Taking an Intersectional Approach

‘We are on a journey with intersectionality…’ This is a phrase we find ourselves repeating, in team meetings and conversations with partners.

It’s almost become a cliché at this point, but using this metaphor is our acknowledgement that this is work we are making a sustained commitment to. It also reminds us that we know we have not yet reached our destination, wherever that may be. Perhaps there is no single destination but instead a series of stops along the way.

Understanding how to take a genuinely intersectional approach to our work to tackle mental health stigma is both simple and complicated. The principles of identifying and naming systems of power that marginalise and stigmatise instead of locating a ‘problem’ within an individual experience, building on community strength and power as opposed to perceived deficit, and understanding that we all have multiple indivisible parts of our identity which give us greater or lesser access to power within society are core to the work of many community-based, grassroots organisations.

But by the very nature of these considerations, this work becomes complex because it demands nuance, sometimes uncomfortable personal reflection (such as on the privileges afforded to whiteness), and the deliberate building of new relationships.

Creative approaches have always been core to our work in See Me and over the last three years, we have administered our own Anti-Stigma Arts Fund.

From its inception, the fund was intended to reach communities that See Me did not previous have a relationship to, recognising that creative approaches can be particularly appropriate for communities experiencing multiple forms of marginalisation offering additional safeguards in the form of anonymity or distance for exploring difficult experiences.

"The Gypsy/Traveller community has got quite a strong oral culture and tradition – there’s storytelling and songs... so it really suited the community we’ve worked with. Seeing people face to face that’s where the community best operates. They found this easier than having to write down all their experiences. It comes more naturally and it’s very powerful." – Quote from MECOPP 'Judged' project lead.

Given this was our starting point, could our journey to better understand intersectional approaches impact and improve the way we approach our work as a funder, for example by addressing structural barriers to inclusion?

Over three years the fund has evolved in small but significant ways. The fund has also been impacted by other work happening concurrently; a great deal of work has happened to examine why there were ‘communities we did not have a relationship to’ and what that means for us as a national programme.

See Me has initiated new partnerships which improved the reach of our arts fund promotion as organisations shared the fund via their own networks and a combination of a more targeted approach to promotion, alongside the organic sharing of information through those new partnerships led to an increase in applications from organisations working with marginalised communities by comparison to previous years.

The arts funding landscape in Scotland is a difficult space, forcing organisations to compete for increasingly limited resources. This year, even our relatively modest funding pot of £500 - £5,000 for five or six projects garnered a lot of interest and more than 70 applications.

Bringing in the external expertise of artist and previous arts fund recipient Nat Walpole, and director and creative practitioner Mariem Omari to join our funding panel was an invaluable step in broadening our scope of knowledge and reflection.

We knew from experience how difficult the shortlisting process would be but making a conscious effort to translate an intersectional approach into this decision-making process helped to clarify the information we wanted to know from applicants.

Instead of asking ‘Does this project engage communities or individuals disproportionately affected by mental health stigma and discrimination?’ this language became 'How does your project engage meaningfully with people from traditionally marginalised groups or people who may experience multiple forms of stigma?'

Instead of ignoring organisational approaches, we wanted to clearly understand what principles underpin that engagement so we asked a new question with a different set of prompts asking about the organisation’s relationship to the community it serves and not just if, but how it considers the multiple forms of stigma people may be experiencing.

The effect of this was to open up new layers of thoughtful insight and reflection in the applications to the fund. Now we were able to prioritise groups and organisations embedded within communities, led by community members who were planning projects that were actively being requested by would-be participants.

And although there were many more of these than we had funds to support, it gave additional nuance to the structure we used to weigh the subtle distinctions between projects.

Over the last two years, we have brought together project leads and practitioners from funded projects for a series of three online learning sets to discuss approaches to tackling stigma, the role of lived experience, and evaluation. This is a space for sharing and peer support and participants have been incredibly generous in sharing their experience and knowledge on different topics.

"It was useful to connect with others and to hear different yet similar entangled issues. It's always useful to have space to be reflexive in regarding relationships to power. It was good for our group as to have this conversation altogether as we have different practices." – Learning set feedback 

An interesting reflection has been the way projects are now coming into the fund eager to speak about intersectionality, power and the impact of marginalisation. No one is oblivious to the fact that tackling stigma is inherently political, but this also means that we have an even greater obligation to understand our role as facilitators in creating a safer space.

Learning for us has come through the generous feedback and reflection provided by participants explaining how we can more deeply embed psychological safety within the sessions.

We fund projects through the arts fund to increase the amount of work happening to tackle intersectional stigma in communities across Scotland, as well as improving our understanding as an organisation of how mental health stigma and discrimination is understood and experienced by different communities.

The fund also gives us greater insight into how creative approaches can engage people most safely and bring transformative change to participants and audiences.

Funders have inherent power in their relationship with the projects they give money to, as part of addressing this we need to give space to the projects we fund to create and implement their own evaluation plans.

We also need to encourage reflection on what feels comfortable and appropriate to the project participants and creative practitioners themselves. We need to reassure project leads that we don’t expect them to engage in practices that feel transactional or extractive.

It can be a difficult thing to relinquish control, but an intersectional approach demands we reflect on power dynamics and redress imbalances where we can.

It also gives space for projects to decide what information to prioritise, what was striking or surprising, what worked well and what went wrong.

There is still a great deal of work to be done with the fund.

We are extremely conscious that we can do a lot more work to improve access to the fund and we are looking to develop decision-making processes and tools which help us to advance equality of opportunity through positive action.

We are learning as we go and it is a journey to understand and critically reflect on what we do and how we do it. We will continue to work alongside communities/partners to challenge intersectional stigma and making stops along the way.

You can read about the fantastic projects we funded this year here.