Home
About
Racial Equity at Celebrity Series

Racial Equity at Celebrity Series

Celebrity Series is working toward becoming a more equitable, anti-racist organization. Read on for our Racial Equity Statement, actions taken since the 2020/21 season, a dashboard with snapshots of our current state and progress toward our goals, and the steps that are part of our plan to keep improving.

Skip to 2023/24 Update

Racial Equity Statement & Commitment

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.

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 Racial Equity Journey in 2023/24

In the 2023/24 season, Celebrity Series continued to enact our Racial Equity Plan, adopted in September 2021, expanding culturally informed and equity-oriented activity in all spheres of our work. Elements of the original 17-point plan were consolidated into six areas of future focus, to more efficiently represent and focus on outstanding and ongoing work.

The Racial Equity Committee (REC), comprised of members of the staff and Board, spent the year celebrating and elevating diversity with the goal of ensuring that each member of the broad Celebrity Series community experiences a sense of ownership, voice, and belonging. REC outreach across Celebrity Series has aimed to implement a racial equity lens in our work with artists, audiences, community partners, vendors, and staff. 

2023/24 activities included: 

  • Transitioning elements of the Racial Equity Plan into standard business operations across departments
  • An all-staff training on Foundations of EDI in the Arts with Kira Troilo from Art & Soul Consulting
  • Piloting efforts through the Audience Development Initiative to reach more diverse audiences
  • Continuing to listen and learn through surveys and focus groups, analyzing our data, and sharing with stakeholders

2023/24 Results

Celebrity Series is committed to becoming more equitable and anti-racist by ensuring equal access to creative experiences for everyone. We strive to reflect the diversity of Boston in the people that lead, work, and participate with our organization. We have set a goal for 30% of our board, audiences, artists, and employees to be Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

Board, Staff, Vendors, and audience progress bars below benchmark, All Artists progress bars well above benchmark

Both paid series and free series artists above 30% benchmark with free series artists well exceeding

In 2023/24, we began to track gender breakdowns by group in addition to racial equity data.

donut charts showing female board members and staff exceeding male. for artists, there are 2x as many men as women. self-reported nonbinary identities were not present in these surveys

Our data collection methodology includes a combination of self-reported survey data, research-based data, and modeled data using TRG’s Data Center.

Download the one-page PDF

History and Past Seasons

A snapshot of the historical forces that have led us to this work, and actions taken in the 2021/22 season

In the 2022/23 season, Celebrity Series continued to enact our Racial Equity Plan adopted in September 2021, expanding culturally-informed, equity-oriented activity in all spheres of our work.

In alignment with Celebrity Series' racial equity goals, the Racial Equity Committee (REC), comprised of members of the staff and board, spent the year celebrating and elevating diversity with the goal of helping to repair systemic racism. Grounded in the concept of inclusion, this work is propelled by increasingly interactive connections and deep listening. Infused into our practices and relationships with each other - including artists, audiences, staff, vendors, and community partners - is the goal of ensuring that each member of the broad Celebrity Series community experiences a sense of ownership, voice, and belonging.

2022/23 activities included Continuing to diversify an already broad variety of performers, reflecting the multiculturalism of Boston through our artists, venues, and community partners Ensuring financial equity in BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) artists' compensation Prioritizing opportunities to work with BIPOC-led vendors Revamping our data collection and evaluation at Neighborhood Arts concerts to better understand our audience Quarterly anonymous surveys for Arts For All! artists and partners to improve feedback loops A focus group moderated by an external facilitator with community partners, leading to program improvements Growing BIPOC leadership on the Boards of Directors and Advisors Forming a staff racial equity subgroup focused on welcoming, equitable practices for recruitment, learning, and accountability Consistently reviewing and shifting language around names, descriptors, designations, and acknowledgements that reflect current or history systemic oppression or bias

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.

We originally formulated the following set of 17 strategies and actions to move our racial equity goals forward. This list was refined in the 2023/24 season to six directional statements that consolidate and condense the items below into a set of operational principles.

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.

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.

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.

Land Acknowledgement

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.