The Action and Accountability Committee (AKA A&A Committee, sometimes called the AAC) was formed by the Board of the Coalition Theater in response to an open letter from the RVA BIPOC Project. Its purpose is to help come up with a Statement of Intent (SOI) related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that the theater will commit to, then to make recommendations on how to implement and operationalize those intentions, and periodically report publicly on how well or poorly the theater is doing with this implementation.

We have rotating members. Each member of the committee is asked to commit to it for six months, after which they can rotate off or stick around. It’s possible that eventually we’ll ask people who have stuck around for a really long time to move over and give someone else a chance, but so far, that hasn’t actually been an issue, because we’re so new!

We also have co-chairs! Two people serve as co-chairs to split up the work of sending out agendas and scheduling things and prioritizing topics. Each co-chair serves for six months, but the rotations are staggered, so there’s always one experienced co-chair when a newbie co-chair comes on.

Yep! You need to fill out this interest form that tells us a little bit about yourself and we’ll review it and get back to you.

Glad to! It started when the theater received a letter from the RVA BIPOC Project, a group of Coalition performers of color, outlining concerns around DEI in the theater that they didn’t see being addressed. The letter included a list of demands. The Board largely agreed with the critiques outlined in the letter, and saw the demands as the nucleus of a useful road map for the theater to improve its anti-racist efforts. It formed the A&A committee to help turn the demands into intentions, and the intentions into action. In fact, the creation of an A&A committee was itself one of the demands. So, in creating the committee, one of the demands was met on the spot!

Ok, I just needed to give a bit more background for context. The A&A committee has been working since its formation in late 2020 to create the SOI, a document laying out the anti-racism work that the theater will be doing in the coming months and years. This document is the response to that initial letter and is intended to serve as a guide for the theater as it moves towards making these intentions into real, concrete policy and action. The SOI was directly inspired by the letter written by the RVA BIPOC Project mentioned in question 1. As we worked on it, we sent drafts of each section to the Board for review, and once it was done, it was approved by both the Board and the RVA BIPOC Project. On June 2, 2021, we published it on the Coalition’s Slack for the theater community to see, and a few days later, we added it to the Coalition web site for the rest of the world.

Anti-racism is the practice of enacting policies and behaviors that intentionally combat structural racial inequities built into current systems. And racism is everywhere, y’all. This applies to you! Even if you don’t consider yourself “a racist,” you’re participating in a system that overwhelmingly benefits white people. So the anti-racist SOI aims to identify racial inequalities in the Coalition Theater’s culture and practices, and define specific new policies and procedures meant to correct and dismantle them.

If you want to learn more about anti-racism, systemic and structural racism, and critical race theory in general, here are some resources the A&A committee has found to be helpful:

– This great resource guide from the National Museum of African American History & Culture as a start.

– This sweet vid of Dr. Robin DiAngelo discussing ‘White Fragility’

– Introduce yourself to intersectionality with Kimberlé Crenshaw

Great! It’s more interesting to discuss something when you’ve done some background reading about it.

If you’re talking about free classes for BIPOC students and active cultivation of BIPOC performers, it’s true that non-BIPOC folks aren’t the target here. So in that sense of discrimination, meaning “focusing on one group and not others,” these policies do discriminate in favor of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people of color. This is intentional, and is meant to help address systemic policies that have favored mostly white people for a really really long time. Rather than passively hope that the makeup of the theater changes over time organically, we’re making a conscious choice to enact policies that increase the representation of BIPOC theater members. We are not asking anyone to leave the theater; we are working to get more people to join the theater.

With a small number of people of color in the theater membership, it is currently difficult to achieve racially diverse teams without asking the same people over and over again to join your team. That can start to feel less like inclusivity and more like tokenism. That’s not anti-racist; let’s not do that. Instead we want to start thinking differently by doing things like partnering with local or non-local, diverse performance groups in shows, bringing improv classes into more diverse spaces, and actively recruiting BIPOC students to take Coalition classes. The goal of this focus on anti-racist policy is to grow the diverse membership of the theater, so that it won’t be difficult to form diverse teams. We hope that our policies, when implemented, accelerate this membership growth.

Teams change over time. People come, people go. Some teams have longer term stability than others. If you’re on an indie team that is all-white, think seriously about how you might change over time as you add new players to your group. Like, devote some time to talking about it together. To be clear, you don’t need to dissolve your team. As the theater membership grows, your team can grow with it. House teams, on the other hand, will be cultivated with these new policies in mind. If you’re not a house team coach, you don’t have to change anything. If you would like to become a house team coach, it’s a good idea to start thinking about these things now!

As we move from declaring our goals in the Statement of Intent to actually operationalizing the work, outreach and recruitment will be a big part of our work. We’ll probably form a special subcommittee to identify these opportunities and reach out to them. (See Question 3 of this FAQ, hint hint)

Oh, you mean who gets to be in shows and stuff? Well, we don’t want audiences to come to shows where every act features a bunch of white dudes making fart jokes. We’re working to ensure that when audiences come to the theater, they see people from lots of different backgrounds all making fart jokes together. Heck, maybe the audience will do some farting of their own! I hope not, but that’s not something we can really control.

Quotas are never the goal. Take a look at the Statement of Intent. We want to be able to look at the theater and say “yeah, we’re doing all of that.” It won’t happen overnight, but having the SOI gives us a vision to build to, and if we work together (see question 3), we can build to it faster. We will try to set goals and metrics and stuff to track our progress, and these goals might include things like “number of shows that have featured BIPOC headliners” and “reach out to these organizations by this date.” And we’ll grade ourselves on how we’re doing.

Great question! And a very practical one. The answer right now is that we (The A&A Committee) are building this roadmap.

We’re dividing into sub-committees, and each one is taking one of the elements in the Statement of Intent and coming up with some recommendations for implementing it, with a proposed timeline, people who need to be looped in, checklists and to-dos, etc. So like for example, our scholarships for BIPOC can be implemented pretty immediately, but there are things that go with that, like communicating the program, promoting it, and then measuring how effective it is in terms of class makeup and whether students stick around and join the theater, or just say “thanks for the class” and move on. Those sub-committees can probably use some help by the way, so if you skipped question 3, maybe scroll up and give that one a read.

Like what? You can submit your question via this form and we’ll do our best to answer it. Maybe it will even get added to this very web page! Like, right here!