Equity Commitments<\/a> accompanying this post, you can understand the concrete steps we plan to take in the coming year, and you can even hold us to account.<\/p>\nTown Hall isn\u2019t a social justice organization, but we are vested in modeling a more just society; our equity journey is toward a \u201cmore perfect version of ourselves.\u201d Becoming a place where as many as possible feel truly welcome is essential to delivering our mission; it\u2019s essential to our vision of a story of this city told through many voices; and it\u2019s essential to any meaningful discussion\u2014looooong or short\u2014about the kind of city we want to share.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
-Wier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cTo tell a story of Seattle.\u201d \u201cA looooong discussion about the kind of city we want to share.\u201d These phrases don\u2019t appear in Town Hall\u2019s mission statement but they\u2019ve become a shorthand for the goal of our perpetual, expansive calendar. It\u2019s inevitable and appropriate that Town Hall should ultimately be described by what we do, and not how we do it\u2014but it\u2019s at odds with our DNA.<\/p>\n
Underneath our busy calendar is an essential passivity. Town Hall was founded as a collective resource to support other non-profits. While we program some of our own events, we are at heart a tool, waiting to be picked up by other people, and other organizations. This makes us different from most cultural producers; even the events we program ourselves are designed to complement the work of our community partners.<\/p>\n
To be maximally useful Town Hall has long prided itself on what we\u2019ve called \u201can architecture of inclusivity\u201d, designed to encourage participation and help people feel at home. Low ticket prices would mean low barriers to attendance in the pews. Low rental rates would mean low barriers to presenting from our stages. A program philosophy of saying \u201cyes to the good ideas of others\u201d would mean the community itself determines the defining events of the Town Hall calendar. An intentional informality would help us feel welcoming, even while high production standards elevate professional and community-based presenters alike.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a great system and we\u2019ve been justifiably proud of what we\u2019ve created. But a system is only as good as its inputs\u2014and if those inputs are limited, the output is inherently limited. (This is officially the end of the tech metaphors.)<\/p>\n
Our system hasn\u2019t created a deeply inclusive place\u2014owing to that passivity at our heart. Town Hall itself is the product of a network of people and institutions who call it home, and that network is overwhelmingly white. Despite our desire to be welcoming, historically not enough BIPOC artists or BIPOC-led non-profits have seen Town Hall as the right place to express their ideas or creativity. Many people don\u2019t know about Town Hall (we\u2019ve been around for 22 years, but we\u2019re still pretty small). Still others know about it, but don\u2019t see themselves or their concerns represented in our calendar. Whatever the reason, if we embrace the goal of a calendar that truly reflects the full breadth and diversity of our community we have a long way to travel. And that journey begins by rejecting our passivity and embracing a more active approach to the community we want to support beyond our walls, and foster within them.<\/p>\n
And so our four years of equity work\u2014four years and still just beginning\u2014is a declaration that a mere architecture of inclusion is no longer good enough. And though it might have felt sufficient, it never was. If you read the Equity Commitments<\/a> accompanying this post, you can understand the concrete steps we plan to take in the coming year, and you can even hold us to account.<\/p>\nTown Hall isn\u2019t a social justice organization, but we are vested in modeling a more just society; our equity journey is toward a \u201cmore perfect version of ourselves.\u201d Becoming a place where as many as possible feel truly welcome is essential to delivering our mission; it\u2019s essential to our vision of a story of this city told through many voices; and it\u2019s essential to any meaningful discussion\u2014looooong or short\u2014about the kind of city we want to share.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
-Wier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62486,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14,6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcement","category-editorial","category-town-crier","category-town-hall-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}