͜•⌝" (Max Barber)

Parting with an early reflection: even with daunting questions, it's good to learn before doing. Take in people's experiences so the work can be rich and long lasting. Thanks for joining us for our first online World Cafe, here's to when we can say cheers in person! Until then!

Wabbit! Two hours well spent, a real pleasure listening and watching our community come together to save our passion. From addressing global issues: covid and language barriers to making our local theatres a place where everyone can thrive, we’ve put the world some rights. 1/2

To make outreach successful, we need to employ Deaf people so we know where the community is, especially in rural areas. We also need to be aware of dismantling elitist creative engagement with schools. Barriers can exist at the source so by taking that away we can drive change.

'Mainstream' theatre have a responsibility to make sure young people know that theatre is for them too. Direct communication events would be a great way of spotlighting Deaf people to empower the community.

There's a lot of "you can't do that" from the hearing community. A lot of us have to do it the hard way. We need to create the opportunities for young people when they are still young, at the beginning, to stop the same problems being repeated generation after generation.

It's easy to feel like you're doing the work when you include someone but it's actually reductive to reduce representation to just one person. Patting ourselves on the back shouldn't happen when we haven't included a range of people to represent one group.

A simple suggestion is investing time and energy into meeting deaf people. X number of people per month to increase your network will naturally access intersectional groups of people and allow more voices to be brought to the table.

Role models is a great way for people to realise they can do it too. But as others have pointed out by others it's hard to take on that responsibility as a role model as all eyes are on them and it can be a lonely place, if you're the only one! It takes a lot of courage.

Discrimination and exclusion means we are missing people who belong in the Arts. So outreach work is key to including people who have been left out of the conversation and creative spaces. We need to step up our training opportunities, too.

Underrepresented socioeconomic background, gender, Black folks, Asian folks, physical and mental health and abilty...We need to remember that people can be a mix of all the above. We also need to think about people in their entirety, not just one characteristic.

An important reminder: language around this topic is ever evolving so this is a safe space to share new words and signs to truly represent how intersectional 'underrepresented groups' really is. Every day we can learn something!

Following the biggest Civil rights movement in history, we are all acutely aware of stepping up for our underrepresented groups – Black, trans, non-binary, women of colour… how can we take action right now to create intersectional space so they can take centre stage?

We have the power to use social media to our advantage to make sign language as visible as possible to the world. We can make ourselves seen. Especially when everyone is spending their time online, so we can emerge from this time with new connections and stronger than before.

Trying to keep our creativity high despite new barriers brought about by leaving Europe is a new challenge. So we need to make strong connections between ourselves internationally to be ready for the new normal, when we'll be able to go back out into the world.

Figuring out the new normal ... we'll have to have more central organisation. We need to be proactive about creating a centre for us to band together, going forward. Is this something we could do?