The Sheffield People's Assembly on Race Equality took place at Ellesmere Children's Centre and brought together 47 participants from across the city, supported by a facilitation and organising team of community practitioners and partners.
The Assembly was designed as a structured, community-led space for reflection, dialogue, and action on race equality in Sheffield, four years on from the Race Equality Commission (2022). It created opportunities for participants to engage with evidence, share lived experiences, and discuss priorities for change across education, policing, health, employment and community life.
How it was run
• Keynote inputs and cultural contributions to set context and honour community experience • Engagement with evidence, including findings from the Sheffield Race Equality desktop review • Structured small-group discussions on lived experience, systemic barriers, community priorities and proposals for action • Collective Agreement and Healing Space, supporting emotional safety throughout • Whole-group report-back, with each table sharing reflections and recommendations
What we heard
THEME 1
Promises perceived as undelivered
Participants widely described the Race Equality Commission as well-intentioned but performative, citing a lack of visible follow-through and slow or absent implementation.
“Review → report → fanfare → inaction.”
THEME 2
Key inequality themes
Health: mistrust, stigma, culturally unsafe services, barriers to mental-health support. Education: disproportionate exclusions, parents excluded from decision-making. Policing & justice: racial profiling, harsher sentencing, over-surveillance. Employment & business: limited access to procurement, funding and leadership roles. Governance: power concentrated among institutions, community voices sidelined.
THEME 3
Systemic issues
Participants highlighted a lack of representation in senior leadership, weak accountability mechanisms, data inconsistently collected or missing, and institutional cultures that reproduce bias, described by some as “colonial behaviours.”
THEME 4
Impact on communities
The consequences of inaction included erosion of trust, growing disillusionment and fatigue, fragmentation, and continued economic, social and educational exclusion.
What needs to change
CORE PRINCIPLES:
Accountability before rhetoric
Community-led decision-making, shifting power, not just consulting
Equity as a central organising principle
Recognition that racial justice benefits everyone
Recommendations
Community
Community
Launch regular community assemblies for ongoing accountability
Build a permanent network for coordinated action
Develop youth assemblies, leadership programmes and civic training
VCS
Voluntary & community sector
Establish community-led scrutiny and oversight structures
Combine data with lived experience to inform action
Strengthen cross-sector partnerships between community organisations, faith groups and civil society bodies
Institutions
Institutional & government
Embed race equality across all policy, strategy and resourcing decisions
Introduce quarterly progress check-ins with publicly shared updates
Implement participatory budgeting and inclusive procurement
Risks identified
1
Community burnout
2
Fragmentation without coordination
3
Repetition of short-term initiatives lacking sustainability
Sheffield must shift from consultation to co-creation, from promises to accountability, and from fragmented efforts to coordinated power.
“We have to be the solution ourselves.”
Where this leads
These findings shaped Phase Two of the Sheffield People's Assembly, taking place on 18 July
.png)
.png)