Accessibility at Celebrity Series
Learn about accessibility at Celebrity Series, both our always-available services and those available upon request. Accessibility is an ever-evolving topic that we're dedicating ourselves to continuously improving.
Celebrity Series of Boston recognizes that many existing systems of power grant privilege and access unequally, and that equity is crucial to the long-term viability of both the arts and culture sector and communities-at-large. Our Racial Equity Plan describes our commitment to ensure that everyone who wants has equal access to a full, vibrant creative life, which is essential to a healthy and democratic society.
Our Commitment
We are intentionally shifting to a proactive, equity-centered approach to how we are structured, how we deliver our programs and services, how we engage with the broader community, and how we support our audiences. We seek to become an antiracist community, working against white supremacy, racism, religious intolerance, and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, class, age, and ability. We have chosen to address equity through an explicitly anti-racist lens. Although we are focusing on race explicitly, we are not focusing on it exclusively. We understand that many people hold multiple marginalized identities, and we strive for an intersectional approach.
What We Will Do
The following Racial Equity Plan and accompanying data dashboard outlines our commitment through:
- The people who lead us, how they behave, and who they represent.
- The people who work for the organization, how we select them, how we respect them, and how we compensate them.
- The partners we commit to, how we engage with them, and how we support those partnerships.
- The audiences and communities we serve, and seek to serve, by providing life-enhancing, performing arts experiences.
We will hold ourselves accountable through regular internal meetings, data collection and analysis, and by soliciting feedback from a variety of our key stakeholders – our colleagues, artists, supporters, and audiences. We look forward to continuing this work and the learning in partnership with these communities.
Our Plan
As an organization, we are working on the following set of 16 strategies and actions to move our racial equity goals forward:
- Evaluate Board requirements to identify and eliminate systemic inequities that prohibit BIPOC participation.
- Develop and explicitly center racial equity goals and values in Board discussions and decision making.
- Establish a Racial Equity Committee made up of one representative from each standing committee of the board, staff, community partners, and governing bodies.
- Ensure alignment of our strategic plans and our racial equity goals.
- Hold the President & Executive Director (CEO) accountable to cultivate antiracist culture and practice throughout the organization.
- Broaden the organization's networks we use to identify new employees. Establish a diverse management team that advances racial equity and equip them with knowledge and resources to manage equitably.
- Create a welcoming process and culture for employees, with particular attention to those underrepresented in the current workforce.
- Attract a diverse audience that reflects the population of Greater Boston and seek to eliminate barriers to experiencing live performances.
- Make sure the programming reflects racial and ethnic diversity among the artists appearing on our stages.
- Guarantee that fees paid to artists of color are equitable.
- Adopt an equitable approach to purchasing goods and services from third party vendors.
- Review all existing and newly developed names, designations, and acknowledgements used within the organization for any historical or unconscious bias or negative connotations.
- Engage our Community Partners (defined as our partner performing arts organizations, our community performance venues, and our Neighborhood Artists) and BIPOC voices collaboratively to build capacity, solve problems, advance our mission, make equitable decisions, and enhance programs for those we serve.
- Establish a culture within our organization that supports ongoing individual, team, department, and community learning about racial equity.
- Capture our organizational narrative and progress.
- Establish a culture of feedback that results in authentic, actionable insight.
- Create an environment fostering belonging for audiences and communities.
2021/22 Plan Updates
After developing our Racial Equity Plan, the 2021/22 season saw progress and provided several reminders of how and why this journey toward equity requires a steady cycle of action, assessment, and reflection across all areas of the organization.
A centerpiece of the plan was to establish a board-level Racial Equity Committee charged with working through the other standing committees of the board to ensure the fulfillment of our racial equity goals. In related governance actions, we renamed the Board of Overseers to the Board of Advisors and adopted a more inclusive guideline for the criteria and expectations of our Board members.
Cultivating Directors and Advisors of color represents an area of particular focus in the 2022/23 season. We have engaged Colette Phillips and her Get Konnected! networking initiative to help with these efforts and introduce Celebrity Series to Boston's up-and-coming and established professionals of color.
