Introduction
The annual Godiva Festival is planned, managed and delivered by Coventry City Council. As such the Festival upholds the Equalities, inclusion and accessibility commitments of the Council.
Coventry City Council is committed to:
- Its continuing duty as a public authority to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment, and any other conduct prohibited under the Equality Act 2010
- Recognising and celebrating diversity, and ensuring equality of opportunity both as a provider and commissioner of services and as a large employer
- Developing a culture that embeds the effective management of equality, diversity and inclusion in our day-to-day practices, policies, procedures, and through our external relationships.
Coventry City Council recognises that people still experience inequality because of their background. The Council will therefore lead by example and challenge discrimination, harassment and victimisation on the grounds of:
- Age, disability, gender reassignment, marital and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.
Coventry City Council is also committed, as a Marmot City, to reducing health inequalities. We will do this by acting across a range of policy areas to address environmental, social, cultural and economic factors - with a specific focus on the impacts to disadvantaged groups and deprived areas.
The Godiva Festival is committed to placing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at the centre of every aspect of the festival. We aim to prioritise EDI through our cultural presentations, performances, our employment, and staff management. We recognise and acknowledge our obligations as both employer and service provider under the Equality Act 2010 to be welcoming and accessible to all who engage with us. The Godiva Festival supports the city’s diverse audiences to experience live performing arts. We bring the best of local, national and international performers to audiences from Coventry and across the Region. We support our city creative companies to stage performers, invest in our performing artists, introduce audiences to live performance, and engage people of all ages, from all walks of life, with our imaginative programme. The Godiva Festival is the largest single ticketed cultural event in the city and has been running for over 25 years. The continuation and development of the festival from a free mass gathering to a fully-fledged Festival with national production values is also a legacy of the city as UK City of Culture 2021.
We recognise that artists, audience members and others who work in the creative industries are a culturally rich and diverse group. Our aim is that everybody should have equal opportunity to engage with the performing arts and be treated fairly. Nobody should experience discrimination, harassment, or victimisation when they interact with us. As such, The Godiva Festival is committed to this policy, which enables all stakeholders to feel secure and confident. In this policy, we set out our legal duties for EDI in our programming, engagement activity, the structure of our organisation and our day-to-day management. We set aims for developing our EDI practice and explain how we will monitor our progress towards meeting them.
Our objectives are:
- Everyone has an opportunity to experience and be inspired by the performing arts.
- We aim for positive representation of performers with diverse artists and gender balance with our schedules.
- We programme with City Council values and campaigns in mind.
- To comply with the Legal duties set out in the following legislation.
- Relations Act 1976 (as amended in 2000)
- Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (as amended in 2005)
- Race Employment Rights Act 1996
- Civil Partnership Act 2004
- Work and Families Act 2006
- Part Time Workers Regulations 2000
- Fixed Term Employees Regulations 2002
- Sex Discrimination (gender reassignment) Regulations and Gender Recognition Act 2004
- Children and Young People Act 2014
- To comply with The Equality Act 2010
Equalities statement
Coventry City Council and thus The Godiva Festival abides by the Equalities Act 2010 and is committed to ensuring that its activities, governance and management practices do not discriminate, directly or indirectly, against any individual on grounds of the protected characteristics set out in the Act:
- Age
- Disability
- Gender reassignment
- Marriage and civil partnership
- Pregnancy and maternity
- Race
- Religion and belief
- Sex
- Sexual orientation
We additionality recognises that discrimination can exist because of a person’s employment status, health status, caring responsibilities, unrelated criminal convictions, and socio-economic status and identity.
The Godiva Festival strives to combat all forms of discrimination and recognises that every individual has the right to equal treatment, equal respect and equal access to its activities and employment opportunities. In this Without Walls acknowledges the existence of unconscious bias and seeks to mitigate its effect through training and selection protocols.
If any such person believes that their rights as set out in this Statement have not been adhered to, then they have the right to complain through Coventry City Council complaints process.
The Godiva Festival works in partnership with a wide range of organisations. Each partner organisation is required to adhere to this Equalities Statement regarding any activities undertaken or services delivered in partnership with Godiva Festival. If any service is contracted out to another organisation as part of the delivery of the festival, the organisation will be required to demonstrate that it has its own Equalities Statement, policy, or to agree to act in accordance with Godiva Festival.
Meeting our objectives
Everyone has an opportunity to experience and be inspired by the performing arts.
- Affordability – Whilst the Festival needs to become self-funded, we aim for affordability with our ticketing. To that end
- The festival does not generate a profit.
- We offer concession tickets.
- We offer Free entry to those under 5’s.
- We offer free “carer” tickets to those in need of personal assistance.
- We allow registered assistance dogs.
- We offer Family tickets at a reduced cost.
- We offer a super concession for those with Go CV+ membership, which are concessionary customers that live within the city.
- We allow food to be taken into the festival and we work with our food and drink partner to ensure there are “value” options available form caterers and that bar prices are kept as low as possible; we offer free water filling stations across the festival.
- We offer payment plans for the more expensive family ticket bundles to spread the burden.
- The Venue is in the centre of the city and does not require audiences to dive to a remote location. The city centre is served by public transport.
- We offer free car parking on site – with a free ticket for Blue Badge holders.
- We offer an in-person ticket buying service in conjunction with the Belgrade Theatre.
- The festival content includes 4 stages of local content, we also include artists with local connections or regional connections on the main stages in the main field, we programme, commission and work with local creative companies to showcase local talent. All of which provides inspiration for local audiences to engage with the performing arts.
- We provide welfare service on site which includes a High Dependency toilet, a safe space for those who need safe spaces/calming spaces – parents with children with autism, etc.
- Our Welfare Service provide staff at the point of entry to assist with customers with access needs. We offer mobility scooters and manual wheelchairs free of charge, we place disabled toilets at all toilet points, we provide raised viewing platforms for those who are seated. Our Welfare team can escort customers into the event and store in fridges and medication that customers need.
- We aim to introduce BSL interpretation on the big screen adjacent to the Mian Stage on all 3 days of the festival.
- We publish our Accessibility offer https://www.godivafestival.com/information/accessible-facilities
Future Aims
- We aim to contact all customers with “carer” tickets to offer bespoke services for those who need it.
- We aim for positive representation of performers with diverse artists and gender balance with our schedules.
- The Godiva Festival music programming group – assists with music programming. Whilst commercial decisions also influence, we ensure diversity by including representatives from:
- Coventry Music - CCC Schools music service
- CCC Cultural Service
- Local music Venue and Women in Music – The Tin
- Young creatives and youth music projects - Positive Youth Foundation
- Coventry Caribbean Centre
- Coventry South Asian music producer
- We ensure there is diversity across all our stages and across the hierarchy and schedule. We look to programme diversity across our non-music programme.
- We will make arrangements for neuro-diverse performers requiring calm spaces and specific hospitality needs.
- We provide access to any stage where needed, with ramps for any performer access needs.
- The Godiva Calling initiative represents across various genres and various venues.
We programme with City Council values and campaigns in mind.
- We will ensure that all community stage programmers also have selection policies which uphold CCC values when programming those community and youth stages.
- We will check performers' profilers before confirming booking, ensuring that performers have not contradicted our CCC values.