As of May 27, 2021
Last year, in the wake of the tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and hundreds more Black men and women, the destructive role anti-Blackness plays in American life was once again laid bare. Since then, we’ve seen the police officer who murdered George Floyd convicted. It’s not justice, but it is a first step toward accountability. Justice will only happen when the nation values all Black lives. This requires a complete restructuring of our systems, from the police to schools to healthcare. The work to accomplish this is a responsibility that falls on all of us.
And we in the theater also have our own specific challenges. As the tellers of stories and the makers of images, we must strive to center those our country has marginalized, to tell truths our culture has suppressed, and to create the narratives that allow us to imagine a more just and inclusive nation. We know that art always reflects the conditions under which it was made, so we must also look inward and ensure that our own structure, processes, and behaviors reflect the world we are striving to bring into being.
Inspired by worldwide mass protest, guided by our BIPOC colleagues and a movement in theater against anti-Blackness and racism, and educated by thinkers and activists, we continue to be pushed to a deeper understanding of systemic racism and our role in it. As our city and our theaters reopen, we have a chance to not just come back, but to come back better — more just, more anti-racist, more equitable. It is vital for all of us in the American Theater to accept this challenge, making the invisible forces of systemic racism visible and centering anti-racism in our practices and our daily work. History, the future of theater, and generations of artists are demanding it of us.
Since last summer, we’ve examined our systems, habits, structures, and behavior. We’ve spent hours learning from educators and activists curated by our BIPOC staff. Inspired and challenged by our internal BIPOC affinity group, we’ve hired an outside facilitator and experts from many fields. We’ve created internal committees and structures to examine — and change — our ways of working. We know we have to change. We need to be more consistent and courageous in challenging the structures that support inequity and white supremacy, both in the world and within the walls where we work. We can, and we must, do better.
We have already made a number of important changes to the way we work, in addition to our Cultural Transformation Plan that is built on impactful commitments and the action items to achieve them.
In order to expand the decision-making process, we restructured and expanded our senior artistic leadership so that all major producing decisions are now discussed and considered in senior artistic meetings where half of the leadership is BIPOC. This configuration is without precedent at The Public and is a direct result of calls to diversify leadership at the theater. We have also created systems so that a much wider set of staff can discuss and contribute to our artistic decisions. We have pledged to aim for art, audiences, and staff that reflect the demographics of New York City, and will develop regular metrics to record our progress.
In order to create a more humane and inclusive workplace, we have pledged to have all staff of The Public make a standardized living wage (based on New York’s cost of living) by 2023. We eliminated unpaid internships in fall of 2019 and are creating paid fellowships that will allow us to recruit and promote a more diverse staff. We have eliminated 10 out of 12s. We expanded our family leave policy from four to ten weeks in January 2020.
In order to make transparency, inclusion, and representation central to how we operate, we have created a Culture Committee, composed of about 20 staff members from all departments and all levels of seniority, to guide, implement, and oversee our plan of action. The Committee is the author of our Cultural Transformation Plan, after discussion and debate that allowed every member of our staff to participate in its creation. We have also created a senior staff position, the Director of People, Equity, Anti-Racism, and Culture, to both support and lead the efforts of the Committee and our ongoing cultural transformation and anti-racism work. Under the leadership of our BIPOC affinity group, we have revised our Code of Conduct to fully reflect our anti-racist stance and to provide clear guidance on the use of slurs and hate speech in our productions.
Our Board of Directors have also had their own process of reflection and learning, creating an Anti-Racist Committee of the Board and developing their own plan featuring three new goals and corresponding action items that are integrated with the staff plan, for their own anti-racist leadership efforts.
The Board will strive to promote an inclusive workplace, fight systemic racism, injustice, and anti-Blackness, and build a culture of collaboration, empowerment, and inclusivity. They will work toward those goals through impactful action items including committing to a mandatory, ongoing anti-racism learning process for every Board member, regularly reviewing and holding Public leadership and staff accountable for progress on the Cultural Transformation Plan with a focus on business procurement and community engagement, and establishing a fund to support paid internships and a recruitment fund to help recruit and mentor BIPOC creative and administrative talent. The Board has also hired a consultant who will work closely with Board leadership and trustees to support their governance processes and guide relationship management between Public Theater leadership, staff, and the Board through an equity lens.
