Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep3: Conversation with John Orr (EP.55)
Updated
March 17, 2022
In episode three of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews John Orr, Executive Director of the Philadelphia-based Art-Reach.
This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”
Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:
Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG
Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent
Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods
David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia
Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab
Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21
Kit Hughes, Co-Founder & CEO, Look Listen
Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools
David Reuter, Partner, LLR
Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University
Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.
Host: Tim Cynova
Guest
JOHN ORR is the Executive Director at Art-Reach in the city of Philadelphia where he leads an effort to end systemic exclusion for people with disabilities and people experiencing poverty within Philadelphia’s cultural sector. Over his tenure Art-Reach has positioned itself as an innovative leader in accessible arts programming. The past 23 years of Orr’s career has focused on ensuring cultural access to as many people as possible. He has served as President of the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia and has worked at large museums, small community art centers and international research institutions. Orr connects with the disability community and the cultural sector though his work on the Mayor’s Commission on People with Disabilities, the Board of the PA Humanities and the Board of the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Orr identifies as neurodiverse and lives in South Philadelphia with his partner Allison, 11-year old daughter Maddie, and two grey cats who hold deep disdain for each other.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. 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.
Transcript
John Orr:
It was incredibly powerful to recognize the privilege and the position that I had, and to leverage that privilege and power in a way that put the community's voice first. I don't think I'll ever do it any differently ever again. The result was worth the discomfort of checking my own privilege in that moment.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck. A podcast about, well, that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini-series called white men and the journey towards anti-racism. While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast, where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduced this series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic, not by white guys, can be found on workshouldntsuck.co.
Tim Cynova:
In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked, they each defined the work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work, others say they approach it more through a justice lens. Others, inclusion and belonging. Still others, equity and impact. Through these conversations we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations that this was work for white guys to be doing. We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging.
Tim Cynova:
Since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with. On today's conversation, I'm joined by John Orr, executive director of the Philadelphia based Art-Reach. An organization creating and advocating for and expanding accessible opportunities in the arts, so the full spectrum of society is served. You can find John's bio linked in the description for this episode. So, in the interest of time, let's get going. John, welcome to the podcast.
John Orr:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Tim Cynova:
Let's just start with, how do you typically introduce yourself and how do you typically introduce Art-Reach and its work?
John Orr:
Sure. My name is John Orr, I'm the executive director at Art-Reach. I'm a white male in my early forties, salt and pepper hair. Today, I'm actually wearing a light blue, grayish shirt, with a small print, darker blue flower on it. Yeah, I've been at Art-Reach, I guess, for about six years now. Oh, actually, almost seven years now. At Art-Reach, we believe that disability is a product of design rather than diagnosis and that good design creates an accessible world. All we have to do is change the world. Right now, people assume that changing the world or creating an inclusive accessible world is too hard or too big.
John Orr:
But people just like us, like you and me and anyone out there listening, people just like us built the entire world. They weren't superheros, they weren't super smart or anything like that, they were people just like us. They built a world that works for a lot of other people, but it doesn't really work for everyone. So, it's up to us, people just like us, to finish the job, and so Art-Reach is working to finish that job. Along the way, we're going to change the world. We just invite people along, ask them to wander down this unpredictable path of experimentation and innovation and imagination and what if statements, and I hope they do. Because at the end of that path, we're going to arrive at the inclusive world that Art-Reach hopes to build.
Tim Cynova:
So, you define the work of Art-Reach through an inclusion lens. Do you broaden that? Are we talking about anti-racism, anti-oppression, equity, diversity? How do those intersect with the work that you're doing through inclusion?
John Orr:
Yeah, so we definitely fall into the anti-crowd. Personally, I think there's a fundamental difference between embracing inclusion and embracing anti-exclusion. To me, inclusion is very outward facing. It's all about widening your circle, right? So, there's people outside your circle and you want to include them or bring them in closer, so you make your circle bigger. That's one approach. But for me, anti-inclusion work not only pushes you to include more people, but it makes you examine the factors, the people, the systems, the policies that you currently have in your circle that kept you from being inclusive in the first place.
John Orr:
Anti-inclusion, or I'm sorry, anti-exclusion to me includes the act of inward reflection and identification of the things that created exclusion in the first place, so that quite frankly, you can remove them from your circle before you try to widen it. It's difficult, it's difficult to have real inclusion and to create authentic, safe spaces if you allow the things that made you exclusive or that kept people out. It's hard to be a safe space if those things are still present in your organization. It's hard decisions, but that's what ... to me, that's what leadership is.
