespective not only of disability/difference of ability but of gender, sexuality, place of origin, faith, culture, income or social background.

In fact, the only people we would choose to actively exclude would be those, who due to their own prejudices, intentionally and/or repeatedly threaten the inclusion, dignity or safety of others. In such cases, exclusion would result if other mediating and mitigating actions were deemed unhelpful or where attempting to mediate could be endangering.

Basically, it boils down to this; no nastiness!