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A Magazine for Sheffield

Watch a new short film looking at the impact of Covid-19 on Sheffield's communities of colour

Sheffield’s BAMER communities have become fed up of being used as 'Tick Boxes' and have been forced to fight back during the pandemic.

Sheffield Community Contact Tracers is a community organisation and collective group of retired medical practitioners, public health specialists, and volunteers working together to combat Covid-19. Established last March, they started with the initial pilot project of setting up a local, volunteer-led contact tracing service for those infected with Covid-19, before the NHS Test and Trace existed. Since then, the group has expanded its services and now offers training sessions to teach communities about coronavirus and how to keep safe. This offers support to the national vaccination programme by putting those who are vaccine hesitant at ease. Now, they are sharing the voices of under-represented communities.

Covid-19 has highlighted the many injustices present in modern day society and has shed light on how many different communities have been forgotten and left to suffer in silence.

SCCT has set out to produce a series of short films, delving into the lives of Sheffield’s under-represented groups. These individuals inspired the name of the series, 'Seldom Heard Communities', coined by Susi Miller of Maan Somali Mental Health Sheffield. “These groups are often labelled as ‘hard to reach’, but we know the opposite is true. They aren’t hard to reach at all. They are seldom heard.”

Each episode within the series will focus on a different 'seldom heard' community with episode one, entitled ‘Tick Boxes’, concentrating on Sheffield’s Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority communities and the work that they have been doing over the past year to combat the pandemic.

BAMER groups have been among the hardest hit during the past twelve months, with it being reported that the death rate is up to three times higher than for their white counterparts. ‘Tick Boxes’ explores why this has been the case and how communities have banded together to avoid this happening again.

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More Equality & Social Justice

More Equality & Social Justice