John Orr:
That's what we have to fundamentally change about our organizations. It's not just how many people can we say, come in here and check us out. It's "Hey, you should feel safe here because we've gotten rid of all the things that made this an unsafe space for you in the past."
Tim Cynova:
What does that look like practically in your organization? What are some examples?
John Orr:
Yeah, so it's messy, right? It's hard because you have to be able to tell people, no, and you have to say, I'm going to look at a high performer in my organization who may get good measurable results, but who may not be treating employees fairly, may not be using language in the correct way. It's not being afraid to say, I'm willing to give up that performance because I know that in the long run my organization is going to be a safer space and it's going to be a more inclusive space, and it's going to be a more authentic space. One of the ways that that happens is, it sounds simpler than it actually is, but it's just getting people to your table and then shutting up and listening to them and doing what they say.
John Orr:
The more perspectives that you can bring into the organization who have faced barriers, if they're willing to sit down with you and give you the time and take the burden of sharing information with you, then don't waste that opportunity. Use that as a chance to improve your organization. You'll start to see why making harder cuts is really difficult. When I came to Art-Reach, we were serving about 13,000 people a year. I was a brand new executive director. We had, I think, 12 different programs that we were running with a staff of six. There was so much potential, but we were just constantly in our own way.
John Orr:
So, when I came in there, it was like, "Okay, well, let's talk to the community, find out what they want, when they tell us, let's listen to it. Then, let's get rid of all the things that we do, even if we like them, that aren't helping the community in any tangible way." So, I came in and I cut two thirds of our programming. I reduced the size of the staff. We balanced out the budget. The following year we served 47,000 people. That number has just continued to grow. That's a hard decision to make. I thought I was going to get fired. I think a lot of the community that we were engaging didn't like me as a director, but at the end of the day, the change we made propelled the organization forward.
Tim Cynova:
My colleague, Lauren Ruffin likes to say, do less comma better.
John Orr:
Yeah, if you've got limited resources, put as much of them as you can into as few items as possible and just do them really well.
Tim Cynova:
What were some of those changes that you made that resulted with the programs and services, and I assume language and policy through the whole ecosystem?
John Orr:
One of the ones that comes to mind, we had this accessible equipment that we housed at Art-Reach that we could send out to theaters for verbal description, shows, and for captioning at shows. It was great, like, "Okay, so we have this equipment, we'll rent it out." It was so janky. It rattled when you picked it up. Our technical expertise around it was, jiggle the cord if it doesn't work. It was just so dumb. I thought, there's all these theaters that rely on us to distribute this equipment so that they can share it because they all say that they can't afford it. But at the end of the day, the equipment was like $5,000 a one-time expenditure.
John Orr:
It was a capital expense for all these places, and we're talking about theaters that had millions of dollars in their budget. This is an immaterial cost, even if it causes a deficit. So, instead of continuing on with this program, where we rented out equipment, I called the dealer and Art-Reach brokered a deal for theaters in Philadelphia to get discounted rates on equipment that they could buy on their own. What we did was, instead of renting out this equipment piecemeal, now we had 12 theaters with their own equipment that could do on demand accessibility.
John Orr:
So, we took the burden off of ourselves. We gave a benefit to the disability community because we were increasing access, and we gave the cultural community a little bit of self-sufficient behavior in the process.
Tim Cynova:
I want to shift a little bit, because we dove right into the organization, which is great. Maybe back up or go to the side and talk about, you're a white guy, so how do you come to the work? What's the journey that you've been on?
John Orr:
Yeah, so my journey coming into this work was not intentional at all. I think it was by happenstance, but in a weird way. I picked up all these little things throughout my career, all these little experiences that built the foundation. When all those little things were woven together, they built the foundation that I brought with me into Art-Reach. Now, when I came into Art-Reach, I had no real background in inclusion work, which was terrifying, but I had all these little micro moments to be perfectly blunt. When I got the job at Art-Reach, I was a first time executive director and I was convinced that it was going to be a giant moment for my career.
