Mainstreaming the voices of displaced and migrant communities

The Backbone Fund provides core funding to organisations that strengthen collaboration, champion voice and agency, and play key infrastructure roles in the sectors we support. Part of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s commitment to civil society and its leaders, the Backbone Fund enables organisations to plan strategically for the long term, helping to build resilience in the voluntary sector.

We made a five-year commitment to Counterpoints Arts – a leading national organisation in the field of arts, migration and cultural change. Their mission is to support and produce art by and about migrants and refugees, seeking to ensure that their contributions are recognised and welcomed within British arts, history and culture. This grant supported Counterpoints Arts to expand the reach and impact of their work and to develop new partnerships at the intersection of arts, racial justice and migration.

Together with various well-known arts organisations, such as the Southbank Centre and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Counterpoints Arts developed a new set of shared values around arts and migration that resulted in new artistic commissions on these topics. This is a sector-wide effort led by Counterpoint Arts, with more organisations and partners joining. This is significant because such collaborations on migrant and racial justice with mainstream actors are still quite rare.

Counterpoints Arts have also created ​‘retreats and salons for pop culture and social justice’ to facilitate public conversations on these subjects and to bring good practices from the US to the UK on arts, migration and racial justice.

The leadership provided by Counterpoints Arts is linked to two key recent efforts. First Counterpoints commissioned a review between November 2020 to February 2021, which resulted in a report entitled ​‘It’s More than Just Black People on a Stage’. The report highlighted the barriers and opportunities to meaningful collaboration at the nexus between displacement, arts, migration and racial justice. This was followed up with an evaluation which further investigated and recommended how Counterpoints could advance work in these areas, with a focus on how migrant and racial justice organisations can collaborate with mainstream actors.

Funding from Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Unbound Philanthropy, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Comic Relief and AB Foundation supported Counterpoints Arts in commissioning these reports, to pivot their strategy and to continue to use art to connect those who often seem different and distant (i.e. refugees and migrants to the mainstream population). The Backbone Fund in particular, according to their CEO and founder Almir Koldzic, felt to them as a recognition of their work, helping them build their confidence and longer-term sustainability and opening up new opportunities.