SEEDS is a proactive diversity initiative created to address the challenges and opportunities of increased cultural and ethnic diversity in North West region of Northern Ireland.

SEEDS vision

To strengthen the bonds in the community and support everyone by eliminating fear, misinformation and barriers that keep individuals apart.

Read more about SEEDS’ aims and goals.

We bring people together

Whether that is in Africa, the Middle East, Europe or here in Ireland we work to improve the quality of life for people all over the globe.

Supporting the SEEDS Project has meant:

• Recognising and relating to the ‘others’ who live and work in our society
• Sharing common resources and providing mutual aid and support
• Providing meaningful work and sustenance to all members and communities
• Integrating marginal groups into the mainstream of society
• Promoting unending education, awareness and social interaction between local people and the ethnic communities in a safe space
• Encouraging unity through respect for differences
• Fostering cultural expression and increase awareness of ethnicity and race
• Creating group wealth and empowerment through capacity building programmes
• Promoting and encouraging social enterprise
• Joint decision making and democratic progress.
• Providing a range of services meeting social need and interventions
• Contributing to the reduction of hate crime in our city and region

In turn SEEDS has the key objectives to promote:

• valuing and respecting diversity and benefiting from our differences;
• creating a positive, safe, accessible environment and culture in which discrimination has no part and where everyone can achieve their full potential;
• listening to, engaging and collaborating with a wide range of partners and agencies in order to continually improve our equality practice;
• promoting equal opportunities in all aspects of employment and community;
• supporting positive action programmes where there is a clearly identified need;
• mainstreaming equal opportunities into all sectors of the public services by developing systems and processes which are accessible and transparent;
• ensuring all projects and programmes supported by SEEDS mainstream equality and diversity as core components;
• being accountable by target setting, monitoring, evaluating and reviewing progress on a regular basis;
• taking necessary action when non-compliance with the Policy is identified
• securing resources to ensure that this commitment is achieved.

We opened the One World Resource Centre in April 2010. This is the base for the groups involved in providing support for the Black Minority Ethnic (BME) community. Since then the demands for SEEDS activities and programmes has grown significantly.

We proactively work towards the achievement of these objectives where they link with its work. This is achieved through its projects by:

• Engaging young people, particularly those who are hard to reach.
• Providing more opportunities to channel young people into arts and sport to get them away from drugs and alcohol.
• Promoting good health improving mental health through arts and media.
• Reducing anti-social behaviour by engaging in range of purposeful activities
• Raising awareness of culture and the creative industries.

SEEDS is participating with stakeholders on a joint collective plan and strategy forward into the future with a comprehensive Multicultural Programme and a focus on strengthening the delivery of multicultural services for Derry and its surrounding communities.

Without an accessible, inclusive and welcoming community our current cultural assets are at risk. Our young and talented will continue to leave because we are not able to provide the opportunities for our young to develop and thrive.

Multiculturalism is a philosophy. It is inclusive and welcoming. It requires the implementation of policies that ensure organisations and institutions are operated in accordance with its goals and objectives. The efficient and effective delivery of multicultural services that are accessible to our recently arrived will enable Derry and its surrounding communities to successfully absorb the newcomers that are anticipated and retain them, in addition to allowing us to repatriate those that have already left.

Our writers, our performing artists, our poets, our songwriters, our current ethnic communities and our children, ARE our multicultural assets.

It is through an on-going pro-active effort in providing accessible, educational initiatives, public awareness campaigns, implementing multicultural policies at all levels of our community and facilitating the promotion, presentation and celebration of our multicultural communities that success will be achieved.

Multiculturalism is not about difference and identity per se but about those that are embedded in and sustained by culture.

SEEDS want to promote equality but equality in a multicultural society is a crucial constitutive part of a real solution to inequality. Equality is laid out at three, hierarchical levels: equality of rights and respect; of opportunity and self-esteem; of power, well-being, and the capacity to flourish.