John Orr:
What caught me completely off guard was that my time at Art-Reach would completely change my life, and what I didn't know at that time ... So, I'm neurodiverse, but I was undiagnosed for a very long time. I loved this sense of community. I learned that when I was at the Fleisher Art Memorial and we were engaging immigrants and refugees who came to Philadelphia. I saw how much stronger organizations could become when they centered the communities that they were aiming to reduce the barriers for. Early in my career, I was on the front line of admissions in museums.
John Orr:
I would see families come in and the families who could put a credit card down and just say, "Hey, I'm bringing my family in and it was no big deal." Then, I saw the families whose parents were scrounging different cards or different change in dollars just to get their kids into a museum. So, the kids were really happy, but the parents were really stressed out. All those micro moments, when put together, prepared me in such a dynamic way for what I was about to do at Art-Reach. Even though I had never led an organization in that way before.
John Orr:
I think when I came to Art-Reach and we decided to remove the cultural sector from the pedestal and we put the disability community up there, that was my aha moment because all of a sudden, like, sure, I was a white guy, I didn't identify as neurodiverse at that time, I had been diagnosed but I was ignoring it back then. We just listened to what people who were experiencing barriers were actually facing, what they were feeling. We built empathy, and that empathy is what drove Art-Reach forward.
John Orr:
It was incredibly powerful to recognize the privilege and the position that I had, and to leverage that privilege and power in a way that put the community's voice first. I don't think I'll ever do it any differently ever again. The result was worth the discomfort of checking my own privilege in that moment.
Tim Cynova:
I think that's really powerful.
John Orr:
There were a lot of little things and a few big experiences, but mostly little moments in my life and my career that were woven together, that when woven together created this strong foundation and empathy, and got me to where I am. I never intentionally set out to build a career around inclusion and the barriers to it. I stumbled into it. I didn't have a ton of professional experience in the space at all. Quite frankly, I was convinced my board was going to fire me six or seven months into my time at Art-Reach. I had cut the staff. I had cut the programming. But they were really patient and they were really gracious and they gave me the space that I needed.
John Orr:
Yeah, I think when I came in as a first time director, like I had said earlier, I thought this role had the potential to be a pivotal experience for my career. What caught me off guard was how much Art-Reach was about to change my entire life. It was at Art-Reach that I was able to embrace my own identity as a person who's neurodiverse. I ran from that diagnosis for a long time, but what I found was that by centering the community, by listening to them, by putting their words into action instead of my own ideas, and being a little bit bullish about it, maybe that's where my privilege was best suited.
John Orr:
If you can use your privilege to help elevate the voice of others and to push their ideas and their agenda forward, even if it runs counter to what you would normally have done, then that's a good use of power. For me, that's transferring power to the community and putting them in a position to be heard, and that's what we did. I think going through that process not only helped Art-Reach, but it helped me personally come to terms with my own diagnosis over the years. To finally accept it and get the support that I needed to be a better partner, parent, leader, and everything else.
Tim Cynova:
You mentioned support from your board, and I'm curious to dig in here because you mentioned thinking you'd be fired six months in. Those of us who have run nonprofit organizations know the structure does not oftentimes reward innovation or risk taking. If you take risks and they turn out well, you get to keep your job. If you don't, you might lose it. In the moment in which we're living, in our lives amid a global pandemic, where the concept of work and life and all of these things that are being questioned. It's a moment when we can actually try things and do things differently that we might not have thought about two years or might not have tried two years ago.
Tim Cynova:
Yet, there's still this structure of board staff, donors that we're working with, that often that's really outdated, built in white supremacy culture, very patriarchal for a number of organizations. There's a disconnect sometimes between the amount of time and energy and learning the staff is doing versus the board. When you look just, again, there's 261 working days a year, and most boards maybe spend 10 days a year thinking about the organization, if they're not doing the personal work outside of it. So, there's a lot of dynamics here that make it challenging for a lot of organizations to say, "Yeah, I would like to do that."
Tim Cynova:
But did you just, one, luck out and get a board that was a unicorn, that you're able to work with? Or, what was that dynamic like and what kind of advice would you give to leaders, staff who are in organizations who are like, "This is the work we need to be doing. This is the time we need to be doing it in, and all these other things are at play."
John Orr:
When I was looking at the series of the podcast in general, I was like, "Okay, this is a podcast hosted by a white man, interviewing a bunch of middle aged white men, giving advice to other middle aged white men." My first thought was, "Man, that reminds me of my early board meetings at Art-Reach." When I joined Art-Reach, the board that I inherited had no active members with a disability. There was one person of color on the board and it wasn't just majority white men. It was majority white men from a very specific area of the greater Philadelphia region who all knew each other too.
