Blossom Africa Anti Racist Principles

Principles that underpin our practice

 

We recognise our white privilege and commit to ongoing development of anti-racist practice.

We acknowledge that we are not experts in the needs of the communities we work with and that the issues we are working with are complex.

We acknowledge that we will make mistakes. We will hold ourselves accountable forthese and commit to ongoing improvement, reflection and development.

We are committed to listening to the community. This means being led by their aims, learning from them and reflecting on our practice regularly.

We will work to a strengths based model, not a deficits based model. We want to work in partnership with communities, in the spirit of global social justice. We know that our role is not to “rescue” or “save” communities and we recognise that we have much to learn from the communities we work with.

We will review and regularly consider, with the community, whether our role should continue. We work for the autonomy of communities and we will regularly reflect on how our role should change or continue. We commit to developing an exit strategy that ensures any change to our role is never at the detriment to communities we have made a commitment to.

We acknowledge that our board must be more diverse and is missing the expertise, skills and lived experience of those who identify as Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic, specifically those who are Ugandan and who live, or have lived, in the communities we serve. We will take action to address this.

We acknowledge the power dynamic that is inherent in our work and constantly work to change this.

The dignity and worth of the community members we work with are our priority. We will never exploit the communities we work with:

  • Images and photographs will not be taken or used without informed consent
  • We will not use images of children, young people or babies in our communication materials
  • We will not centre ourselves in any imagery
  • We will work with communities to decide how and where images are used and to determine their own storytelling.
  • We will ensure that we do not reinforce a narrative of dependency or white saviour-ism in the language we use as an organisation.
Some of these principles were either reproduced or informed by a blog post published by NoWhiteSaviours (NoWhiteSaviours.org) on Twitter and Instagram on the 12 and 13 September 2020. The principles in their entirety are based on information published or shared by those with lived experience of racism and race inequality both in Wales and across the globe. We acknowledge that in developing these principles, we have relied on the expertise and shared knowledge of Black Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals.