Our advocacy begins with understanding why some communities were or are underrepresented or marginalised. First we have to carry out our research carefully
Once we have identified the area we want to focus on we develop each project by:
- Planning how best to use our research to carry out our charitable aims
- Providing a platform for people to represent themselves in their own words when they wish to
- Raising up individuals and their creative work sensitively, with their consent
- Knowing how to differentiate between the public interest and people’s personal privacy
- Identifying the difference between an individual’s personal experience and a whole community or group
- Explaining to present generations how historical norms kept some groups ‘back’ and raised others up and how this still affects our understanding and expectations of people from those groups
- Carefully constructing fair and balanced biographies of historical figures
- Recognising when one person’s experience might be shared by others who could provide mutual support
- Focussing on people’s creative output (their music, poems or other writing)
- Speaking out in the name of the charity where we see an injustice or prejudice
- Encouraging others to support our charitable aims
- Publishing music and other educational resources to make our composers’ and writers’ work easily available
- Considering very carefully when to arrange or adapt a composer’s or writers’ work, and being able to justify it in their best interests, not ours
- Ensuring that our publications are equal in quality to commercial publishing houses’
- Generating meaningful royalties income for composers, writers, composers’ estates and others
- Supporting teachers by sharing information
- Writing about or presenting our work to the general public wherever possible without charge
- Commissioning works to open up conversations around social-justice themes of our times
- Creating interdisciplinary projects to enable professionals in different areas of the Arts to learn from each other
- Making our resources accessible to as many people as possible (link to Accessibility page).
We try not to:
- speak for others when they prefer to speak for themselves
- put the spotlight on the advocate
- make value judgements about others or their work based on gender, race or other characteristics or commonalities
- denigrate one group for the artificial advantage of another