John Orr:
It was problematic. So, one of the first things that I did when I came in, I was like, "If we're going to center the community, we have to start working toward representation on the board level that's just different, and looks dramatically different at board meetings than it looks right now." Luckily, as I was making the changes through Art-Reach, there were some board members who didn't agree with them and decided to leave on their own. Whenever there's a spot, you open up opportunity. But we were really intentional about starting to get members of the disability community involved in the governance work.
John Orr:
So, we still have a lot of work to do on that front, but we have a 15-member board now, and I can say, it's no longer majority male, majority white male from the western suburbs of Philadelphia and 7% people of color. It's a board of 15 people and 27% of my board is a person ... or identifies as having a disability. Another three members of the board are either caretakers or work directly in the disability community. A third of our board are people of color, 20% of our board are people who identify as black. I think there's still a lot of work to do on that front to bring more representation into the board itself, but that's movement that I'm proud of.
John Orr:
It's definitely movement that has changed the conversation and the work at Art-Reach. For me, it's all about putting people at the table and giving them the opportunity to influence the flow of work. We just recently went through a governance restructure with our entire board. So, I don't want to get into a boring board conversation about this, but most nonprofit boards are set up with this. We have a marketing committee and a development committee and a finance committee, and all these other boring committees and they meet with staff and the staff get frustrated, because they're like, "Oh, your marketing ideas aren't actually relevant to what we need to do."
John Orr:
Then, the board gets frustrated because their ideas never get implemented on the staff level, because they're just not possible. We decided to dissolve all of our committees and just get rid of them and reboot the governance structure. The committees that we have now, we have the influential leadership committee, which is our, what we would refer to as our why committee. That's working on strategy to make Art-Reach an influential leader in the national conversation around cultural accessibility. We have our broader reach committee, that committee's the who and where, who are we serving? What kind of audiences are we serving?
John Orr:
What groups are we serving and where are we serving them at? Then, we have a business model committee, and their job is the how, so while we want to be influential leaders and we want to reach more people in more places, we want to be sustainably set up as a business to evaluate properly. Evaluate with an eye toward innovation and to keep the organization in a different space. Those are three conversations that the staff don't necessarily need to have at the strategy level, but it's been really fun to turn from strategy into operation at the staff level. That whole conversation has shifted the entire dynamic of the board governance that we have at Art-Reach as well.
John Orr:
It's cool, it's like everyone's fired up about it, again, in true Art-Reach fashion and experiment. I've never tried to work with a board that was set up that way, and there is risk and potential for failure or for all of this to crumble and blow up in our face, but everybody's game, and it's more fun. It makes the conversations a little more lively.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, that's really awesome. Do you maintain similar board structure with officers and members in a traditional way or are you messing around with that one, that as well?
John Orr:
We haven't messed around with it too much. We have a chair, a vice chair, secretary, treasurer, and then we always try to have a community advocate on the executive committee at all times. So, a person with a disability placed onto the executive committee just because that's the one committee that got held over and we just ... they handled now the finance review, the governance stuff, all the board stuff. But we always want to have representation on that board or on that committee. That committee right now is five people, 20%. We have a person with a disability, we have two people of color, and then we're split. I think it's 40% male, 60% female.
John Orr:
We want representation on that committee as well. We make sure that we've got representation split amongst all of the other committees. The executive committee is split up between the three other committees that we have. We're all tying everyone together so that the conversations don't get too out of control for any one committee, but yeah, it's working. I think we're going to go into a session next year where we really talk about what this board is and what it could be. We have a consultant that we're going to work with on that project. But I think there's going to be a little bit of introspection.
John Orr:
I think us taking care of the committee realignment was a good project for us. There's a part of me as the executive director that wants to see what the board self-governs and how they start to implement some things on their own, now that the representation is different than what it was six years ago.
Tim Cynova:
That's really cool stuff. I said messed around with, which in the best possible way of experimenting and iterating.
