IDEA Progress Report 2023

Arts of Life continues our commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. We have much to share about the work we’ve been doing over the past year. We have focused on continued education, partnerships with IDEA specialists; internal audits, analysis, and improvements; and alignment with our partners.    

• EDUCATION: Arts of Life was proud to continue our participation in Enrich Chicago’s Anti-Racist Cohort while also joining IFF’s inaugural Arts and Culture Fund’s DEI Collective. Through that collective, representatives of the board and staff attended Restart Consulting’s immersive workshop series designed to help organizations better understand and explore how we can incorporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into our operations. Finally, we engaged Upgrade Accessibility’s Mary Fashik to provide two professional development opportunities for staff and artists focusing on ableism and disability history & justice.  

• AUDIT & ANALYSIS: Because Arts of Life has valued inclusivity and equity since our founding,  we know that further leaning into these principles of our culture is how we drive diversity and accessibility improvements. To that end, our committee updated its acronym from DEIA to IDEA. We spent much of this year analyzing our systems to improve our culture and practices. We surveyed our artists, staff, and board on key demographics to better understand where we are currently to influence our upcoming strategic plan goals.  

• IMPROVEMENTS: Disability advocates are increasingly endorsing the shift from person-first to identity-first language as a form of empowerment and an expression of positive social identity. We wanted to support our artists’ views and continued our work with Upgrade Accessibility to develop and implement a series of conversations and surveys around identity. Through that process, we learned that many Arts of Life community members, including our artists, prefer person-first language. To honor each artist’s preference, we will add their preferred language to their individual artist page. In addition, we have made improvements to our website, including updating how we talk about disability, adding our land acknowledgment, and continuing to add accessibility functions.  

• ALIGNMENT: We have begun to take action and put into practice what we have learned from the work mentioned above. Regarding our hiring practices, we’ve updated our job descriptions; become more transparent about our wages and benefits and hired a human resources consultant specializing in IDEA. We also have made IDEA values front and center with our partnerships including exhibitions, vendors, and more. We have begun to align our partnerships with people and companies that share our values and improve the accessibility of our audience experience. Work will always be done in this area, and we know we are building the best framework to support our values.  Finally, our current strategic plan comes to an end in June 2023. As we begin to develop a planning process, we look to bolster our IDEA work by using SMARTIE goals that promote inclusion and equity throughout our next strategic plan. 

We’d like to thank our community for its ongoing support and continued advocacy.  If you have any questions or want to talk to us directly about our IDEA work, please contact me.

Denise Fisher
Executive Director, Arts of Life