Radical Listening Week 2025: Towards a Charter for Equity
Event: Lunchtime Podcast - Equity and Intersectionality
When: Tuesday 17th June 2025
Where: Online - YouTube
Time: 12pm - 1pm
About the Podcast
Hosted by Selina Thompson Ltd
Discussion led by Selina Thompson, Toni-Dee Paul, Toni Lewis
Contributors: Demi Nandhra, Hazel Sealeaf, Dee Manning
Central to the Charter for Equity research is the need to centre people with overlapping barriers, not just single-issue approaches. We explore how equity strategies can embed care, trauma awareness, and lived experience from the start.
We ask: what would change if those most affected by inequity led the solutions?
These reflections shape the Charter’s focus on intersectional design, accountability, and collective care.
This event is part of Radical Listening Week 2025. Expect provocation, collaboration, and a shift away from extractive consultations.
What is Radical Listening?
Radical Listening is rooted in the belief that power needs to be rebalanced across the cultural sector. It centres the voices and priorities of people most excluded from influence. Listening is a verb. It is about redefining whose realities shape the future of our work.
Radical Listening Week 2025: Towards a Charter for Equity
Radical Listening Week brings together cultural workers, freelancers, organisations, and communities across the West Midlands to explore what equity looks like in practice.
Through conversation, reflection, and shared provocation, we’ll explore key themes from the Charter for Equity research by Dr. Lucy Lopez. Together, we’re building towards a framework that centres lived experience, challenges structural inequality, and supports long-term change. This is a space to listen with intention and act collectively towards a more equitable cultural sector in the West Midlands.
Radical Listening Week is part of Culture Central’s Inclusive Network, a co-created programme that highlights the voices, insights, and needs of creatives from traditionally excluded backgrounds.
Hosts
Selina Thompson is an artist and writer from, and based in, Birmingham, whose work is presented nationally and internationally. She is Artistic Director and CEO of Selina Thompson Ltd, and has led company since its inception in 2016. STL’s work seeks to centre those historically excluded by the arts, without compromising on rigour or experimentation.
Her practice is chiefly concerned with grief, love, and the world to come, and she seeks to make work that is visually striking and lyrical, even while grounded in politics.
Toni Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist who creates, curates and produces artworks that sit at the intersections of art, race and care, in Birmingham and the West Midlands; independently, collaboratively, and with Contemporary Other and Selina Thompson Ltd.
Toni makes work that explores the nuances of the human experience as it relates to race, culture and identity, and is rooted in her lived experience as working class/2nd generation migrant/neurodivergent/fat/queer/woman of colour.
Toni-Dee Paul is an independent artist working across form; a writer (In Other Words, Field Notes), workshop leader, facilitator, collaborator and ‘thinker-in-the room’.
In the Midlands, Toni is Associate Director at Selina Thompson Ltd, working on the Art, and how we care for one another. In the North West she makes intricate, intimate, and entertaining events for children and families as Associate Artist of One Tenth Human; exploring rest as resistance through chronic illness-centered projects; and facilitating the International part-mutual-care-part-art-part-activism project Balmy Army.
Contributors
Demi Nandhra
Demi Nandhra is a neurodivergent artist and writer from Birmingham. She makes and curates both solo and collaborative performances, live art, theatre with a focus on Mental Health, Care & Trauma.
Demi’s debut Edinburgh fringe show Life is No Laughing Matter won a Lustrum Edinburgh Award, was shortlisted for others, and made The Guardian’s Top 15 2019 Fringe Shows. She followed up with The Trauma Show, and continues to make funny work about shit things. Demi collaborates with other artists and writers through dramaturgy, outside-eye feedback and Access support, sometimes all together.
Hazel Sealeaf is an artist, researcher and producer from Birmingham, who supports community and creative organisations; they facilitate, fundraise, evaluate, build digital resources, create events and design systems for growing teams. Hazel’s focus is supporting queer and disabled people to thrive, and collaborating with aligned organisers, artists and communities to understand the threats facing those communities.
Hazel produced the Disability Justice Labs with MAIA, researched Learning Disability Leadership with Spectra, and held spaces for queer memory, grief and conflict through Softly Spoken.
Dee Manning, Consultant Dee.M Creatives, comes from a background in teaching, youth, community, and the arts, and has expertise in project management, production, community development, and mentoring across the arts, education, and the third sector showcasing a diverse skill set. She specialises in community and strategic development, creative production, and the implementation of arts and culture in local communities, fostering cultural engagement and growth at a grassroots level.