Last week, we said that the support package the UK Government has announced must be used to build a radical, new, more inclusive arts sector, and that Wales Millennium Centre takes its own share of that responsibility very seriously.

The fact that just 2% of our full-time staff, 4% of our casual staff and 20% of our Board are Black, Asian or ethnically diverse is a significant failure, so we acknowledge that our task starts with the urgent diversification of our workforce.

We have incurred massive losses during the Coronavirus pandemic, but whatever our funding landscape looks like from now on, we will accelerate our ongoing initiatives to make the Centre more reflective of the communities it serves, which include our partnership with JobCentre Plus around mentoring and building skills for work, our participatory budgeting model and programming more diverse work on our stages.

We also know that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In September we will publish a Centre-wide Action Plan for making our organisation and its work as inclusive as possible, including anti-racism and unconscious bias training across the organisation and its Board, delivered by a person or people with lived experience.

In the meantime, our Creative Learning Producer Jason Camilleri has written a blog about his own experiences as a black man working in the creative industry in Wales, and his personal reflections on what has to happen next – here at the Centre and elsewhere.

Please read it and watch this space for further announcements.