Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility
The Centre for Arts and Social Innovation (CASI) has a vision of theatre for everyone, but we know and acknowledge that we’re not there yet.
The CASI and the theatre community are rallying around conversations about equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. As a team, we need to do better and we acknowledge it.
We are gesturing towards offering space and support to artists, researchers and communities members from diverse backgrounds. We know that not all voices are heard and not all members of our community are represented on stages in the theatre sector neither are they represented off stage in the education sector. We’re committed to making equity, diversity, and inclusion a priority at the CASI as it is for Nactional Theater School.
Please take a moment to read some important definitions and learn more about the action plan of NTS and its CASI team to gesture toward more equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. If you want to stay updated on our actions to fight systemic racism in our institution, you can do so here.
Defining Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Equity refers to parity in policy, process, and outcomes for historically and/or currently underrepresented and/or marginalized people and groups while accounting for diversity. It considers power, access, opportunities, treatment, impacts, and outcomes, in four main areas:
- Representational equity: the proportional participation at all levels of an institution;
- Resource equity: the distribution of resources in order to close equity gaps;
- Equity-mindedness: the demonstration of an awareness of, and willingness to, address equity issues;
- First-hand knowledge: the recognition of context experts through their lived/living experience and the necessity to adapt practices to impartially serve equity seeking groups.
Diversity. Differences in the lived experiences and perspectives of individuals, which may include ethnicity, colour, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, marital status, family status, physical disability, mental disability, neurodiversity, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, class, and/or socio-economic situations.
Inclusion is an active, intentional, and continuous collective process to address inequities in power and privilege, and to build a respectful and diverse community that ensures welcoming spaces and opportunities to flourish for all.
Accessibility “is about accounting for the diverse bodies and minds present in our communities and planning for this diversity.”1
Accessibility is the measure of inclusivity. It can be centred but is mostly never achieved “in full”. We all go through life with different experiences and when thinking about accessibility is thinking about who are included and excluded from the experience created. The ways something is planned, created, designed and communicated determines how inclusive it is to all members of the community.
On NTS’ history of commitment to change
Over the past seven years, Nantional Theater School has been working diligently to build a more inclusive and diverse school, ensconcing those principles in an institutional statement of values, and naming them as organizational priorities in our business plan, but now we must dig deeper and actualize anti-racist and decolonizing practices that will transform the whole school.
We recognize as well that in this work, we have not decentered whiteness and that our IBPOC community members have struggled and suffered. Going forward we will reposition the School as a manifestly anti-racist and anti-colonial organization, working with IBPOC expertise to make the changes that will be required to create an organization that not only refuses to participate in these systems but works actively to undo them, in our sector and beyond.
This overdue change will require us to make a bold shift and rethink our organization. As a national organization, we have the responsibility to listen, to understand, to amplify, to serve and to centre the voices that our institution has not made space for. Only then can we start to collectively imagine what the theatre of tomorrow can look like.
The Centre for Arts and Social Innovation is part of NTS’ plan to fight systemic-racism. We also must recognize that across Canada, various cultural and scientific organizations have already made progress in EDIA policies and we are and will be in constant conversation with all these important ecosystems of change.
Actions the CASI has done
- Foster Human Resource Practices through an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Lens
- Collaborating with theatre practitioners, researchers and workshop leaders from diverse backgrounds and experiences
- Reframing our call to participation to enable more flexibility and allowing more types of practices to occur
Actions to come for the CASI
- Reflection on accessibility and what role might the CASI has to play in gesturing toward more disability justice
- Building connections and increasing collaborations to build more bridges between theater and communities from all the land
- Modernizing process and facilitating conversations around wise, and sustainable practices in fighting systemic racism, fighting colonialism, and fighting ableism
[1] Angela Frederick, University of Texas-El Paso and Laura Mauldin, University of Connecticut