Intentionality and Environmental Impacts (EP.48)
Recorded
April 27, 2021
Last Updated
November 11, 2021
This conversation was recorded as part of Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit that took place on April 27, 2021.
This past year saw the environmental impacts of the workplace shift dramatically. For many, travel for work was completely erased, both commuting and related business travel. Conferences that traditionally attracted hundreds or thousands of in-person attendees shifted to online offerings. As we consider how to reopen our workplaces, how can we do that in intentional ways that center our impact on planet and people?
Resources mentioned during session:
Howlround’s Climate Change resources
“A Producer’s Guide to Measuring, Budgeting, and Lowering the Carbon Emissions of Livestreams and Video Conferences” by Vijay Mathew
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World by Jason Hickel
Guests: Krista Bradley, Alexis Frasz, Vijay Mathew
Moderator: Erin Woods
Host: Tim Cynova
Guests
KRISTA BRADLEY is Director of Programs and Resources at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), the national service organization for the performing arts presenting industry. At APAP she’s responsible for the professional development programming for the annual conference as well as year-round programs, leadership development initiatives, regranting programs and resources that advance the skills, knowledge and capabilities of APAP's membership. Prior to APAP, she was Executive and Artistic Director of BlackRock Center for the Arts, a nonprofit multidisciplinary arts center in Maryland, and Program Officer of Performing Arts for Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She brings more than twenty years of experience working in the nonprofit, performing arts, and philanthropy sectors as a curator, funder, arts administrator and consultant for organizations such as the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, the Walker Arts Center, Houston Grand Opera and Opera America. Krista is also a practicing musician, a current member of the Thomas Circle Singers, a DC-based choral ensemble, and a former board member of APAP. She holds a B.A. degree in Literature and Society from Brown University.
ALEXIS FRASZ is a researcher, writer, strategic thinker, program designer, and advisor to partners in culture, philanthropy, and the environmental sector working for transformative change and a just transition. She is a co-director of Helicon Collaborative and leads their work at the intersection of culture and the environment. Her perspective on systems change draws on her artistic practices and diverse background in anthropology, Chinese Medicine, permaculture, and Buddhism. She believes in the need to build solidarity between artists and culture and broader movements working for racial, ecological, and economic justice. Alexis also teaches on creative civic leadership for artists and non-artists, and is faculty for the cultural leadership program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Climate Leadership program. Her research on socially engaged artistic practice has informed artist training curriculums and philanthropic programs worldwide. She is actively engaged in Helicon’s ongoing work to address inequities in cultural philanthropy. Alexis graduated Summa cum Laude from Princeton University with a degree in Cultural Anthropology and has pursued Master’s level study in Chinese Medicine. She is an advisor of the Public Bank East Bay, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and The Artist’s Literacy’s Institute. She lives in Oakland, where she spends as much time as possible in her garden.
VIJAY MATHEW is the Cultural Strategist and a co-founder of HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College, Boston, USA and is privileged to assist a talented team by leading HowlRound's development of commons-based online knowledge sharing platforms and the organization's notions of cultural innovation. Prior to his current position, he was the Coordinator for the National Endowment for the Arts (USA) New Play Development Program, as well as a Theater Communication Group (USA) New Generations Future Leader grant recipient in new work at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Vijay has a MFA from New School University, New York, a BA from University of Chicago, and an artistic background as an ensemble-based filmmaker and theatremaker. He is a board member of Double Edge Theatre located in rural Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA.
ERIN WOODS offers the enterprise equivalent of creative production, bridging strategy and execution for projects and organizations. Her work is focused on transformational, purposeful learning, sustainable travel and tourism, and arts, culture and community. She has an undergraduate degree in theatre from Colorado College, a Master’s in Communication from the University of Denver, and has participated in such systems-shifting programs as Getting to Maybe and Creative Climate Leadership. Whether on stage or backstage (though now mostly from the balcony), live theatre will always have her heart.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) wears a multitude of hats, all in service of creating anti-racist workplaces where people can thrive. He is the Principal of the consulting group Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. and has deep knowledge and experience in HR and people-centric organizational design. He currently leads curriculum design in WSS’s areas of expertise: from sharing leadership and power to decolonizing the employee handbook and bylaws; talking with humans to how to hire. His book, Hire with Confidence, based on his experience leading hundreds of searches and “retooling” the traditional search process to center anti-racism and anti-oppression, is scheduled to be published in Winter 2021. In April 2021, he and WSS produced the Ethical Re-Opening Summit, a one-day online convening that explored the question, “How can we co-create a future where everyone thrives as we move into this next stage of a global pandemic?” In August 2021, Tim closed out his 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, the largest association of artists in the U.S., where he served in both the COO and Co-CEO roles, and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made this commitment in 2013. Additionally, he serves on the faculty of Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR; he's a trained mediator, and a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled 3,902 miles across the United States.
