Race launch live illustration by Camille Aubrey, www.camilleaubry.com
The Research Action Coalition for Race Equality (RACE), a partnership between Black South West Network and the University of Bristol, aims to connect data to community-led approaches, in ways that recognise, value and respond to communities’ lived experiences and diverse forms of knowledge and expertise, through partnership, collaboration and co-production between academics, community groups and policy-makers.
Research, data and evidence are critical to the campaign for race equality but those who need information do not always have access to it. There is much evidence on race inequalities, but this does not always reach or connect with those who are campaigning to overcome them. By placing the principles of co-production at our core, we put ideas of empowerment into practice by working with communities and offering greater control over the research process. By doing so we can enhance the effectiveness of research by making it better informed by communities’ preferences and needs. We aim to:
Re-balance power in research
Collaborate to promote anti-racist research & practice
Promote genuine partnership and collaboration ensuring the effective engagement of Racialised communities in research
We shall enable this though:
Valuing diverse forms of knowledge
Ensuring reflexivity about our practices, ways of working together and outcomes, and
Making research and data accessible, using approaches preferred by users
mission statement:
Our research will provide evidence on outcomes in areas such as health and wellbeing, education and unemployment which can most effectively enable strategic partners to identify the most impactful strategies to support their needs. A shared partnership space including communities, City Office, Bristol Race Equality Strategic Leaders’ Group, CoRE, Bristol Digital Futures and other academic and non-academic partners will allow us to both address gaps in the data and increase access to data in order to effectively support ongoing and new initiatives to address race disparity in the region.
Our Objectives:
Provide regional data from which to evaluate the effectiveness of initiatives designed to tackle race inequality.
Work collectively with communities to gather data from which to enable a greater understanding of both the challenges they face and their priorities to inform the development of more inclusive policy agendas.
Work in partnership with wider regional stakeholders to provide data which will inform targeted action plans to address persistent evidence gaps and respond to other identified challenges and opportunities.
Ensure alignment and collaboration with other key regional Race Equality focused bodies such as the Commission on Race Equality (CoRE), Bristol Race Equality Strategic Leaders’ Group, and other key strategic groups.
Ensure outputs, actions, messages and projects developing from the work of BREN reach a wide range of audiences including communities, wider regional stakeholders and relevant regional/national departments in appropriate formats.
Seek out opportunities and relevant resources including funding, placements and social capital to sustain this collaborative effort.
