Tonic is a charity that for over a decade has been at the forefront of driving change within arts and culture, making the sector more equitable, diverse and inclusive. Tonic devises and leads innovative and impactful change projects which get to the root of existing inequalities and make long-lasting and wide-spread change.
Participate is a programme of training created specifically for schools, colleges and conservatoires in the performing arts. Participate is designed to help both students and staff address a range of topics in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion, as well as provide a space for reflection on personal and professional development. In the 2024 autumn term alone, 1,340 students and 280 staff members have taken part in a Participate workshop.
We interviewed Lucy Kerbel, Founder and Director of Tonic. We dive deeper into the organisation’s contributions to creating a less homogenous and more diverse workforce and learn more about the importance of understanding what the arts landscape looks like for students and teachers today to keep up with the rapidly changing sector. We find out more about why Lucy believes Tonic and Participate are successful in impacting equity and diversity and the valuable learning insights she would share with other organisations looking to kickstart their own EDI activity.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion across the arts and cultural sector?
At Tonic, we believe a thriving arts and cultural scene is something that supports a society to be healthy and happy, and we believe the widest range of people should have access to it. Our particular area focuses is on the workforce. We believe if the workforce in arts and culture is diverse, it will be more productive, more imaginative, and collectively more successful. It will also respond more effectively to the country's diversity in terms of the work it makes and how it does that. It's about making our sector as effective and successful as it can possibly be.
As one part of this, we have our Participate programme, which focuses specifically on the pipeline of talent that is feeding into the sector, specifically the performing arts. Participate is a workshop programme which sits alongside the curriculum and provides space for students and staff to reflect on personal and professional development. Workshops focus on areas of equity and inclusion and associated topics such as consent and forming respectful working relationships. This is so graduates have the tools they need to navigate the industry and be a force for positive change. Workshops for drama schools are well-established, and we are now also filling the gap for dance and technical and production students.
How is your EDI intent embedded within your wider company strategy?
We exist to support people and organisations in arts and culture to make positive change and to do that in a way that is considered and which is going to lead to long-term impact. We need change that is meaningful rather than tokenistic. Everything we do is about driving change across arts and culture, and we always do that in a very collaborative manner. It's not about us just telling people they need to be different, but it's about working with them to figure out how that change can come about.
We are increasingly speaking to organisations not only about their workforces being more diverse but also about them being more adaptable and more resilient in a really broad range of ways. So, that's emotional resilience for individual workforce members as much as it is about the economic resilience of the sector. At Tonic, we feel that those three things—diversity, adaptability, and resilience—are completely interwoven.
It's also about how ideally, over time, EDI will become less something seen as an additional area to what organisations are doing and instead, just being embedded across everything they do. What we've found over the years is that for any organisation, when they weave EDI into their core thinking around their business plan, their strategy, their vision, and their mission, that's when real change actually happens. When an organisation attempts to continue doing what they've always done, but sets an EDI programme up alongside that (e.g. creating a member of staff just for EDI), that's when change is limited.
What are some of the key things Participate offers to those involved?
For some young people, arriving at college, university, or drama school is maybe the first time they've really been part of such a melting pot of difference. It's really important to have training that supports them in understanding the value of diversity. It should encourage them to be self-reflective about how they're engaging with others, and the impact they have on their fellow students. All of theatre-making is intrinsically about collaboration—you can't even do a one-person show without collaborating. So, it's really important, as a theatre worker, to have well-honed interpersonal skills. Because it's such a collaborative endeavour, you want everyone around you to be at their best and making their best work because, collectively, you will then all do better.
Participate workshops also look at things like power dynamics to help young people understand what is, for instance, an appropriate use of someone's power in relation to you. This feels very important in a post #MeToo landscape. What we're trying to do is give young people a sense of empowerment but also an education so that they can make informed choices.
Finally, we do a lot of work through Participate, where we're trying to cultivate qualities that the students will need, like resilience and managing fear. This is about setting them up to feel robust and equipped to handle what may be an unpredictable and demanding career.
