Our local impact

Through our strong links with Hull City Council and regional arts and community groups, we’re helping to advance community understanding of historical and contemporary slavery.

Many of our staff and students are actively involved in the community and play leading roles in local anti-slavery organisations. The Institute has strong links with museums, schools and local ethnically diverse communities. We have also developed educational resources for use in schools, as well as a range of digital archives (e.g. Remembering 1807) aimed at informing debates around the legacies of transatlantic slavery, racism and discrimination.

Interior of the Wilberforce Institute showing a staircase and portrait of William Wilberforce

The Wilberforce Institute is located in the heart of Hull’s historic Old Town, ideally located to host community groups of all kinds. We have considerable links with Hull City Council, Hull Culture & Leisure, Fairtrade organisations, the Freetown (Sierra Leone) association and other local community groups such as the Hull African and Caribbean Association. We are part of a successful bid to commemorate Windrush Day, 22 June, and have developed events and exhibitions around Caribbean Stories, noting this part of Hull’s heritage and linking it to events for Black History Month every October, which is a key outreach month for the Wilberforce Institute.

Jen Nghishitende at the Wilberforce Institute

Our longstanding involvement with arts organisations focuses on the intersection between slavery and freedom in artistic representations and will develop other ways to extend our research and outreach activities towards all such areas.

We have a lengthy association with the Freedom Festival Arts Trust, in which we provide online and live material for their programmes and facilitate artistic involvements of all kinds, providing speakers, hosting debates, and offering specialist advice to performers and artists working on themes relating to historical and contemporary slavery.

A farm worker with a crate of fruit in the foreground

We also have significant involvement with the Humber Modern Slavery Partnership, led by Humberside Police. The chair of this partnership is Dr Alicia Heys and the coordinator for the partnership is Andrew Smith, both employed by with the Wilberforce Institute.

The partnership is committed to tackling Modern Slavery in all its forms across Humberside by working in partnership to disrupt organised crime, bring perpetrators to justice and protect vulnerable people.