Transcript
Alexis Frasz:
I think that we often, and I think this has been a miscalculation, actually, from the environmental movement initially where there was a lot of talk about sacrifice and what we need to give up, and I don't think that's untrue. I think there are things that we need to give up. But I'm one of those people that got a pandemic puppy. Okay? I want to say that I did give up a lot when I got my puppy and I gained a lot, and I think that that's the piece that's missing. So, it's like what if doing less is not actually a sacrifice? What if it actually gives us more?
One of the things, for example, that we've been told would really help the climate is actually working a four day work week. That also connects to worker wellbeing and having time to care for your family, and that means you spend less money on caring for your family. So, there's all sorts of proliferating effects that can happen from doing less. It's just not how our culture typically thinks about progress.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I’m Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that.
Earlier this year, podcasting's favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin and I produced Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit. The event took place online on Tuesday, April 27, and featured eight sessions, 25 amazing speakers, and covered a whole host of topics related to the ethical re-opening of workplaces amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
We raced to produce the Summit from start to finish in just three weeks as we felt the urgency and stress mounting as workplaces were in the midst of re-opening decisions. Several months on, we still feel the content is as necessary as ever, so we decided to release each of the sessions in podcast form.
In each of the eight sessions, you'll hear the conversations just as the Summit attendees did. As a reminder, in late April 2021, COVID vaccine distribution was just gaining speed and we had yet to begin hearing about the Delta variant. From that vantage point in time, it very much looked like by Fall 2021 things might be settling back into somewhat of a quote unquote normal routine. As I record this preamble in Fall 2021, that's not the case. We're now talking about break-through infections, booster shots, schools opening and closing again, hospital ICUs are packed in states across the U.S., and still how to safety gathering in indoors as the temperature again begins to drop with the change in seasons.
In this session: Intentionality and Environmental Impacts, the panel discusses how we can approaching reopening in intentional ways that center our impact on planet and people. Panelists include Krista Bradley, Alexis Frasz, and Vijay Mathew, with this discussion moderated by the amazing Erin Woods. So, over to you Erin...
Erin Woods:
I'm going to kick this off. My name is Erin Woods and I am ... Thanks, Kate. See, I've got some supporters in the crowd. I love it. I am, for a matter of visual description, a White woman with dark blonde hair, I'm wearing a pink blouse, and I'm in front of some mixed media art in my background, and I will ask the speakers when they introduce themselves to introduce themselves that way as well. But I'm calling in from my office in my home in Banff, Alberta, which is in Treaty 7 territory, the traditional home of the Stony Dakota, Tsuut'ina, Blackfoot, and Métis Region 3 peoples who have historically and continue to call this place home.
Erin Woods:
Banff has always been a place for migrants and immigrants, and so there are many of us who are very fortunate to live here. I think as we talk about intentionality in the environment, it's great just to remember that what we're talking about is place. We're talking about where we are. So, and Diane [inaudible 00:01:10] from The Netherlands even. So, it would be great as we do this, and people already are, just to put in the chat where you're calling from just so that we get a sense of where our community is joining us from, and I will hand it over to Krista maybe to introduce yourself and then we'll just do brief, brief introductions around, and then we'll dive into the meat of the matter.
Krista Bradley:
Sounds great. Hi, everybody. I'm Krista Bradley. I'm Director of Programs and Resources at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. I'm calling you from my home in Silver Spring, Maryland outside of DC, and it's the traditional land of the Piscataway and the Pamunkey peoples. My pronouns are she/her/hers and I'm a Black woman with a dark purple shirt on and a gray sweater, a bright blue headband, blue glasses, sitting in front of my Peloton and a window with lots of plants. It's good to be with you.
Erin Woods:
Great. Thank you. Alexis?
Alexis Frasz:
Sure. I am Alexis Frasz. I am calling in from unseated Ohlone territory in Oakland, California. I am a light skinned woman with short, bleached blonde hair, it's kind of a Mohawk, and I'm wearing a black sweater and sitting in front of a couple of posters by Shepard Fairey. I work at Helicon Collaborative, which is an organization that focuses on the intersection of culture and the environment. We do a lot of things in that space, which I will talk about later.
