Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Policy

 

Hi everyone,

Tori and Elena here. We hope you’re well, wherever you are.

We’re writing to provide updates on the commitments we made in early July 2021 in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the creation of the 35//50 Initiative. Our goal was and continues to be making our organization safer and more welcoming for Black, Indigenous, and artists and audiences of colour, as well as members of other marginalized communities, including d/Deaf, disabled, fat, new Canadian, and LGBTQ+ artists. You can find our Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Policy, (developed last summer) if you keep scrolling down.

Our hope, in providing this update, is to offer some transparency around what we’ve been up to (in an attempt to be more accountable to our community) and to open the door to folks reaching out if they have questions and/or would like to know more.

We acknowledge that we had previously laid out a deadline of July 1, 2021 for this update, and apologize that it’s coming a few weeks late.

DONATIONS

We donated $152CAD to BLM Edmonton in December 2020, 5% of the total Box Office for queer sketch troupe Gender? I Hardly Know Them’s run of httpeepee last summer. (Record of donation below). We’re committed to donating 5% of our future Box Office revenues to local grass-roots organizations, created by and for Black, Indigenous and people of color. Due to the pandemic, httpeepee was the only show we produced in 2020.  

TRAINING
Tori and Elena took the following courses and/or workshops over the past year:

Elena has taken the following courses and/or workshops:

  • "The Art of Sign Language in Theatre” with Handsome Alice Theatre (with Landon Krentz)

  • “Anti-Fat Bias in Creative Process” with the Citadel Theatre (Mieko Ouchi, Andrea Beça, Keshia Cheesman and Bianca Miranda)

CONSULTATIONS AND EQUITY AUDIT

  • We received a microgrant from Canadian Stage in Fall 2020 to do a consultation with Deaf artist and advocate Connor Yuzwenko-Martin and discuss different ways of making our upcoming seasons more accessible to d/Deaf, hard of hearing, and/or neurodivergent audiences, as well as anyone else who uses closed captions. 

  • We had an initial meeting and received a quote from an IBPOC-run organization for how much it will cost for us to move ahead with an equity audit of our company (approximately $3000). We spent much of this year applying for grants and reaching out to different organizations (Edmonton Arts Council, Edmonton Heritage, Edmonton Community Foundation) to try and raise the necessary funds to make this happen, however, as ad hoc collective (as opposed to a charity or incorporated not-for-profit) we’re ineligible for a lot of the grants that exist to fund these types of activities. We don’t currently have the money to move ahead with this audit, but are in the process of fundraising. One of the ways we’re doing this is by offering a workshop every month between now and January 2022 and putting what 50% of what we raise towards this future audit. (The other 50% will go towards facilitator and artist fees). These workshops will include: September: Grant Writing, October: Budgeting, November: Tech and Design for Women, gender non-conforming, and trans* theatre Artists, December: Touring. If you’d like to know more about these workshops + when they’re happening, we’ll post updates on our social media (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter).

  • We also just launched an online store, and for all of August, 50% of all sales of our TBJ shirts and pins will go towards this future audit as well. In a similar vein, if you’d like to support our fundraising efforts and make a donation to go towards this audit, you can Paypal us at tinybearjaws@gmail.com and write “Audit” in the notes section.

FUTURE ACTIVITIES

  • We will continue to collect and post the breakdown of the genders and races of folks we hire in our upcoming seasons in solidarity with the 35//50 Initiative. If you’re interested in seeing a more detailed breakdown of the genders and race of the artists we hired in 2019/2020, please visit tinybearjaws.com/3550/.

  • As we move forward with producing and creating our next shows, we are consciously working to feature global majority artists in core leadership roles.

  • We’re developing a small-scale training program for emerging and mid-career Alberta-based IBPOC producers, which we’ll be launching in the coming months.

Thanks so much for reading and if you have any thoughts, questions, comments, hopes, dreams, and/or concerns about any of this, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can get in touch with us at tinybearjaws@gmail.com or through this contact form: https://www.tinybearjaws.com/contact

We’ll post our next updates about these initiatives in July 2022.

In solidarity, Elena and Tori

Record of donation:

Last updated July 5, 2020.

Tiny Bear Jaws is an independent theatre company founded in 2015 by Elena Eli Belyea. Today, it is run by Elena (Artistic Director) and Tori Morrison (Artistic Associate + Producer), two white cis-passing theatre makers. We benefit from our white privilege daily, which has and continues to affect our trajectories, both as individual artists and as a company. 

We recognize the work of anti-racism + anti-oppression is an on-going process. We also acknowledge there have been times where we’ve neglected to self-reflect, and consequently failed to adequately support and bolster BIPOC artists in the communities where we’ve worked (Amiskwaciywaskahikan, Moh’kins’tis, Tkaranto, Tio’tia:ke, and Mi’kma’ki). We apologize for any harm we’ve caused.

We commit to implementing the following concrete actions immediately, in order to make our organization safer and welcoming for all but especially Black, Indigenous, and artists and audiences of colour:

  • We commit to donating 5% of the Box Office from all future Tiny Bear Jaws’ projects to local not-for-profits and charities that advocate for the needs and rights of BIPOC. (A record of the organizations we donate to will be posted below on this page).

  • We hire artists on a project to project basis. We commit to hiring BIPOC artists in leadership positions for our future productions, as well as increasing our representation of BIPOC artists, and hiring teams that represent an all around diversity of lived experiences (BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, d/Deaf). 

  • We commit to continuing our learning by attending at least one workshop and/or course on anti-racism and anti-oppression as a company every year moving forward.

  • We commit to actively seeking out and attending work by BIPOC artists and taking responsibility for our own learning.

  • When we misstep (we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again), we commit to apologizing and working with the affected parties to take immediate concrete action in order to prevent the same mistakes from being made again.

  • When engaging with content depicting culturally-specific lived experiences, we commit to hiring paid team members (ex. actors, directors, designers, etc.) from those communities, as well as consultants, with the goal of creating a respectful working environment, providing accurate and authentic representations, and advocating for the needs of audience members with accessibility needs and/or similar lived experiences.

Some of the long-term goals that we are working towards over the next year include:

  • Fundraising and applying for funding in order to hire a BIPOC consultant to evaluate and provide insights around how we can 1) (re)structure our company to better serve our communities and organization, as well as 2) make our company more accessible and inclusive. 

  • Researching and implementing a new system for collecting feedback and/or complaints from our collaborators and/or audiences that involves an independent third-party to keep ourselves accountable.

  • Revisiting these commitments this time next year (July 1, 2021) in order to update, review, and report on this process. 

  • Offer mentorship opportunities to emerging BIPOC, disabled, d/Deaf, and LGBTQ+ theatre makers and producers. 

  • Listening to and uplifting the voices of BIPOC artists in our communities. 

We invite community feedback on this policy, however, we’re also committed to reaching out to + paying BIPOC artists for their suggestions on how to make our company better.

If you have any feedback, including questions, comments, concerns, and/or suggestions that you would like to offer, please don’t hesitate to contact us at tinybearjaws@gmail.com.

  • In solidarity, Tori and Elena