Forward Together: our vision
Inspired by the Forward Together monument, this project will seek how can we come together and use our difference to make a better future and positively challenge organisations who seek to divide us and how we use our differences to strengthen communities to overcome everyday challenges.
Raaj Shamji (Edward Cadbury Centre Honorary Fellow) from the team that made the monument approached the Edward Cadbury Centre's Professor Andrew Davies (Cadbury Centre Director) to join forces to develop 'Forward Together' after they asked themselves, What does 'together' look like and how can it be built in a city such as Birmingham, where we celebrate our diversity but at the same time we need to ensure cohesiveness?
The project seeks to think through practical ways in which we can hold our communities together in times of mass polarisation and identitarianism. Forward Together explores what harnesses us as a society to tackle issues like divineness and hostility that detrimentally impact aspirations, freedoms and liberties.
Forward Together celebrates difference without fear, allowing for trust and confidence to be built towards a future of togetherness and unity. We challenge extremism at both ends of the spectrum, from the racist right to identitarianism on the left, both of which threaten our commitment to unity in cities like Birmingham.
Raaj Shamji
The Forward Together monument has given us a unique opportunity to use it as a catalyst for a conversation on a topic I am passionate about. Bringing together ordinary people to make change is powerful but I am disappointed by inequality of opportunity and dismayed that the signs of progress in the 1990s haven’t lived up to what we should expect today, and communities seem more allowed to turn on each other. We developed phrases like 'political correctness' to help people like me, but it has backfired and it now simply suppresses how people really feel: behaviours may have changed externally but thoughts and trust internally have not.
We know that some people benefit from the 'divide and conquer' paradigm, but we still allow it as it meets some of our human needs for identity and significance, but not our ultimate need forgrowth, love and connection. Why is there no conscious effort to tackle segregation and encourage unity in diversity?
I enjoy togetherness – it’s just forgotten where we allow division. When we do 'together' like at the VE day celebrations or the football we love it, but it is short-lived. We quickly find something (usually through the media) to remind that we are not good enough or ready for it and that our foundations of together are weak.
Forward Together is an opportunity to build something long-lived, to remind us that together we are stronger.
Professor Andrew Davies
There are so many things to argue about these days, from the team to support to the best coffee shop to the latest major political crisis. And religion sneaks in there from time to time too. I like a good, thoughtful discussion, personally, where people are open to thinking things through, learning from one another and even being prepared to modify their views if they need to. But so much debate in society today turns into bitter, rancorous feuding, that it’s difficult to talk openly and honestly about some of our world’s biggest challenges.
Through Forward Together, I’m excited about building a platform where we can talk without pretending we all think the same. It isn’t all about making everyone into me. It’s about recognising the strength and coherence that comes from harnessing a variety of distinctive and varied ideological positions, whether they be political, religious, or any other kind, and putting them to work to deliver shared goals. A whole bundle of different sticks is far stronger than one big one. I’m all for cherishing that diversity, encouraging that difference, but working together on the issues that affect us all despite that.