Erin Woods:
Thanks, Alexis. Vijay?
Vijay Mathew:
Hi, everyone. My name is Vijay Mathew and my pronouns are he/him. A visual description of myself is I have brown skin, short black hair, and a little gray stubble. I'm wearing a black short sleeve shirt with a collar and my background is a white wall, and I'm calling from the Boston Metro Area, which is the land of the Massachusett and Pawtucket people. I'm a co-founder of HowlRound Theatre Commons, which is based at Emerson College in Boston, and it's a media publisher of essays and live streams that are produced by and for the professional performing arts community.
Erin Woods:
Great. Thank you. I'm imagining that most of this, my hope is that most of this will really be more of just a conversation, a dialogue because Vijay and Krista and Alexis all know each other. Certainly, in the chat, feel free to, any comments, and then there is also a Q&A. As you can see, there's a Q&A tab. So, we will do a Q&A section at the end. So, as questions come up, if you would plop them in there, that would be great. I'll try to keep an eye on those. But I would love to, by way of introductions, have each of the panelists talk about who they are, their work, where their work and this idea of intentionality in the environment, where that starts to intersect.
Erin Woods:
So, just sort of a workplace overview, as well as maybe a couple little tidbits about you that aren't reflected in your job description or in your title, a little something that we might want to know about you, and I'd love to see that in the chat from individuals as well. Where do you work, or if you're comfortable, what organization do you work for, and some other little nuggets about do you love French fries or are you double jointed or whatever that might be. So, maybe Alexis, will you kick us off with just a little bit more about Helicon and your work and a couple tidbits about you that we might not know?
Alexis Frasz:
Sure. Okay. So, I'll start with the tidbits so I don't forget them. I probably would. Let's see. I have a garden that I'm pretty obsessed with and have learned a little bit of permaculture. So, I try to apply that as best I can. I am a rock climber and I am learning how to build things, and I built a shed in my backyard, which I'm very proud of. But as far as Helicon, a few, maybe five or six years ago, we started really venturing into the environmental space and climate change. We came out of the arts.
Alexis Frasz:
So, really, the work that we do is at the intersection of culture and the environment, and that means that we really think of the environmental issues that we face, including climate change, as cultural issues, not primarily technological or scientific issues. That is a growing kind of perspective, I think, in the environmental sector broadly that we actually know many of the technical things we need to do, but how to change human behavior, how to move in a completely new way as a society is more of a social issue and a cultural issue than a technical one. Granted, science plays a big part in it. I'm not denigrating that.
Alexis Frasz:
So, the other piece of it is that because we came out of the cultural sector, we're really interested in the role of the culture and artist creative practices can play in helping to make that transition to re-talk about a just transition. That's the language that we like because we've always had equity as a focus of our work. Really, that means that whatever we do, the solutions protect and prioritize the people who are most impacted and focuses on making a better world for everybody. So, I guess I'll stop there for now.
Erin Woods:
Great. Thank you. Vijay, do you want to jump in on that to talk about your work and where intentionality in the environment and your work intersect, and some tidbits?
Vijay Mathew:
All right. Okay. So, tidbits. Let's see. I'm a parent to a 12 year old, I'm addicted to spicy food and must have it every day, and I'm almost completely free of all social media platforms. Liberated. So, okay. Then intersection with the work, so HowlRound Theatre Commons, its editorial agenda is to amplify progressive ideas and conversation and perspectives from performing artists themselves who are producing the essays and live streams. Unfortunately still, the climate emergency is actually a progressive and disruptive topic.
Vijay Mathew:
We have been publishing for several years incredible essays written by artist from around the world about their work at that intersection of performing arts and climate change, both about actual pieces that address that, as well as production methods and different systems of how the work comes into being that is aligned with different paradigms, and yeah. So, I'm coming at it from that perspective, and similar to what Alexis said, really seeing it as a cultural issue. It's a culture that created the crisis and it's culture that will mitigate or transition us into a different form. Yeah. So, and I'll just throw a link in there to our tag on climate change where you'll find essays and videos that artists have made themselves.
Erin Woods:
Great. Thank you. Krista, of course, the work that you do and climate change, or the emissions in any rate, can't be separated. So, certainly, you've been thinking about this a lot. So, I'd love to hear about work that you're doing where that intentionality and the environment intersect and some juicy tidbits about you also. They don't have to be juicy.
