Birmingham Hippodrome is committed to placing Inclusion and People at the heart of our organisational values, making it central to our decision making.
Our ambition is to provide unprecedented access to all the work on our stages, reflecting the youngest, most diverse city in Europe in all we do. This means breaking down barriers, embracing change and taking positive steps to become a more equitable place for audiences, artists, participants and our own teams.
We recognise this is an ongoing process of challenge and collaboration to make meaningful and systemic change. If you’d like to send us your feedback, please email us at change@birminghamhippodrome.com
Keep reading to find out what we’ve been up to!
What We’ve Achieved So Far
- We established an Inclusion and Anti-Racism Staff Working Group in order to ensure that our staff’s voices are heard, and a People & Inclusion Board Sub-Committee, who ensure our commitment is consistent at every level of the organisation.
- All of our new staff members undergo online learning courses in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), Unconscious Bias and Creating a Workplace that Embraces Neurodiversity as part of their induction to the Hippodrome. All Hippodrome employees take Strawberry Words’ Time to Talk About Race training, both online and in-person.
- We’ve worked to diversify our Board to broaden the skills, lived experience and backgrounds of our Trustees, including a full review of the accessibility of our recruitment process and providing Strawberry Words’ Anti-Racism training for all Board Members and members of our Senior Management Team.
- Our New Work and Artist Development team have cultivated new partnerships and hosted specific residencies to support the creative development of artists form the Global Majority.
- As a founding member of the More Than A Moment pledge, we follow the More Than A Moment guidance for our recruitment processes. Find out more about the More Than A Moment pledge here.
- We provide training on cultural sensitivity and anti-bias for all employees including hiring managers. We remove personal identifiers such as names and equal opportunity data from applications to ensure that candidates are evaluated purely on their skills, experience, and qualifications, making the process fairer for all applicants, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds.
- We’ve provided clearer and more visible routes for reporting incidents of discrimination across the organisation for staff as well as partners, artists, participants, external companies and visitors.
Work Underway
- We are proud to be an integral and engaged member of the Southside neighbourhood, with Hippodrome staff representing us in Birmingham’s annual Pride Parade for many years and our Hippodrome Sites team hosting the annual Chinese New Year festival.
- Over the past year, we’ve delivered D/deaf awareness training and sighted guide training for key staff across the organisation.
- Birmingham Hippodrome was the winner of the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce Award for Excellence in Inclusive People Development. We are also proud to have been finalists both for the MBCC Award for Excellence in Diversity & Inclusion, and the West Midlands Tourism Award for Accessible and Inclusive Tourism.
We recognise that we are on a journey and that this is ongoing work. We are collectively open to change, facing hard truths along the way. We are committed to truly reflecting the city and region that we know and love within our workforce, our programmes, our audiences, and opportunities. We will embrace change because we believe that it should and will be a part of our DNA.