Proud2Be CIC

To say that we are angered by the ongoing racial injustice and police brutality against Black people would be a huge understatement. Proud2Be stands in solidarity with all those protesting in response to the senseless murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others.

We have been taking some time to educate ourselves about how we contribute to and benefit from systemic racism and white supremacy, and how this relates to our work at Proud2Be.

We remain committed to building a diverse, inclusive, safe, and anti-racist organisation — and acknowledge that we have a long way to go.

To start, we are making the following commitments:

• We will introduce mandatory unconscious bias and anti-racism training for all staff, volunteers, and directors
• We will review our group and event code of conducts and create clear processes to follow if an attendee is deemed to be displaying racist behaviour
• We will regularly use our social media channels to signal boost and amplify the voices of Black people/activists/organisations
• We will always challenge racist behaviour including the use of slurs, microaggressions and the perpetuation of stereotypes and myths
• We will only consider taking part in speaking events and panel discussions if Black people are adequately represented
• We will always pay Black people to deliver talks, workshops, performances, etc. at our annual pride event
• We will increase the representation of Black people across our team and board
• We will no longer accept any funding/sponsorship/commissioned work or enter into any partnership or collaboration with the police force as a whole. The police will no longer have a presence at any of our events/groups including Totnes Pride

To make sure we are accountable, we will be checking and publishing our progress against the above list at least once a year.

This statement comes in response to the ongoing systemic racism and police brutality against Black people all over the world. We recognise that other people of colour experience racism too. Learning from this work will feed into action plans to combat all racism in ways that are specific to each particular experience.

All our love,

Max and Maya, Proud2Be Founders ❤️❤️