John Orr:
Yeah. Well, I think on the experimentation piece it's interesting, Art-Reach experiments with so many things. Most of the time we talk about the programmatic pieces, because that's the fun stuff, right? The idea that somebody gives us one day and they just say like, "Oh, why can't we do this?" The next thing we know, we're creating a 10-week choreographed performance with Philadelphia ballet. We have people with intellectual disabilities dancing with professional dancers, and they're choreographing an original world premiere performance. That kind of stuff is so cool and the experimentation and risk of failure there is so high.
John Orr:
But yet, I like to think that we can be experimental and comfortable with risk and comfortable with failure at every level of the organization. I think the board conversation is where that intersects a little bit
Tim Cynova:
For me, that's been the biggest disconnect I felt, having worked in the cultural sector for almost my entire career and seeing the amazing work that gets on the stage, on the screen, on the gallery wall, in public spaces. Knowing who's working in these organizations and just accepting, "Well, that's just how you run an organization." Like the book says in 1975, we're like, "Why do you check that creativity?" I think that's why this moment in our lives is so exciting because it's exercising that in a different way. People can say like, "Oh, right, we don't have to accept this.
Tim Cynova:
We can center anti-racism, anti-oppression, inclusion, equity, justice in how we want to live and be in our work." It's exercising those muscles, right that like, "Oh, we haven't had to think about how we change our workplace policies in a way that does that. But why don't we?" I have a colleague, she's like, "Your employee handbook is just in a Google doc. It's not written in stone. Just change the policy. It's as simple as going in and editing the document."
John Orr:
Yup. Yeah. That's the same way I feel. We've had long conversations about this. It's like, "Yeah, your policies, they're written on paper. They can be rewritten anywhere you want." We've talked about this in the scope of employment law in the past. Civil right laws, employment right laws, they're all written on paper and they can be changed at any time. They're the standard that we aim for. What we can actually strive to do is set a progressive agenda that goes much further than those laws. Actually, say we have to meet, because at any time, those civil rights laws can be whittled away with a pen held by somebody else, who doesn't understand the ramifications of their power.
John Orr:
What can't be taken away from anybody is their human right. So, at Art-Reach, our first core value of the organization is that art is a human right, and that everyone should have access to it. But we understand that there are groups of people who have historically faced barriers, the disability community, people experiencing poverty. We want to work specifically with those communities to understand the barriers that they faced, hear what they think good solutions are, and then put those solutions into practice.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things we've talked about before is the difference between equity and equality as it comes to employment law and workplaces. We hear a lot of organizations committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I'm not always sure if people understand what it means to get to through equity in the workplace. As you think about language, policy, practices, programs, initiatives, to actually embed that into the organization, I wonder if you can ... We've spiritedly talked about this in the past. I'm wondering if you can take the baton on this one. How do you think about equity, equality, employment law, workplace, and is it possible to get to true equity in organizations?
John Orr:
I'm going to further complicate the question. I don't think that equity is the goal. I think that it's a step towards the goal. When we talk about equality, you're talking about inputs that people get. Everybody gets the same treatment, but the same treatment, if it's equal across the system, doesn't create equal output from whatever system you're trying to navigate, because that system's fucked up. If the system is broken, then equality is irrelevant because one group is going to get more than the other group anyway. If you do equity, equity is focused on a leveled playing field with the output from the system.
John Orr:
Some groups of people get more support and that provides this equitable output. But what that does is that because the input is not the same, some group is getting more than another group. The group, generally the one who would have power, feels like they're being put upon, like they're not getting the same treatment now. The difference is that they have power to influence that equity in a way that benefits them. The other side, doesn't have it. What I want to get to is justice, right? Where the inputs can be the same, the output can be the same, and the reason that it all can be the same is because we've taken the system and we fucking fixed it.
John Orr:
We've fixed it. All of a sudden it doesn't matter that we're supporting both groups or all the groups, or whatever, however we want to talk about it, we've set up a system that has been balanced out at a systemic level. So, the inputs can be equal and the output can be equal because we've established justice within the system. People might think that that's too idealistic or too whatever. But if we don't shoot for further than we want to get to, I don't know, I would love an equitable world. I would love for the outcomes to be equal or equitable for everyone.
John Orr:
I just don't believe that human nature will ever allow that to be the case because of the inequality that some groups will see to an equitable system. I think that a system based in justice is that next step beyond equity that says we can give everyone the same inputs. They can get the same outputs, and the reason that's possible is because we've taken a racist and oppressive system and we've made it right. We've justified it and we've set it straight. That's the outcome that Art-Reach is striving for. I just want to keep pushing. I think the shift from equality to equity has been great. I think it's a shift on a much longer path though.