Krista Bradley:
I don't know. Juicy tidbits. I have become a plant mom during this COVID time and I started with one plant and now I have 15. So, I'm really enjoying that. I love to cook and I have been a choral ensemble singer for probably 25, 30 years. So, that is my thing, making music with people that you can't create on your own. So, how am I connected to this work? APAP is the service organization for the presenting, touring, and booking industry in the performing arts, and by that, I mean we support the people, the artists, the agents and managers, and the venues that provide the infrastructure for artists to connect with communities around the country and around the globe.
Krista Bradley:
By nature of the work of the live performing arts touring industry, we spend most of our time moving people and our work and our arts across boundaries, across states, across oceans, across continents. That in its nature is all about connecting artists with audiences, but the way that we do it right now is fairly extractive. The model that we've built are work on means that artists have to tour enormously to make a living and venues have to position themselves as interesting spaces where only certain artists go to.
Krista Bradley:
So, there's lack of an incentive to sometimes be as thinking in partnership and ways that you can connect with other like-minded colleagues to bring artist to your communities and to do it in a way that's longterm and not for one night. The other piece of what APAP does is we're one of the largest conveners of the performing arts industry every year. We have our APAP conference in New York typically. It usually attracts three to 4,000 people coming into the city and it's an important piece in the industry, in terms of gathering the field.
Krista Bradley:
However, it's also gathering a lot of people, making people travel a great deal to come to one place, and it puts out a lot of waste. So, both as a service organization trying to be a couple of steps ahead of the field and provide information, resources, support on how to do our work better, how to be sustainable as a field, and how to be just and equitable and accessible, the whole idea of being or interested in environmentally sound practices is really critical, and how do we think about our work differently now that we've had 13 months to have to reimagine how we work? So, I'll stop there.
Erin Woods:
Great. Thank you. I think all of you touched on this idea that a lot of what we're talking about is how do we stay connected with our communities? How do we share, whether it's art, or a lot of the people in joining us may be from arts organizations or maybe nonprofits more generally. But often, those organizations, their fundamental reason for being is connecting with community and connecting now in different, maybe more creative ways. So, I'd love to just have maybe an informal chat, Vijay, Alexis, and Krista, just about that, about what are we learning about connecting with community now that the old ways, for 13 months, we couldn't do, and we're coming to a real understanding of how damaging those ways might be? So, unmute yourselves. Discuss.
Alexis Frasz:
I can jump in just to kick it off. I think to some of the things Krista was mentioning, many of us have discovered not that there ... I don't want to minimize the real pain and suffering that's happened with COVID and the things that have been really difficult. I think that there have been things that we've discovered that are really valuable about not traveling as much, having more time with our families, getting into plants and gardening, connecting to our bodies in different ways, and I think also recognizing what really matters and how we're connected to our communities, that if our community is not well, we're not well.
Alexis Frasz:
I think that the arts, especially that so many businesses are like this, have become very disembodied, actually, that there's this idea that it's very mental, it's very global, and I think the pandemic forced us to be more local. My hope would be that we ... I think we will be forced to be more local in the future, whether we like it or not. But I think that there's also great potential to see that as an opportunity and something really beautiful, especially because we have these platforms where we can actually connect more broadly, but then really go deep in our local place.
Erin Woods:
Yep. Vijay, your thoughts about that sort of the global and local, because I know a lot of the work that you're doing is really about this streaming. How do we connect virtually?
Vijay Mathew:
Yeah, right. So, I think the pandemic, in a sense, created an uncontrolled collapse of a lot of our arts field, especially the touring and international presenting parts of it. It was a cold turkey kind of quitting of the major tool we use for international touring and presenting, which is air travel, fast travel, which there's no "green alternative" to. The industry itself has said that they can't develop carbon-free technology in any kind of timeline that's going to avert total catastrophe. So, there's that one thing.
Vijay Mathew:
So, hopefully, there's going to go from uncontrolled collapse to now continuing a controlled collapse and putting creative limitations like, for example, an organization stepping out in a very difficult way to say, "We're not going to travel anymore using airplanes," and using that as a creative prompt to really rethink basically everything about their purpose. Who are they serving? So, that's one aspect. Another aspect is during this pandemic, speaking from the perspective of HowlRound and publishing and performing arts artists wanting to connect and share ideas with each other, this has been an incredible moment for artists from the global South and global North to be in the same virtual space together like never before.
