Report: Beyond Tokenism
Beyond Tokenism: Insights from Community Consultations Now Available
From July to August 2024, Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV) hosted a series of community consultations as part of our Retrospection program and in collaboration with Dr. Gilbert Caluya.
These conversations supported the development of the newly released research paper, Beyond Tokenism: Strategic Conversations with Culturally Diverse Artists and Creatives and contributed valuable input into Creative Victoria’s next Creative State strategy.
We are proud to share that the publication is now live and available to download from our website.
Grounded in the lived experience of artists across generations, the report offers a sobering, yet hopeful account of how cultural diversity is experienced in the Victorian creative industries. These consultations provided space for artists to speak candidly about the pressures to perform identity, the exhaustion of working within systems that do not include them, and the framing of diversity as an aesthetic or checkbox exercise.
Participants emphasised the need for long-term investment in culturally diverse leadership, including governance structures that reflect the communities they serve. The report calls for a shift in power—beyond representation and into resourcing community-led, self-determined cultural production.
It also highlights the importance of intergenerational dialogue and care-based practices, challenging the emphasis on productivity and output that often sidelines community accountability. These findings directly reflect MAV’s core mission as a not-for-profit community arts organisation committed to equity, cultural safety, and meaningful structural change.
As an organisation shaped by a team as diverse as the artists and communities we serve, MAV remains committed to supporting bold storytelling and advocacy that strengthens Victoria’s multicultural arts ecology.
We invite you to read and share this report as part of our collective journey toward a more equitable and imaginative creative sector.
Acknowledgements:
These community consultations took place on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples. We acknowledge their enduring custodianship and pay deep respect to their Elders past and present.
The consultations were open to all artists and creatives who self-identify as culturally and linguistically diverse—including First Nations artists—across all artforms, cultural practices, and geographic locations. We are deeply honoured to have spent time with artists of all ages. The personal stories shared—of migration, resilience, transition and survival—form the emotional and cultural foundation of this report.
We thank Creative Victoria for funding this opportunity to conduct these roundtable discussions to provide input into Creative Victoria’s strategy.
We wish to thank the multiple research participants that attended the roundtable conversations, which served as the backbone of this report.
We also want to thank the MAV team (July 2024)— Lauren Mullings, Miriam Abud, Jo B, Theresa Angela, Oscar Jimenez, James Emmanuel McKinnon, Noah daCosta and Damon Paraha for facilitating the roundtable discussions and acting as researchers for this project.
Special thanks to Leah Avene (Co-Culture) for co-designing a facilitation process grounded in cultural responsiveness and relational engagement—centering care, trust, and the decompression of power dynamics throughout the consultation.
Finally, we extend our gratitude to Dr Gilbert Caluya for leading the research and authoring this report with insight, care and rigour.
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