In terms of the Participate workshops we lead with staff, it's really all about supporting staff in drama training who have to respond to huge amounts of change when it comes to preparing students for a very different industry than they had previously been preparing them for. We support staff in holding sensitive conversations too because sometimes, you're working with texts or materials that contain difficult subject matter, which can create divided opinions in a room. We want to give staff the support they need to go on this journey of change as well.
What do you think makes your approach to addressing EDI within your sector successful?
I think Participate creates a bridge between education and training, and the industry. Tonic sits right in the middle of the two in that we work deeply within the industry, but we're now also working deeply within the training institutions as well. So, what we offer is something that gives the schools and students a very up-to-date authentic portal into what the industry is today rather than what it might have been previously.
Also, because we can talk to organisations we're working with within the industry about what's coming through, we can encourage them to think differently because we see what emerging cohorts are coming through needing and wanting. We work really hard to listen to what the schools and their students are experiencing in terms of challenges and we do that in a really 360 way. It's all about keeping your ear to the ground and really listening to what is needed and wanted by the people you're delivering it for. That's a good rule for anything to do with EDI.
Plus, the Participate programme has been built by a team of people who have a really deep understanding of drama training, how it operates, and also have a deep understanding of the industry that students are being prepared for. So, anyone who delivers sessions in the programme has gone through this particular training or worked in these training institutions previously.
What are some of the barriers or challenges you've found difficult to overcome with Participate?
I just think the schools are up against so much and there are so many demands on them. There's a tension between them really trying to provide a huge amount in the training and the students expecting a great deal from that training. There's an understandable pressure the schools feel to really do their best by the students in that respect but also trying not to overwhelm already quite overwhelmed students. Something we're picking up on is a shift within schools to try and create bubbles of space within the timetable just so students can reconnect with their families or just take a breather.
Sometimes, the rigidity of the higher education system in some institutions means that they can't really be very flexible or nimble. Some are locked into pre-existing structures that can feel really challenging to shift. So, the rigidity of the structure within the training doesn't always respond to the level of quick change that the theatre industry is experiencing. I see schools and individual staff really busting a gut trying to find the flex within the structures so they can give students up-to-date training. Everyone is stretched.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar EDI activities?
Don't fall into the mistake of thinking how things were when you trained is the way things are now. That's an error I often see across all sorts of initiatives designed to support younger people to build and develop their careers. There can sometimes be an expectation that what young people are experiencing today is what those of us who've been able to get into the industry and develop our careers experienced—but the world is completely different.
Really take time to understand what the reality is for young people today. Work in partnership with education providers and really try to get inside what they're experiencing and what their challenges are. There can be a risk with EDI work that you have a great idea about how you're going to drive change and then you impose it onto other people or other setups. So, if you are in the industry or the profession and you want to do something with educational institutions, make sure that it is a proper partnership. Equally, if you're in an educational institution thinking of setting up something like this, speak to the industry or your sector.
It's really about exploring all of the facets that make work work today and creating something that responds to that in whatever year you choose to do it, rather than something that might have been a brilliant fit for an earlier point in our history.
What do you perceive as being the risks of not addressing EDI in your sector and where is there still work to be done?
Reduced success and just more homogeneous workforces that are more likely to turn out more homogeneous, less exciting work and less dynamic solutions.
Although Tonic's background is in theatre and live performing arts, today we work right across the arts and cultural sector including visual arts, heritage and museums, libraries and the recorded arts. Across all of these areas there has been a significant shift forward in terms of awareness of the importance of having diverse teams. However, I think we've come less far when it comes to leadership and that's just as important. It's not only about having a diverse range of people creating a really exciting range of creative outputs, it's also about the core decision-making happening and the strategy around how our sector functions. That's everything from how we're speaking to policymakers through to what commercial opportunities we may not be spotting.
Find out more about the change-making work Tonic is doing across arts and culture at www.tonictheatre.co.uk.
Image Credits: Justin Slee Photography
