The arts have a unique power to inspire, to bring people together, to help us all imagine different possible worlds, to illuminate and amplify diverse experiences, to catalyze transformation, and to allow us all to build empathy and connection. As stakeholders of cultural organizations, we are all leaders; this means we have a powerful responsibility to engage in the urgent, essential, and nuanced work to build a more equitable world for us all through building racial equity. We recognize that we have a special responsibility to do this work in ways that welcome others to join us, because fighting oppression and making change requires both leadership and broad participation.
We commit to engaging in this incredibly important work with humility, commitment, integrity, accountability, patience (for ourselves and others), courage, and joy, because we believe that a world which acknowledges past injustice and builds authentic and meaningful equity into organizations and systems will be a richer, more vibrant, more powerful, and more just world. We believe in working toward this world, and that by pursuing racial equity, we will create more just and inclusive organizations and communities, open our institutions to more people, right historical wrongs, deliver more impactful arts and cultural programming, and become stronger, more resilient and more vital organizations.
We aim to encourage an equitable, authentic and fair working environment for our artists, creative team, and staff.
We strive, in every performance and event, to bring a group of people together for a communal experience, whereby artists connect with audiences. Each artist and each audience brings their own unique background to that experience, and the experience is fullest when the backgrounds are the most diverse and unique. We believe we will create the best possible theatre when we have the most diversity of thought, background and experience represented in every area of our organization.
We are gathering a group of Arts Center employees who will comprise an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Task Force Initiative to ensure increased diversity, on our stage and off.