Vijay Mathew:
So, there's been some really incredible, just this kind of cultural mobility that happens in this virtual space that had never happened before, as well as breaking down of the ongoing decades long silos of the deaf performing arts community, deaf theater makers with the hearing community. It's still very, like what we heard in the first session, very siloed communities, and again, this virtual platform, platforms being able to break that down. So, those are very promising little beginnings of new paths and creative ways that we can rethink what we're doing.
Krista Bradley:
Yeah. Yeah. Building on both Vijay and Alexis' points, we've seen presenting organizations connect to audiences that they didn't know that they had and to reach a much more, a browner audience than they thought they had because there's less of a barrier and it's also been inspirational for artists to create work to reach a specific audience that may look like them in a different way without intermediary, which I think has been really interesting and bodes well for how we will be connecting directly with our audiences as artists. I think that's been a really great innovation.
Krista Bradley:
I think that artists, we've heard, at least, that they think that they can have a better balance in terms of making a living, that they don't have to travel so much and they can spend more time with their family and they can find new ways to connect with each other and make work in a virtual kind of way, and that's super exciting. I think for people that work in the performing arts as administrators, it is not necessarily very people friendly. We seem to prize long hours, extreme work, being in the theater for 18, 20 hours, not taking time off, etc. So, for workers in this industry, I think we've all realized that that's not only unsustainable, but it's not something that we really want to do again.
Krista Bradley:
So, how do we reimagine and advocate for a different way of working for us working in the cultural sector? Maybe not making work, but certainly supporting the work that does get made and recalibrate what we think is a just way to work for us in the arts and cultural sector, which I think is long overdue. Then to your point, Vijay, about accessibility and equity, we at APAP discovered that even with the conference, that our conference is an expensive conference. People cannot access it to the extent that they would like to, and yet, we attracted so many more people on the SwapCard platform this year that would never have been able to come.
Krista Bradley:
In fact, the leaders of organizations who are usually the ones that come to our conference invited and were able to give all of their staff access to thinkers and doers and mavericks that were talking about innovation, which was amazing. So, we in our practice realize that we can be much more accessible and inclusive and equitable and should be by pursuing a more hybrid model. So, those are some things that I'm seeing.
Alexis Frasz:
Can I just jump in with one thing to build on that, which isKrista Bradley:
Exactly. Good point.
Vijay Mathew:
I want to add to the workplace and work organization and how that's structured and how that's related to actually climate crisis, where the idea of extraction or costs or hidden costs or the costs of doing business that we put aside and we just let them happen, that's related to the workplace in that in organizations that have less of a hierarchy in terms of a rentier class of people, people on top who, no matter what they're doing, no matter what value they're creating for their organization, are always somehow extracting more wealth, more resources, more longevity, more opportunities, more resources than people lower in the hierarchy who may, for example, be artists, who are freelance, contractor, paid very little, who are struggling to just make basic ends meet, basic needs met.
Vijay Mathew:
So, that mindset that there can actually be, and that we all collectively accept this as a norm or it's normal that there is a rentier class in our nonprofit arts organizations, that's the same mindset that is also capable of allowing a climate emergency to run away out of our control, even to the point where it's truly on the table whether or not we're going to survive as a species or that our complex civilization is going to actually be something we can keep onto that's truly on the table. So, there's that mind shift, that change of perspective and change of culture that has to also infiltrate, and talking just from the arts, nonprofit organizations, they truly need to look into maybe the worker cooperative model or some other kind of system that is not just based on cheap, free labor.
Erin Woods:
It would be great, I would love, actually, to have you all three maybe talk just a little bit more about that, that it's kind of a bunch of times, that this is really about a cultural shift. It's not a technological problem. It's not about the science. It's actually about who we are and how we want to be in the world, and that what we value and what we think about as sustainable, not only in terms of the environment, but in terms of our own lives and our own selves and our neighborhoods, all of those cultural things, especially in response to some of the conversations I know that happened this morning about base camp and reverting to 1983.
Erin Woods:
So, if there is this movement, there's a pull to 1983 and there's a pull towards these possible futures. I would just love your thoughts about how we might weight the scales one way. Then also, since I've got the floor, if anybody's got questions, please do start to populate the Q&A section and we will start to field questions from all of you as well. So, thanks. The brilliant, the pull towards the future. Or what have we seen that's worked? Maybe it's not a massive shift to the future. Maybe it's just small little changes that, as Alexis says, aren't necessarily sacrifices. They're just shifts.
