OUR CHARTER
The Swindon Shuffle Charter
We want to ensure that the Swindon Shuffle is a community organisation with events that equally celebrate the diversity of all music, arts, culture, and members of our community.
SOCIAL INCLUSION
We recognise, value and embrace the diversity across audiences, artists and volunteers, and therefore do not tolerate any discrimination in any form due to anyone’s age, disability, gender, gender identity, race, religious belief or sexual orientation.
GENDER
Gender imbalance in original music remains a challenge both within the music industry and in Swindon and the surrounding area. Over the last five years we have continued to focus on increasing female representation on our line ups however we are limited by original artists in this area that are available to play.
This is why we also support any wider community initiatives to encourage greater female participation in creating original music, recognising that this is a more sustained way to ensure better balance on future line ups.
DISABILITY, D/DEAF ACCESS AND NEURO-DIVERSITY
We recognise that music fans come from all sections and backgrounds of life that have different access and / or infrastructure requirements, and we aim to support all individuals wanting to attend where this is within our means.
However, the Swindon Shuffle does not own any of the venues used, and unfortunately most of the venues in the Old Town area of Swindon are very old (100+ years) and were not built with many access requirements in mind, so we currently have limitations beyond our control making better access difficult to achieve.
That being said, we continue to work with the venues involved to identify what provisions can be made regarding accessibility as we want to make attending the festival as enjoyable an experience as possible for everyone within our community.
We acknowledge that with regard to D/Deaf access and support there have been good improvements in recent years. However, as the Swindon Shuffle is a free entry community organisation our current funding does not allow us to provide these facilities. We will continue to monitor this and improve facilities when technology, costs and/or funding allow us to.
MENTAL HEALTH & SAFEGUARDING
The Swindon Shuffle continues to take supporting artist and audience mental well being seriously. We have done this for many years, with Swindon & Gloucestershire Mind being a previously supported charity.We have information available to everyone on our website regarding looking after their wellbeing and venue staff and volunteers will help anyone requiring temporary support during events due to struggling with their mental health challenges.