Race, arts and heritage
Race Equality Nottingham
Race Equality Nottingham is an independent, community-led racial justice infrastructure for the city. Hosted by Himmah, it works in collaboration with a number of Black-led groups and individuals across Nottingham, taking a citizen-led approach that turns lived experience into collective power.
We work to ensure that racialised communities are not left to face discrimination, hate crime, exclusion, or institutional neglect alone, particularly in the areas of health, hate crime, housing, and education.
This is delivered through monthly discussions, advice surgeries, casework support, research, public education, and policy challenge.
Race Equality Nottingham exists not only to respond to harm, but to build knowledge, organise communities to demand accountability, expose structural racism, and create stronger mechanisms through which local institutions can be challenged and transformed.
The Race and Class Arts Lab is a space to explore arts, culture, and ideas as a means of fostering solidarity. It brings together community activists, artists, researchers, and the wider public to engage with race and class through anti-racist, class-conscious, and decolonial perspectives.
Rooted in narrative-based approaches, the Lab values lived experience, collective memory, and community knowledge as vital forms of cultural production and political learning, and as counter-archives to the colonial narratives that still shape mainstream culture.
It exists to build solidarity across difference, support artists from working-class and racialised backgrounds, and generate new ideas, language, and creative practice capable of challenging dominant narratives. The Lab also seeks to influence the creative sector to confront its own biases around race, class, and empire, while widening access to more just, grounded, and community-led forms of cultural work.
The Lab runs workshops, supports artists, holds talks, and hosts a monthly gathering for artists to share and discuss their practice. Current activity includes workshops in Broxtowe and Hyson Green, alongside intercommunal sessions that bring different communities into dialogue across neighbourhood and racial lines.
Race and Class Arts lab
Fanon centre
The Fanon Centre is the strategy's healing and consciousness-building space. Taking its name and orientation from Frantz Fanon, it works in a decolonial tradition that understands racism as inseparable from colonialism and class domination, and as something whose effects are not only institutional and material but also psychological, relational, and intergenerational.
Through trauma-informed counselling, collective care, mental health education, and the development of a practitioner network, the Centre is beginning to support people of colour and their communities to heal, connect, and sustain themselves within the work of struggle.
Its role is both to address individual pain and to situate care within a wider politics of liberation, recognising that the wounds of racism and colonisation are real, and that movements need spaces of reflection, restoration, and political grounding if they are to endure and grow.
We currently have limited capacity, but can offer free counselling sessions to people of colour in collaboration with Nottingham Counselling Service.