Alexis Frasz:
Yeah, and I don't want to minimize the scale of change. I think the reality is we are in, and entering more so, a time of accelerating change, and I think that we just need to come to terms with that as a society. Really, this question of whether we want to change or we don't want to change. It's just not an option. It's not our choice. We do get to chose how we want to meet that moment and I think for our own survival, as Vijay said, but also especially for justice because there are people ... Climate change has been presented as if it's this far away thing and I think more and more of us are dealing with, we have flooding, we have fires where I am in California that are extreme impacts on our quality of life and our ability to work, as if that's not the primary concern that most of us have when those thing are going on is whether or not we can work.
Alexis Frasz:
But they do affect our ability to work and to participate in our industry, whatever that may be. But we know that those things are going to continue to accelerate, at this point, regardless of what we do for a while. It isn't to say that our actions don't matter. They actually do quite a lot. So, I think there's one of the things in our culture, that it's characteristic of a consumer culture is that there's an immaturity and an innocence. Right? This is being talked about a lot in the racial justice work that is also becoming to the fore in our culture. But it's like there's no excuse for not knowing what we should know at this point. So, the question is really how are we going to participate in that?
Alexis Frasz:
I think, I remember, actually, this happened at Banff, Erin, when we first met. There was an environmental guy. I was part of an environmental meeting. This was probably seven or eight years ago. I remember this guy who worked in the environmental sector and he was recounting this experience he had talking to one of his friends about what he did and thinking, yeah, we're really having this great dialogue about climate change, and after they finished the conversation, he said, "Well, good luck with that. I really hope you make some progress on that," and it's like it was his issue. I think that we need to recognize it's a context for all of our issues, no matter what you care about. It's a context in which we live.
Alexis Frasz:
I think that creates a lot of opportunity for empowerment, actually, around what we can do. We are both potentially leaders of organizations or staff members, we are consumers, we are voters, we are role models, we're parents. So, thinking much more broadly, [inaudible 00:28:42] just about ourselves as consumers, but as citizens really, not using the negative connotation for that term, but really participants in and responsible for the future of our society and our world. So, yeah.
Krista Bradley:
I'm really interested in leadership because it just keeps popping up, because this march that we're on is inevitable, as Vijay knows, and adaptation to the climate emergency and to a very different reality that's quickly approaching, I think, is going to be so critical. So, how are we leading from the middle? How are we leading cooperatively? Vijay, the comment you made about different work structures and flattened hierarchical work structures and thinking about cooperatives. I'm just wondering how those could play, or that model could play a role in leading change and moving away from that individual person that's, whatever, trying to drive change.
Krista Bradley:
Change, I think, comes from more mass movements of like-minded people who are making small or medium sized calls for change or just coming up with different guidelines or ways to work that even in their own small sector or small organization, and Kate, I have worked for a number of small organizations, so I totally see and appreciate that challenge about trying to maintain change, and I think what's helped me is being able to network and create a collaborative of people who are all working towards that as ways to learn from and to cheer on and continue to move things forward, because I do believe in the power of that kind of collective movement and cohort groups making change. So, I just wanted to raise that up in terms of the whole leadership piece.
Erin Woods:
No, I think that that's great. Vijay, you also, though, in addition to the individual, the smaller collective grassroots movements, you also have talked about radical operational changes. So, where do those play together perhaps?
Vijay Mathew:
Oh, yeah. Well, I think it, when we ... Let me get my thoughts together. There's something about how when we live in a specific system, whether it's our workplace or just in our greater economy, and we've been called as consumers, these systems really impact the way that we relate to each other. Despite our own personal intentions or values, these systems seem to always trump ... The ideology and the values embedded in these systems always seem to trump our individual of will. So, if we're able to live and create new structures in our workplaces and in the world outside of our workplaces, it will bring out better things in us as people, I think. So, that's an important aspect and that's incredibly related to the system, the capitalist consumer system, colonial system that has created the climate crisis. So, those are all very related.
Vijay Mathew:
The other thing is that, getting back to a point I think Krista made about disruptions, also Alexis, these disruptions that are going to be ongoing, continued crises that are localized or global, pandemic or whatever, that our impulses to collaborate and to take care, to really start to do the work of caring for each other is incredibly important, and the cultures and systems we inhabit will bring that out in us so that we can do that better. I think that's really on way the arts can go is to really see how they can actually be a caring entity in their community, both local and virtual. Then practically, what that means is if you're not, for example, doing accessibility practices for your online events, that's a good and quick place to start.
