Bringing together the diverse communities within our county

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OUR mission at Lives of Colour is to elevate the voices of marginalised communities by working with individuals, communities and organisations through education, events and training programmes.

We work with local institutions including the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham Borough Council, Museum of Gloucester, the Cheltenham Literature Festival, to host events year-round but in particular in October during Black History Month.

All in an effort to bring together the many diverse communities that make up Gloucestershire.

Over the past year, and after speaking to many people within Gloucestershire, we realised that there was a lack of visibility and representation of BAME communities, and a feeling that their interests and stories had been pushed aside.

With a view of changing this, we created the I-MMIGRATE exhibition - a selection of portraits and oral stories of both the Windrush generation in Gloucester and African diaspora in Cheltenham.

This was exhibited in Cheltenham

Town Hall in October 2019 and has been at the Museum of Gloucester since February 2020.

Alongside being a successful exhibition, with almost 1000 people attending within the first two weeks of the Gloucester exhibition opening, it meant a lot to the Windrush generation.

As seeing portraits of themselves exhibited in the museum made them feel like an appreciated part of Gloucester’s history. And we did not stop there, this summer we launched our Authors of Colour initiative.

With the aim of ensuring that every child is represented in the books that they read, we are helping to equip the nation’s school libraries with a curation of the latest diverse children’s books and resources in order to nurture empathy, understanding and education among students.

Alongside this, our diversity and inclusion training equip businesses and organisations with the skills they need to grow and cater to a diverse workforce, using our G.R.A.D.E.S inclusion strategy.

Our G.R.A.D.E.S inclusion strategy permeates everything we do at Lives of Colour, in order that we can amplify the voices of marginalised communities. It denotes: Gender, Religion, Age, Disability, Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation, all characteristics which affect the way people experience life.

For more information visit our website on livesofcolour.co.uk.

we realised that there was a lack of visibility and representation of BAME communities

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