Notes from the Board: Arts For Everyone

This past year, the staff and board members at River Arts have been focusing on implementing anti-racist practices at our organization. This has come with the wave of racial justice reckoning that our country has been engaged in since George Floyd’s murder last May. It is work that is a long time coming. Racial injustice and Racism are woven into the fabric of our country, our state, and our local communities. The fact that it took so long for a vital arts organization like River Arts to put a focus on this work is a sign, in and of itself, of how much there is to be done. We recognize that these systems of racism are not fixed with the flip of a switch: adding a diversity statement on our website, or simply going through anti-racism training. This work is ongoing, nuanced, and interactive. We are looking at how to make our signage more inclusive and welcoming, making our board more racially diverse, changing our programming to better reflect the racially diverse identities of our communities, formalizing our hiring practices so that they are more transparent and reduce implicit bias, and developing more platforms and soundingboards for VT Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)  artists. 

Our focus on this work so far has been our mission statement: Arts for everyone. Everyone. To be an organization for everyone is an active stance, not a passive one. To be for everyone, we first need to acknowledge the systems in place that marginalize, erase, and ignore members of our communities. We as a board recognize that art cannot transcend race and injustice without first acknowledging the waters of oppression in which we all swim. Art is not for everyone if we ignore our blind spots when it comes to serving and representing our BIPOC communities. 

This work will be ongoing and transparent. We look forward to sharing our process with you all, here on our blog and elsewhere. This sharing will not be to pat ourselves on the back but instead to share our work for feedback and, hopefully, for other local organizations to follow suit. Thank you for standing with us as we work to ensure that River Arts is truly for EVERYONE. 

-Isaac Eddy, River Arts Board Member, Professor of Performing Arts at Northern Vermont University, Johnson