Alexis Frasz:
Yeah. I think that's a really ... So many points are so important that you're making, and there's a really great book that just came out recently called Less is More by this anthropologist called Jason Hickel, and one of things that they've found and that he writes about in that book is that democratic governance is always associated with better care for people and the environment when any group, it's not just democratic political systems, which we don't actually have and we know that, but when people are collectively able to make decisions together for the good of the whole, then make the right decision.
Alexis Frasz:
So, I think that really speaks to the point about changing structures, and it seems like it's not necessarily related to Kate's question. There may be things that don't seem like they're ... You may not be able to afford putting solar panels on the roof of your building. But you can practice more democratic decision making, and many small organizations already do. So, I think that also, if you do look through and do an audit of your activities and look for ways that you can minimize your harm, also look for ways that you might be able to maximize your benefit and places where maybe you already are. Like many artists, there are artists who fly all the time and go around the world and use a ton of carbon. But most artists that I know in my local community live pretty modest lives.
Alexis Frasz:
So, to ask them to really cut back more is probably not the best bang for the buck in terms of what we're looking at here, which is not to say everybody should do their part, and whatever you can do, great. But if you already take the subway, if you already live in a house with multiple people, you're ahead of the game in a lot of ways. So, I think that we also need to think about really looking at the places where there's the most bang for the buck, and in both those senses, in terms of reducing harm, but also human beings have this capacity to have an impact beyond our species size. We have an impact on everything else. So, a concept that I mentioned, permaculture, in the beginning, a concept that permaculture is maximize your impact, actually, not minimize it. But do it for good, not for evil, and with intentionality.
Krista Bradley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Maximize your impact. I guess it could be misconstrued. But I really get in the context that you're using.
Erin Woods:
Do you have anything else along those lines, Krista, that you just ... Because I think there was a question in the Q&A about that that actually might relate to this maximizing your impact idea is that in organizations, do we have some thoughts, yes, on what we can do individually? How do we get more democratic decision making? Some of these big ... Do we just try to blow it up? Do we make incremental change? Do we have time for incremental change? What is a transformative process, a practical way to think about organizational shifts, if you've maybe seen some examples or have some ideas or some case studies?
Vijay Mathew:
Well, I think the quickest way for any shift to happen in the nonprofit arts is if funders actually make policies that actually mandate certain things. You literally can change the field overnight if that happens. That's the lever to pull.
Krista Bradley:
Agree more, Vijay. That's how our infrastructure is designed, that people need incentives to change, and I don't think it's incremental, frankly. I'm tired of incremental change. I'm tired of incremental change around racial justice, gender justice, disability justice, trans justice. It's like, we have all waited way too long and now you just need to blow it up, and the way to blow it up is to have the accomplices of our funding partners who are already taking major steps to take the corpus of their money and put it in a different place, and you see how that's shifting tons of ways that people are making decisions about who they're hiring or what organizations are thriving, or at least not failing because they've been under-resourced for so long and we now are beginning to get some just investments. So, yeah. Funders are really critical to this, and not incrementally. That's no how you make change, at least not right now, I don't think. We don't have time.
Alexis Frasz:
I have so many mixed feelings about this. I agree. I think that funders have outsized influence and can put pressure. In fact, many of you may know already of a group called Julie's Bicycle in the UK and they have been very successful at encouraging and working with organizations in the UK to develop sustainability plans because they had to as a condition of funding from The Arts Council of England, which funds everybody, whereas our funding system doesn't really work quite as ... I don't know enough about Canadian ... I know there's some Canadians on the call. I don't know enough about the system there to know whether that would work. But I think that pressure can be put.
Alexis Frasz:
I think one of the things that was really interesting to me about their work is that just developing the plan for sustainability, that was the requirement. You didn't have to deliver on it. You actually just had to develop the plan and submit it. Just doing that, people actually did start to do things, even though they didn't have to, and the wellbeing and sense of employee satisfaction in the organizations increased. There's a lot of ways that we could interpret why. To me, I think there's something about being in integrity with the truth of what we know. Some scientists have talked about there being this way that we're all operating in a sense of denial.
Alexis Frasz:
Those of us who believe in climate change are still operating in a sense of denial because we acknowledge it on the one hand and then we say, "Well, yeah, but I do need to fly to that really important conference because I've been invited to do the keynote," or whatever it is. Go visit my friend in Mexico or something like that. So, we make those kinds of compromises all the time and so it means that we don't take it as seriously as it actually is. So, I think there is something that feels really aligning and good on an inner level to be operating in alignment with the reality that we know is true.