The 2021/22 season's programming continued to reflect the Celebrity Series' longstanding commitment to diversity in its programming. Highlights were "The Movement Series," a trio of performances including Sankofa Danzafro's "Accommodating Lie," Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain's "The Just and the Blind," and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater which highlighted issues of social justice. We engaged Black- and woman-owned firm The Williams Agency for community engagement and audience development in support of this series.
Our Finance and Administration team moved the Celebrity Series endowment and other funds - a total of $14M as of June 2022 - to an asset management firm owned by a woman of color. On the Human Resources front, job searches did not advance until people of color represented at least 25% of the applicant pool.
The adoption of the Racial Equity Plan in 2021/22 and the allocation of resources helped us discover new ways to move forward. As we begin the 2022/23 season, we rededicate ourselves to the goal of centering racial equity as a strategic level imperative for our organization.
This list does not suggest that the work to be done is diminishing. The opportunity for meaningful improvement and connection with our communities continues.
ID text for Diversity Dashboard Infographic
Image 1:
An infographic labeled Diversity Dashboard with a series of circles showing progress toward diversity targets of 30% for leadership and staff. Board of directors, 28 members, 11 percent people of color. Board of advisors, 71 members, 10% people of color. Full time staff, 25 members, 20% people of color. Part time staff, 11 members, 18% people of color.
Image 2:
Bar graphs showing representation of artists of color with a goal of 30% across paid and free concert categories. Subscription series artist of color representation was 42% in 2019, 35% in 2020, 34% in 2021, and 49% in 2022. Community engagement artist of color representation was 79% in 2019, 60% in 2020, 70% in 2021, and 65% in 2022.
Image 3:
A visualization of artist fees paid to artists of color, as a percent of season total artist fees. Subscription series BIPOC artists recevied 57% of fees in 2022, and community BIPOC artists received 76% of total fees in 2022, compared to a goal of 30% for both.
Image 4:
A graph showing that payments made to vendors of color / BIPOC-owned businesses was 8% of non-payroll expenses in 2022, compared to a goal of 20%.
A snapshot of the historical forces that have led us to this work, and actions taken in the 2021/22 season
As we begin the work of becoming a more inclusive organization that contributes to increased equity in Boston and in cultural and civic life, our desire for positive progress must be informed by our historical context. Despite Boston being the sixth most diverse U.S. city, we live with an ongoing myth that Boston is a white majority city. Our brutal history of segregation continues to exclude BIPOC individuals. We recognize that structural racism is entrenched in our community and in our cultural institutions, including our own predominantly white organization – and that we have benefitted from it. We wrongly operated from an assumption that everyone has access to the performing arts and feels like they belong when doing so. We acknowledge and understand that this is not the case for far too many individuals from marginalized communities.
As Boston evolves, so must the Celebrity Series of Boston. We began this long-overdue organizational journey during the summer of 2020. However, we consciously chose not to issue formal statements at the time. First, our staff and Board went through guided personal and foundational learning. We did this so that we could center racial equity in our organization with a sustainable plan that will ensure these are not empty statements.
Celebrity Series’ Racial Equity Statement and Plan was developed over the course of over 750 person-hours during the 2020/21 season and an initial series of related action items were formally adopted by the Board of Directors on September 21, 2021. The process began with guided learning sessions for the full Celebrity Series staff followed by a phase of reflective and quantitative organizational assessment. A Racial Equity Task Force of 28 stakeholders—comprised of members of our Board of Directors, the newly named Board of Advisors, staff, and senior board/staff leadership—convened regularly to discuss and plan our path forward with this critical organizational undertaking.
Our goal from the beginning was to formulate a plan of action – concrete steps the organization will take, clear assignments of accountability, measurable indicators of progress, and a projected timeline for growth and adoption. Whenever possible, specific, measurable data will be used to track our progress, and key metrics are included in our 2021/22 data dashboard linked below.
Accessibility at Celebrity Series
Learn about accessibility at Celebrity Series, both our always-available services and those available upon request. Accessibility is an ever-evolving topic that we're dedicating ourselves to continuously improving.
We acknowledge that Celebrity Series presents performances in multiple venues around Boston which reside on traditional ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusetts tribes. We honor their people, past, present and emerging, and their connection to the land on which we gather.
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