Tim Cynova:
Part of the aim of this series in interviewing white men in leadership of organizations, specifically for other white men to be able to listen to, who are on this journey as well, is that we can start sharing the things that have made impact and resonated with us. Advice and reflections, and don't go that way, take my advice. You don't want to try that. Sharing with other white guys, what advice or reflections or prompts would you like to provide that you found personally resonant and helpful?
John Orr:
We'll see how many LinkedIn connections I lose because of this, but number one, get over yourself, you're not that important. I mean that in a lot of ways. I try to go into a room with people who are seeking equity and I try not to be the one who's leading the conversation in there. I'd much rather listen and implement than give people ideas that they haven't generated on their own. So, my advice is get over yourself, you're not that important. Number two is that for most white men, please understand that your personal discomfort around a topic is not a good enough excuse to take away another person's human rights.
John Orr:
Your inability to budget for accessible accommodations is not a good enough excuse to violate human rights to access. Those are my prompts. If I'm going to be less antagonistic, the transfer of power was a really important moment for Art-Reach and seeing the outcome that came from that transfer, and not just from a performance perspective for the organization, but from a community perspective in Philadelphia, it's changed the city. It hasn't just changed Art-Reach, it's changed the city and that's what we want to do.
John Orr:
Ideally, Art-Reach will put itself out of business, because I don't want to be fighting for an equitable or a justice based world forever. I want the world to be justice based, and the longer Art-Reach exists, the longer there's proof that it's not there yet.
Tim Cynova:
Living amid a global pandemic with the work you're doing, working to change the city, working to change nonprofit structure, experimenting, what other things are you working on right now in that intersection? Either within the organization or within your broader community.
John Orr:
At the beginning of the pandemic Art-Reach made a really intentional decision. I met with the board and I said, "Look, the cultural sector is just decimating its employee base right now, and I don't want to be a part of that. I want us to make a commitment right now that the hill we will die on is that we kept our staff employed for the duration, no matter what happens. We have some money in the bank. If we lay everybody off, we're not going to do anything, we're going to lose relevance." The board was very receptive to that idea, and we were able to keep it.
John Orr:
We didn't lay off anybody during the pandemic, and because of that, we had the full force of our team to be able to pivot and think about opportunities as they came up. We always talked about, if we could wipe the slate clean for the cultural sector and start over, could we build an inclusive world? It felt like for a moment we were just like, "Oh, my God, it happened." We have a chance to reinvent now. I wanted us to be able to be proactive in planning so that when all these places reopened and there was all this chaos in the reopening in the cultural sector, that Art-Reach was positioned as the stabilizing force that could help you welcome back audiences in an accessible way.
John Orr:
Welcome back your staff with training opportunities and all these different things. For us, the pandemic in the last year was an interesting time to navigate that new reality of Art-Reach. We don't produce a ton of our own programming, we produce programming in partnership with other organizations and they were all closed. So, we were like, "Okay, what are we doing?" Everybody shifted to digital and virtual engagement. We evaluate it really quickly and said, "Look, if we're going to do this, we have to do it right from the jump." I think there was a lot of excitement about all of the available options that people had when things went virtual.
John Orr:
It started to creep back into that old conversation though, of like, "Okay, there's so much available, but why aren't people captioning things? Why aren't people providing ASL interpretation? How is it being made available to my community?" I think the most impactful piece that we mentioned to our partners is we're like, "Oh, yeah, you're all excited that you did this digital program and you can attract audiences from around the world. But what made you unique in Philadelphia? If you're the one museum that deals with whatever, or you're the one theater company that does whatever kind of theater, what made you unique in Philadelphia?"
John Orr:
You're no longer navigating that space because the people in Philadelphia have access to your company in every city across the country and every city across the world. So, you need to be able to engage your home community in a way that's meaningful to them through accessible and inclusive practices. I think we started to see that a little bit. I like to say that at times, there's that old saying, that we felt like we were building the plane as we were flying it. I think at times it felt like we were jumping out of a plane without a parachute, and at other times it felt like we were parachuting without a plane.
