The TV Foundation, the charitable arm of the Edinburgh TV Festival, has launched an industry initiative inspired by this year’s MacTaggart Lecture by playwright and dramatist James Graham.
Graham’s lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival outlined how the TV industry needs to coordinate and strengthen its approach to class and social mobility.
The TV Foundation said it had been working on its new Impact Unit for the past 18 months, and that it aims to help shape the way the TV industry works to make it open to all.
The Impact Unit will build on the TV Foundation’s existing career development programmes, working with talent who, for a variety of reasons, find barriers to progression. It will initially, focus on the representation of class and social mobility.
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It will create a pan-sector working group in September that will be open for applications, and will also contribute to developing measurements and monitoring of representation.
The Impact Unit will also highlight TV organisations in TV which are “Class Confident” and will introduce a Social Mobility Bursary for the TV Festival to start in 2025.
The Impact Unit will be led by Gemma Bradshaw in an expansion of her remit since joining the TV Foundation last year from One World Media.
Campbell Glennie, CEO for the TV Foundation and the Edinburgh TV Festival said: “The launch of the Impact Unit is the culmination of months of work evaluating what the TV Foundation can be doing to address pressing issues head-on. We want to provide a collaborative umbrella to take forward all the intersectional issues around class and social mobility that we are exploring this week at the Festival and convene a passionate group of people to effect real change.”
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