Vijay Mathew:
One thing that I think would be a good partnership between organizations and funders is trying to solve this issue that Alexis, you bring up, of one's career advancement or progress in one's field is right now aligned with mobility and your ability to travel, an ability to be in places, the ability to take airplanes. There is a way. I don't know what it is, but we would be in the correct structure or a structure that is less harmful if we can figure out how to decouple career advancement from fast travel.
Krista Bradley:
That's really so insightful. I'd never even made those connections. But you're absolutely right. Right? How is that equitable, first of all, and access to movement and career advancement, it is limited to of the few that have the ability to do that. So, thanks for raising that. That's really insightful.
Erin Woods:
Yeah, and what's striking me too that's come out of this conversation is the lever to pull, the funder lever, the big lever, but there are also these smaller cracks in systems that maybe we can start to think about, well, okay, maybe we can just change our hiring practices or we don't make people go to conferences as often or are there smaller little shifts institutionally while we're also keeping an eye on the big things? But then just writing a sustainability plan actually leads to employee wellness is not a thing you would know, but it's the right thing to do.
Erin Woods:
So, I think that that also comes back to doing the right thing often leads to more right things, which is maybe a little bit fluffy, but also really quite practical. So, any other last questions in the group or thoughts about other practical approaches or maybe a few words of wisdom or resources that that panelists would like to leave? We've had a couple of URLs and the Less is More book mentioned already. Closing thoughts?
Alexis Frasz:
Yeah. I guess I would just say I think I would ... This is a really good question. I didn't see it from more about the practical approach and do we shut our organizations? As much as I do think some change can happen from above, it's both top down, but it's also bottom up, and I really think that we're seeing this with the racial justice work right now where it's become unacceptable to have certain people on your board, to say certain things. It's slower than any of us would like, but I do see this tide turning. So, I also think that artists, grassroots groups can put pressure on the above with setting the culture. So, I think that's possible.
Alexis Frasz:
But I also think that one really important thing, and I hate to leave on a down note, so someone else will have to fill in, is to plan for adaptation as well because just like with COVID, with the wildfires, there are going to be these things happening and for small groups and artists, really understanding what the issues are in your place and connecting with other people who can help to build resilience around those things.
Erin Woods:
Thanks, Alexis. I don't know if a famous person said this, but I did hear that art is adaptation plus imagination. I wrote that down somewhere. So, kind of an interesting idea. But Vijay, Krista, last thoughts?
Vijay Mathew:
Yeah. Just a quick little tiny project I've been working on that I'm very excited about. It's just, this is basically a carbon emissions calculator for streaming media. Just launched it, and it's basically an awareness tool, awareness tool about the costs of our activity and it masquerading as math and sciences. [inaudible 00:44:58]. But yeah. It's just a site that may be helpful. The intention there is for people in organizations who are thinking of tapering their travel, tapering their carbon emitting travel to use this kind of tool or some kind of tool to create a tapering budget of carbon emissions, alongside their actual financial budgets.
Erin Woods:
That's great. Thank you. Yeah. Another level, for sure, budgets. Definitely. Krista, your last word from [crosstalk 00:45:35].
Krista Bradley:
Oh, I think the glass is always half full because we work in a field with a lot of creative people who are passionate about caring for one another and for this Earth. So, I have no doubt that there will be change where it's need and I'm inspired by this conversation and my colleagues and really hope it's been useful for everybody else. I'm hoping that we can create more tools, like the tool that Vijay's talking about, the tools and structure that Julie's Bicycle created. I think we need language, we need tools in our field to help build that awareness and to give us steps for how we can make incremental and seismic change. So, I'm hopeful that will happen and look forward to partnering ways to make that happen.
Erin Woods:
Thank you all so much. Vijay, Krista, Alexis, thank you for joining me. Thank you for everyone else on the call, on the session.
Alexis Frasz:
Thank you, Erin.
Erin Woods:
Oh, you're welcome. I'm looking forward to-
Krista Bradley:
Yeah. Thanks, Erin.
Erin Woods:
... Work Shouldn't Suck and what they come up with next. This is going to be, this talk about a movement. Talk about some commitments. Yeah. Work Shouldn't Suck. It shouldn't be bad for the environment. It shouldn't be bad for its employees. So, I think this kind of movement is, we're part of it and it's exciting to be here. So, thank you all. Thanks for joining us.
Tim Cynova:
Find more about the Ethnical Re-Opening Summit, including speaker bios and session recaps at work shouldn’t suck dot c-o backslash ethical hyphen reopening hyphen summit hyphen 2021.
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