ECHO Manifesto

European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) members have created this Manifesto to share our collective aspirations in the areas of diversity, inclusion and community building for the next decade. It has been written as Europe continues to come through the COVID-19 pandemic, and against a mixed background of challenge and hope across all the member countries and the wider global community.

Herein are set out aspirations and associated commitments focused on ensuring that ECHO member organisations play our full part in civic recovery, regenerationregeneration, and transformation, working towards equity, social justice and access for all.

The ECHO network draws strength from its diversity. Each of the twenty ttwenty-threewo member halls across thirteen countries hascountries has its own particular socio-cultural character and history, is situated with a distinct civic position and possesses a unique artistic identity. This breadth of character across the network generates a potent learning environment through which all members can both contribute insights and be inspired by the courage and ambition of others.

In this Manifesto ECHO members come together in common cause; eagercause; eager to listen, learn and support each other to take risks and innovate in order to effect change. We acknowledge that there is much work to do, and that we will be most effective in these efforts when we reach out to learn from and work with external partners, seeking new relationships as well as nurturing existing ones.

We are proud to be locally rooted, building and sustaining profoundsustaining profound primary relationships with our own communities, as well as passionately drivenpassionately driven by our vision as European cultural leaders, sharing our experiences across our network and beyond to help unlock the transformational power of music for the good of all.

CORE VALUES

1. ECHO members stand for quality in all aspects of concert hall output, behaviour and culture. We know that our ideas of quality must include human and social aspects alongside aesthetic and performative elements. This means that we are committed to continuous reflection and improvement, to ensure that both what we offer to our communities and the way that it is offered are the best that we can possibly achieve.

2. ECHO members believe that music can transform lives for the better. This means that we actively seek out new ways of working with artists, of connecting with communities andcommunities and of communicating with audiences, in order that we may share the potential impacts of music as widely as possible.

3. ECHO members recognise that we have a civic responsibility to extend our relevance, reach and value across all sections of society. If music has positive benefits for people, then we must ensure that we are never knowingly neglecting or excluding members of our communities from our halls and our programmes. We actively work to connect and build dialogue in order to understand our communities better.

4. ECHO members celebrate the dynamic diversity of our cities and how they are always evolving and growing. This should be reflected in the culture and workforce of our halls and as well as the content of our programmes, and we. We recognise that this will require us to review, challenge and change some of our assumptions -assumptions - social and cultural - and the ways in which we organise and plan our work.

5. ECHO members believe that as concert halls deeply rooted in our local communities we can and should play a role in helping to achieve greater social justice. We understand that we have to work actively to break down barriers to access and inclusion, within our institutions as well as with our communities – both those we are already in touch with and those we aren’t yet reaching.. To do this we must will deepenwill deepen relationships with our exisitingexisting local partners, andpartners and seek out new relevant partners relevant to the diverse communities we work for and with. We must, listenlisten, learn, co-create and take risks in finding new ways of fulfilling our responsibilities.

ECHO members commit across our network:

i) To be agile, flexible and capable of transformation within our institutions, by ensuring that we are looking outwards in order that we canto respond appropriately to socio-cultural change and challenge, as well as building active internal dialogue so that all colleagues feel empowered and safe to contribute innovative ideas.

ii) To enrich and develop artistic eco-systems – locally, nationally and at European level – through action on diversity and access, by meansby means of shared initiatives with external partners at all three levels who are expert in this work, andwork, and can extend our capacity.

iii) To act with intentional social responsibility and understand how to evaluate this - locally, nationally and at European level, - by means of collaborating locally and nationally with relevant external partners as relevant to identify and carry out meaningful action in this field, and by working across the ECHO network to design and implement effective accountability frameworks within which to assess this work.

iv) To work more holistically within institutions so that access, inclusion and diversity are seen as fully shared responsibilities, by establishing internal structures that bring colleagues together across departmental divisions for active participationto participate actively in planning and decision making aboutmaking about these topics.

Developing our actions – case studies and learning

We have gathered a set of case studies from across our network to help us learn how to deliver on these commitments most effectively. These initial case studies have been chosen to reflect the widely varying approaches that ECHO members are taking in relation to diversity, inclusion and community building, and many of these describe initiatives that are in the earliest stages, whilst some are long-established programmes.

Taken together, they offer a rich learning resource that ECHO members will study, update, amendupdate, amend and add to over the coming months and years. This in turn will lead to the development of cross-institutional and network-wide strategic collaborations aimed at realising the aspirations of the Manifesto through concrete initiatives. These are likely to focus on:

Extending the diversity of our workforces – both institutional and artistic
Extending the diversity of our audiences
Embedding access and inclusion as core qualities of our Halls
Exploring co-creation / co-programming dialogues with our audiences / communities
Developing long-term audience, programme and community building partnerships with relevant institutions from other sectors: health, education, social development etc.
Supporting wide range of artists in connecting more deeply with specific communities, locally and network-wide

Manifesto development

This Manifesto was created through a consultative process that ran from Marchfrom March – July 2021, overseen by Andrew Manning, then Secretary-General of the ECHO Network, and a steering committee of colleagues from three of the ECHO member halls: Karina Svensson (Konserthuset Stockholm) , Esther Adrian (Elbphilarmonie Hamburg) Tine Van Goethem (BOZAR Brussels). ECHO Chief Executives contributed to the process through their ECHO network CEO meetings, as well as through deeper discussion in a Manifesto CEO sub-group and through bi-lateral dialogue with the Secretary-General and individual ECHO member halls. Two consultative participatory workshops were held with Education, Learning and Participation leads from across the ECHO network. The overall process was designed, and facilitated, and the Manifesto drafted by external advisor Katherine Zeserson.

September 2021, revision at March 2022