John Orr:
We were just like running around with a giant thing attached to our backs. We weren't getting very far, but we stayed relevant. We increased our trainings. We increased our presence. I feel like we elevated the voice of the disability community and we embedded ourselves into spaces that we knew we could meet the disability community in Philadelphia. Now, I'm on the Mayor's Commission for People with Disabilities. I'm the chair of the Recreation and Arts Committee of that commission. Art-Reach has a seat on the Pennsylvania Developmental Disabilities Council. We have a seat on the Disability Pride Pennsylvania board.
John Orr:
We just found where our communities were still getting together and still gathering, and we met them where they were again, but in a new virtual way. We brought the same authenticity to those conversations and it helped us survive. Now, we're positioned in a spot where we feel like we're emerging from this pandemic with more momentum and more opportunity ahead of us than maybe some other organizations that were similarly placed as Art-Reach.
Tim Cynova:
About a year ago I gave a presentation to a group of corporate leaders around the work that, I was at Fractured Atlas, so our anti-racism, anti-oppression work, and all the things we had tried and done. When I finished, the very first question was like, "That was really interesting, but can you share some tangible things?" I'm like, "That was what the entire presentation was." [inaudible 00:38:52] I failed this group that I totally missed that? I was relaying this to my colleague, Courtney Harge, at the time and she said, "I think people confused tangible with impactful, and impactful with visible."
Tim Cynova:
She said, "Adding pronouns to an email is tangible, ending gender discrimination is impactful, and increasing gender diversity at an organization is visible." As you think about the work and approach that Art-Reach is taking, what resonates with you in those distinctions?
John Orr:
I don't even remember who told me this, but they said, you can only lead at the speed at which people are willing to be led. So, when I look at this confusing tangible with impactful and impactful with visible, I don't really see conflict there. What I see are multiple inroads to different people on their journey as they're going through this inclusion process. Yeah, I want Art-Reach to be visible. I want the community to be visible within Art-Reach. I also want our work to be impactful and I want it to be tangible. So, I can view those as maybe start with tangible, that maybe becomes impactful, and then that creates visibility.
John Orr:
I don't necessarily think it's linear that way though. I think, if anything, the work that I do at Art-Reach and my personal experience with neurodiversity is that everyone's at a different spot on the spectrum of where they are in this work. You have to be able to make avenues for engagement for everyone on that spectrum. So, for some person, it might just be like, "Oh, my gosh, I've never done this before. I'm going to start adding my pronouns to Zoom and to my email." That's a good first step for them. Do they have to do more? Yeah, eventually, but they're on a learning curve for themselves as well.
John Orr:
I think if you simply put something out there and that's all you do, if I went to Art-Reach and I said, "Hey, everyone, we're just going to," I don't even have an example, "we're going to add pronouns to our email." They'd be like, "Cool." Then, we didn't do a damn thing after that, it's just performative. It doesn't mean anything. It's indicative of how ignorant you are to the actual problem. In fact, I remember, this is anecdotal, but I remember working at a museum and you walk into the museum and they have these cool signs on the pillars. As you walk by them, it said, welcome.
John Orr:
Then, it would change to all these different languages so that you could just walk by it and it would say welcome. It felt very welcoming to everyone who walked the door. The issue was you got to the information desk and there wasn't a damn brochure in anything but English. It's like you put this bandaid facade up, you raise the expectation for people as they come through, and then there's no integrity behind it. I do think that those visible, the tangible piece is something you can see, but if there's no actual spirit, or plan, or integrity behind it, it doesn't mean anything. I don't think that we then cut that out.
John Orr:
I think that there are some people who need that first step. My job as a leader is to say, "Okay, this is the first step." Then, you need to go on this little unpredictable stumbling path of opportunity and discomfort to get to how we take something that's tangible and make it actually impactful or meaningful. Then, what that means to translate into visibility. We may say at Art-Reach, add your pronouns, and all of a sudden we may find out that one of our staff members is non-binary or identifies as non-binary and has different pronouns.
John Orr:
All of a sudden, that's a breakthrough that maybe that person didn't feel access to sharing it any other way, but that opens up an opportunity for growth for the organization and for individuals within the organization. I think visibility is huge. I think impact is huge, and I think tangible pieces are needed. Sometimes I think it actually has to go backwards, right? When all of the racial unrest happened in Philadelphia after George Floyd's murder, there was this big push by the cultural community to put out statements. It was happening in May, and Art-Reach put out a statement.
