Equity and liberation lie at the heart of our future

Why does Barbichette talk about equity rather than equality? What does liberation mean to us?

This well-known comic sums it up pretty well! (Except that it’s all men pictured, of course)

Ultimately we believe in a future that works for everyone, where no person’s individual circumstances or context limits their potential and ensuring we achieve that is what we at Barbichette are committed to.

While liberation is the end goal, we believe equity is the road to getting us there. 

Equality is a nice idea, but it speaks to non-transformation of the systems that surround us and leaves too many people behind. Through equality, everyone gets the same access to supports in society - including taxation, physical spaces, etc - but this doesn’t recognise that not everyone has the same needs. Persons with disabilities, people of colour, women and girls, LGBTQI+ people: there are so many groups in our society currently left out of the solutions being presented by many including decision-makers, who need specific investment and solutions to the barriers they continue to face in their lives.

We need to change the systems at the core to ensure all people have equal opportunities to participate and to live a good life and that means authentic social transformation. It means taxing the rich fairly, having a justice-based approach to things like reforming our justice system, having a social floor that no one can fall beneath and ensuring our decision-makers and systems represent those they make decisions on behalf of and are held truly to account for the decisions they make. It means those facing multiple forms of discrimination receive the most support in society and have a seat at a table that’s made to suit them - so that all spaces including those where decisions are made represent their populations.