At Snow City Arts, we strive to be accountable to African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA) identified people. We hear the call to rise up in the wake of the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and many others. We honor and hear the call to lift up and protect Black lives right now. 
  • We continue our individual and collective learning to develop anti-racist curriculum. We do this by seeing, listening to, and integrating the work of Black artists and creators, and centering the narratives their work present to us and to our students. We commit to speaking directly to the conditions of oppression and resistance that are necessary to understand these realities. As a mostly white teaching staff, we commit to partnering closely in this ongoing learning by checking each other’s work, and by first and foremost trusting the perspectives and judgment of our colleagues of color.
  • We continue to check ourselves against the frameworks of white supremacy culture, identifying racist manifestations of thought, pedagogy, and organizational governance. As a majority white staff, Governing and Auxiliary Boards, we commit to consistently evaluating our policies, our processes, and our behavior, and commit to leaning into the values of transforming our institution to be anti-racist. Snow City Arts continues its efforts to recruit staff, partners, and board members who reflect the diversity of the children and families we serve, which in turn allows for richer and more diverse thought, broadened reach, and increased innovation. In order to create a path to accountability, we commit to the transforming values of collaboration and cooperation, transparency in our operations and our communications, and sharing power within and around our organization’s structure.
  • We continue our learning about what it means to authentically support our ALAANA staff, students, board members, and partners who experience harm inflicted daily by a culture rooted in white supremacy. We do this by deepening our relationships, reaching out further, and more boldly to each other and to all our stakeholders and community members. We engage with our colleagues at Enrich Chicago and Crossroads AntiRacism Organizing and Training as we create and make use of spaces where this harm can be addressed in a community-wide setting, and where we can build on the collective wisdom of our peers and elders in seeking justice and ending racism.
We are: 
  • Learning to listen to ALAANA identified individuals
  • Learning what it means to be accountable to ALAANA identified individuals
  • Amending our professional practices
  • Turning inward for deeper reflection on what it means to be a predominantly white staff doing this work 
We implore you, our friends and community, to take action alongside us: 
  • Lift up Black voices and center the experiences of Black people
  • Learn and embrace anti-racist policies and practices that dismantle anti-Black oppression
  • Engage with children and young people about race, and listen to them
~ Snow City Arts
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