John Orr:
To me, that's like a visible thing that people were doing, that some organizations did without any integrity. They threw up their thing and they said, "Oh, we did it because we don't want to get the backlash on social media. We put up our MLK quote and that's all we got to do. At Art-Reach, we made a statement, we kept it really short. We said, "We support the broken silence in Philadelphia and we support black communities across the region." But then we went a step further to make our statement impactful. We actively wrote to all of our donors during our end of fiscal year donor push and we said, "Stop donating to us.
John Orr:
Donate to these six organizations that the staff have identified that are serving the black community on topics of mental health. We want you to support them with your dollars instead of Art-Reach. We're going to have a deficit this year. It doesn't matter what you donate to us, we're going to have a hole. So, you can throw your money into a pit or you can throw your money into a cause that has an actual need right now. We got a lot of blow back about that for donors who said, "We want to support you. You're telling us not to now, and you're telling us that our donations aren't even worth it."
John Orr:
My response to them was like, "Look, Art-Reach is going to be here in September. We just are. We're not going anywhere, but we can't say that about every black life in Philadelphia." Unfortunately, later that year Walter Wallace Jr. was shot and killed by police. He was a black man with a history of mental illness. The police department in Philadelphia had put a mental health specialist on the 911 call line to address just these situations, but they don't work on Mondays, the one person. This incident happened on the day that they were off, and Walter Wallace died. I didn't send a note out to my donors and say like, "Hey, I told you so. This is why we needed the support."
John Orr:
But that's why we did it. It wasn't for necessarily what had happened. It was to prevent what was going to happen, even if that's an unknown. I think for me, that's impactful and tangible because we're giving up our power, and that's what this all comes back to. That fundraising campaign was power that Art-Reach has. We know that we can raise money from that campaign to actively say, "We want to give that up and reroute that to other organizations because they need it more." It was something that I felt strongly about, my staff felt strongly about, and that my board supported.
John Orr:
I think my board supported it because we've taken a more progressive approach to a world where human life is valued and a world where human rights and social justice is at the forefront of our work and our actions.
Tim Cynova:
That's a really powerful example of living values and using power. As we land the plane on our conversation today, where do you want to land it?
John Orr:
I think for me, one of the really fun things that my team and I just went through is we built these core values for the organization about five years ago or so, six years ago. One of the things that we forgot about when we built the core values for our work was the core values for how we work. So, we just went through a strategic planning process. I said to the staff, I was like, "Look, I think it's important that we define not necessarily the work culture that we have today, but the work culture that we want." So, we had really honest conversations and we came up with these seven values that we wanted to put forth in our work environment.
John Orr:
They came out to be that we value a collaborative process that includes different perspectives and informs the vision for everything that we do at Art-Reach, from planning, implementation, and evaluation. We value trust as the root of our conversation, and trust allows us to have open and honest conversations about evaluation and creates healthy conflict and straightforward evaluation of our work. We value the lived experience perspective and background of our coworkers. We embrace anti-ableism, anti-racism practices to create systemic change through intentional changes in policy, action, and programs. We value experimentation.
John Orr:
That's been ... as our way toward innovation. We embrace risk and failure. We value choice in how and when we work, and this one was important for the entire group. I believe wholeheartedly that the idea of work and life being in balance is just a myth. I think that it's important for me that every Art-Reach employee has autonomy to choose when to prioritize their work, when to prioritize their family or any other commitment that's important to them in ways that allows them to have personal, mental, and physical wellbeing. Then, the last two were we value exploration in professional and personal development.
John Orr:
We value the teamwork and the interrelation of our roles as they relate to one another. We can't do our job without directly impacting another person's, and that teamwork between the departments is really critical to our success. So, for me, as we land that plane that might not have any wheels or wings or whatever, we're just running around on the tarmac with our parachute strapped to us, this is the one, it's like the glue, right? The dark matter of space, if you will, the piece that you can't see that keeps the work together. Allows us the freedom to live our values, push for progressive change in the sector, and to do it in a way that makes people want to come to work and take on this burden.
John Orr:
It's not easy work. It's not always fun work. There is conflict in it, and my team's good at embracing that, but I also want to make sure that they feel taken care of by the organization as well.
Tim Cynova:
John, such a packed conversation with such richness, really.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your experience, your vulnerability today with this conversation. There's so much here, so much helpful stuff to share, and thanks for being on the podcast.
John Orr:
Yeah, this was great. Have me back anytime.
Tim Cynova:
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