We’ve taken what we learned from an in-depth, organization-wide assessment of our practices and ongoing internal and external conversations to set three new goals to guide us, develop action items to support those three goals, and map out systems to move this work forward together. The Public’s leadership has created a large space for this cultural transformation work and the commitments we’re sharing today. The BIPOC affinity group has been and remains a powerful and influential force for change within The Public. As an entire staff, we have created a set of living goals that will evolve and for which we will hold each other accountable. We will continue to listen to and learn from our partners and collaborators from various communities — Black, Indigenous, and POC, LGBTQIA+, caretakers, and persons with disabilities — and incorporate their wisdom into our plans as we move forward.
Through these goals and action items, we will work together to push ourselves further to be a more just, more anti-racist, and more equitable organization and to ensure that the values of The Public are clear and present in everything we do.
- Commit to a significant annual anti-racism and cultural transformation budget beginning in September of this year with the 2022 fiscal year budget.
- Permanently and publicly honor the accomplishments of our past artistic directors and the BIPOC leaders who have been so central to forming The Public.
- Interrogate and repair systemic institutional harms identified by BIPOC staff, engaging in ongoing BIPOC staff and leadership dialogue.
- Develop bridges with local and national Indigenous communities to build collaborative relationships and to make amends for past and present harms and immediately establish land acknowledgments for use at all events and programming.
- Create ongoing space for the organization, staff, and community to identify, discuss, and address The Public’s history of and continued relationships with racial intersections and harms.
- Hold regular and participatory conversations with all stakeholder groups about The Public’s Cultural Transformation Plan and anti-racism work.
- Create multiple spaces for staff to gather across all departments in order to build a more equitable and interwoven culture.
- Rethink the way we produce work, create a transparent framework, and establish shared agreements.
- Create a pipeline document, with trimester reporting, for all projects, recording information on artists via self-identification forms to ensure that diversity is centered from the beginning through the end of all projects. Artistic Staff reports metrics on a trimester basis.
- Institute mandatory anti-racism trainings and accountabilities for staff, Board, and companies/casts/creative teams. With the support of our facilitator, we are developing a customized learning and training program that takes into account our need for healing and reconciliation where we may have caused harms and the specific skills we need to become anti-racist practitioners.
- Create professional and personal development opportunities and ongoing learnings for staff to have tools to develop an anti-racist workplace and to navigate surviving racism, white supremacy, and microaggressions.
- Prioritize career development for all full-time permanent staff members and formalize performance planning and succession planning as part of regular manager interactions and as a part of the performance review process.
- Hold managers accountable for embedding anti-racism principles in performance planning, career development, succession planning, and annual reviews.
- Create more just and inclusive fundraising policies that target and celebrate donors across all levels of contribution, financial and otherwise.
- Revise, publish, and broadcast our Code of Conduct, values, Mission Statement, and other practices to embed equity throughout our organization and create shared commitments between all stakeholders.
- Employ staff, create programming, and cultivate audiences that reflect the demographics of New York City (currently 70% BIPOC), fostering an environment that welcomes all individuals. Staff will report metrics on a trimester basis.
- Enact a communications plan that addresses the preferred languages of staff, committing to the availability of multilingual translations, formalizing the process(es) regarding document translation, and appropriately compensating translators.
- Structure Audience Services to support diverse language and accessibility needs.
- Identify and implement a Standardized Living Wage (SLW) as an organization based in New York City. The SLW will be defined in calendar year 2021, and all staff will be making at least The Public Theater-defined standardized living wage by Fall 2023.
- Create and publish a more equitable and transparent structure for compensation and job descriptions.
- Clarify the role of the Board of Trustees, ensuring safe and healthy interactions between trustees, staff, and stakeholders.
- Recommend the appointment of two staff representatives, elected by staff, to the Board of Trustees for staggered two-year terms, to represent the diversity of the staff.
- Create a festival of works that invites a rotating group of non-artistic staff from across the organization to welcome a diverse set of voices into the curation process.
These goals are just the beginning of our cultural transformation work, which has the power to change The Public and shift our culture in permanent and impactful ways.
We are holding ourselves accountable and will listen when you call us out.
We know that changes big and small across every department at The Public are required, and in the coming months we’ll share more details from our team and our Board on the progress we’ve made, our ongoing planning and learning, and our continued growth.