Our Zesting course is a seven week awareness journey for white identifying leaders that want to:
Week 1: CULTURE OF BELONGING
- Understanding what a Culture of Belonging is and how it feels
- Reflecting on the feelings and behaviours that manifest for you
- Developing strategies to disrupt them (white fragility)
- Crafting a toolkit to regulate emotions and decentre yourself
- Introducing Accountability Partners
Week 2: WHY NOW?
- Understanding race as a social construct
- Awareness of Britain’s role in erasing history & how it manifests today
- Beginning to analyse current systems through this historical reference
- Increased confidence in racial literacy
- Understanding why you chose this journey
Week 3: PREJUDICE, POWER AND PRIVILEGE
- Understanding the race equation
- Confidence in debunking racist myths
- Acknowledgment of your own privilege and prejudices and where they come from
- Beginning to unlock your privileges and latent individual power to collectively dismantle systems of oppression
Week 4: WHY HERE?
- Unpacking how the cultural sector is not an enabling environment
- Exploring the dominant culture of white supremacy and its characteristics
- Looking at the tools that we’ve been using – the status quo
- Acknowledging the cost of survival for Black and Global Majority People
- Starting to dream abundantly and considering alternatives
Week 5: FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART I
- Revealing and testing the assumptions and limitations with which we operate
- Discerning between equality and equity
- Reflecting on organisational infrastructure and the limitations of ‘good intentions’
- Dissecting a grievance policy and generating alternative practices
Week 6: FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART II
- Understanding white comfort vs. safety of Black and Global Majority People
- The Imagination Battle concept
- Recognising where failure of imagination shows up in our sector and how it manifests
- Collaborative ideation and beginning to re-imagine within the parameters of possibility
Week 7: ACTIVATION
- Generating ‘what if?’ statements
- Creating your own anti-racist actions
- Embedding accountability into your process
- Considering what’s next
- Root their anti-racist practice in knowledge of the history and context of racism in the UK
- Unpack how white supremacy is embedded in our culture and specifically in the cultural and creative sectors
- Understand their role in upholding systemic racism, the power and privilege they have access to and how to apply this usefully to create change around them
- Develop a toolkit of analysis, reflection and application so their anti-racist practice is ever expanding and evolving
- Connect to a network of other Zesters for accountability and ongoing support.
We are offering Zesting to organisations from Autumn 2022 onwards.
Zesting is delivered over seven weeks for 20 white identifying members of staff and includes:
- 21 hours of facilitated content (3 hour weekly online workshops)
- 7 hours of self-organised learning between workshops
- Accountability Partners
- Decompression Space
Scaleable pricing depending on organisational size.
