Barrett and Welsh releases Creativity with a Conscience

Barrett and Welsh, the award-winning Toronto branding and advertising agency specializing in inclusive communications, announced today the release of Creativity with a Conscience, a free online toolkit for an anti-racist, pro-inclusion creative practice.

Compiled by Barrett and Welsh's founder, CEO and CCO Gavin Barrett, the toolkit springs from the firm’s ongoing work to improving inclusion in the creative industries. “Every one of us in Canada’s creative industries and all of our clients must play our role in reversing systemic injustice,” said Barrett. “As creatives, we can have an incredible impact — if we act with conscience.”

Creativity with a Conscience is based on the core belief that creativity and innovation can drive social change when practised with intentionality and care. It provides practitioners with practical tools to navigate past their own implicit and unconscious biases to design actively inclusive brand engagements. The toolkit is designed for everyone – from copywriters, art directors and designers to clients and account handlers – and anyone interested in exploring the power of creativity to effect change.

First unveiled in beta with the RGD’s BIPOC designers group, Creativity with a Conscience is freely accessible and shareable under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It organizes a variety of tools and resources under 12 guiding principles titled:

• Embrace reconciliation
• Include, Include, Include
• Ramp up accessibility
• Support industry-changing initiatives
• The canvas is not white
• Hire IBPOC-owned/led agencies
• Invest in IBPOC media
• Design with IBPOC typefaces
• Cast truly diverse talent
• Use more diverse stock
• Commission IBPOC creatives
• Produce with IBPOC

At the heart of the toolkit are three open-to-all tools created by Barrett and Welsh. Here. We. Are. is a crowdsourced directory of IBPOC-owned or led advertising and marketing businesses. IBPOC-owned/led firms not yet listed can add themselves and invite or add others. Also listed are the agency’s Multicultural/Minority Canadian Talent and Talent with Disabilities inclusive casting talent platforms, both of which it hosts on Facebook.

“I invite the entire industry to adopt and contribute to the toolkit,” says Barrett, adding, “Inclusion is a necessarily continuous process. There will always be ways to keep improving; I don’t think the work we have ahead of us will ever be complete. That’s why I envisioned Creativity with a Conscience as a forever-in-beta toolkit; it’s a living document that will be constantly updated as new tools and resources are added by us in a crowdsourced, collective effort.”

The Creativity with a Conscience Toolkit is open-source and available for free online at rebrand.ly/creativity-with-a-conscience.

About Barrett and Welsh: Barrett and Welsh is located in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee and Wendat peoples, on Treaty 13 and Williams Treaties lands. The agency specializes in communications that create inclusion for minorities. It is a certified B Corporation, a Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council Certified Minority-Owned Agency, and a POCAM Call for Equity and Dear Everybody Agreement signatory. It is Canada’s most-awarded multicultural agency and is considered one of the world’s leading branding and advertising agencies in the space.

About Gavin Barrett: Author and creative entrepreneur Gavin Barrett is the Founder, CEO and CCO of Barrett and Welsh, and a co-founder of People of Colour in Advertising and Marketing (POCAM) and the Multicultural Marketing Alliance of Canada. He chairs the Board of award-winning immigrant journalism non-profit New Canadian Media. As an advisory board member, he helps ensure Canadian Authors Association programming reflects the diversity of Toronto’s writers. Though not 100 years old, he was the inaugural and the 100th anniversary Jury chair at the Marketing Award’s multicultural juries.