To our beloved community —

I’m delighted to share with you two important steps forward for The Center at West Park as we strive to make our organization more just, diverse, equitable, and inclusive. 

New Curators

This fall, we are presenting PARDON THE INTERRUPTION, a new performance series curated by Debra Ann Byrd, Melanie Greene, and Elliot Reed. It is an honor to have these three stellar Black artists serving as Guest Curators for our fall season. They have chosen a slate of five rising artists working in theater, dance, music, and interdisciplinary performance to develop and share new works in our Sanctuary Space this fall.

I believe this season showcases the remarkable diversity of performing artists in New York City and the resilience of our community in the face of the pandemic’s devastating impact. The work of our artists and curators may have been interrupted, but it’s coming back this fall with strength, with beauty, and without apology. 

You can learn more about the PARDON THE INTERRUPTION artists and curators here. 

We have also expanded the curatorial team for Object Movement, our puppetry residency and festival. Marcella Murray, an Obie-award winning theater artist, playwright, performer, collaborator, and puppeteer. She performed in the 2019 Object Movement Puppetry Festival with Maria Camia’s piece “New Mony!” and we’re delighted to have her return to the program as a curator. You can learn more about Marcella and her work here. 

New Hiring Policies

At the recommendation of our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force, the Center’s board of directors have approved the following policies for hiring all staff positions: 

• We will use inclusive job descriptions that do not require a specific education level, years of experience, or prior job title; and that do not use gender- or culturally-specific language. 

• We will engage in robust and inclusive outreach efforts to recruit applicant pools as diverse as New York City. This will include sharing job opportunities with numerous organizations that serve the diverse populations of the city, including BIPOC communities, LGBTQ communities, and differently abled communities. 

• We will aim to have each job candidate reviewed by multiple staff and/or board members of different backgrounds. Whenever possible, hiring committees will include at least one person of color and at least one female or nonbinary person. 

• Each round of an applicant review process shall make best efforts to include a diverse pool of candidates, including BIPOC candidates. 

• Candidates will be evaluated using a standard rubric. This rubric will include the value of bringing any under-represented perspective to our team. 

• We will provide fair and equitable compensation and seek to provide, at minimum, a living wage for the New York City metro area. Salary and benefits will be clearly stated in the job posting.

We intend that these policies will contribute to the Center at West Park becoming a more equitable employer, a more attractive organization for BIPOC workers, and a better working environment for everyone. 

We are currently hiring multiple new positions, including a Facilities Manager and Development Manager. You can learn more about job opportunities with CWP here. 

Thank you for your attention and for keeping us accountable for doing the work. We know there is still much more to do to build a just and equitable future. Onward!

Gratefully, 

The Center at West Park

To our beloved community —

This past Thursday marked an important moment for our country when Juneteenth was officially established as a National Federal Holiday and we hope you have been able to take time to commemorate the day and reflect on it's significance.

One year ago we laid out our commitment to begin to more deeply understand and fulfill our mission to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community through the arts; to undo our culture of white fragility and false supremacy; and to contribute to a truly antiracist society where there is never any doubt that Black Lives Matter.

Throughout the past twelve months so much has changed for us as a society, as a culture, as a community; and while progress has been made, we must recognize the work that still needs to be done.

As we prepare for our upcoming Fall Season featuring a diverse group of new artists we are also taking the necessary time to reflect on the commitments we made. Prior to announcing the productions premiering this Fall, we will send out an update on what we have done during these past twelve months to follow through on our commitments and how we will continue to do our part to work towards change.

On behalf of the Staff and Board of The Center at West Park, we hope you are all doing well and staying safe. We encourage you to join us in our communal reflection on the great beauty and power in diversity, and how we can all continue to educate and build together.

In Gratitude,
The Center at West Park

To our beloved community—

Six months ago, we wrote to you about our commitment to begin a process of getting in right relationship with ourselves, our community, and our values. We saw the hard truths that we are not yet the anti-racist organization we want to be, and that we have a lot of work—unceasing work—to do in order to get there. Now I’d like to share with you the work we’ve done so far and the work we plan to do in the first half of 2021.

Led by our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force of seven board and staff members, we are now in the mid-point of a yearlong, four-part process of Reflection, Detection, New Action, and Evaluation. This framework comes from Melody Capote, Executive Director of Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI), as part of CCCADI’s Anti-Racism Training Institute. After a period of Reflection over the summer and Detection in the fall, we are looking forward to a time of New Action in the new year.

In the DEI Task Force’s first meeting, we identified five areas of activation for anti-racist action within our organization:

1. Board 

2. Staff

3. Artists & Programs

4. Audience, Donor, & Community Engagement

5. Policies & Practices

For each of these areas, we have now identified specific goals for growth and specific action steps to take in the first half of 2021. Some of these goals are achievable in the next six months. Others may take years of strategic planning, investment, and action. All of them are necessary, doable, and possible to advance significantly in the coming months. I’m pleased to report that our board enthusiastically endorsed each of these goals and action steps at our meeting this past week. Please see below for the full Spring 2021 New Action Plan.

The past six months have been a period of reflection and detection not only for the Center as an organization I co-lead, but for me as an artist, an arts administrator, and a White man raised and indoctrinated in our systemically racist society. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity for learning and growth created by the activism and emotional and intellectual labor of so many Black folks, Indigenous folks, and People of Color — and some White folks too. The wisdom and teachings of Nicole Brewer, Melody Capote, José Rivera, Winona La Duke, Derrick McQueen, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and all the student activists of the Brooklyn College Theater Department have been especially influential for me during this time. This work would not have been possible without them.

The work continues. Now the work begins.

Wishing you all safe & happy holidays, and a new year of healing, growth, and liberation,

Zachary Tomlinson
Artistic Director
The Center at West Park

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Spring 2021 New Action Plan

BOARD 

• Goal: Our board members will be informed about and actively engaged in dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy. 

  • Action: 

    • Step 1: Board members will engage in an anti-racism self-education activity, such as reading a book, watching a film, listening to a podcast, or attending a workshop in the first quarter of 2021. We will provide a list of recommended resources centering BIPOC voices for self-education, and the DEI Task Force will sponsor a conversation where board members can share what they learned with each other. 

    • Step 2: We will engage a professional facilitator to lead an anti-racism training designed for boards of nonprofits and arts & culture organizations in the second quarter of 2021. 

• Goal: Our board will be representative of our community of service: the diverse artists, audiences, and cultural communities of New York City. 

  • Action: The DEI Task Force will work with the Board Nominating Committee to make a plan for board cultivation that centers NYC communities and backgrounds that are under-represented on our board. 

STAFF

• Goal: Our staff members will be informed about and actively engaged in dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy. 

  • Action: 

    • Step 1: Staff members will continue self-education activities such as reading books, watching films, listening to podcasts, and attending anti-racism workshops on a regular basis. 

    • Step 2: Staff members will attend an annual anti-racism training designed specifically for arts & culture workers in the first half of 2021. 

• Goal: Our staff will be representative of our community of service: the diverse artists, audiences, and cultural communities of New York City

  • Action: The DEI Task Force will draft a hiring policy to ensure that applicant pools for new staff hires are diverse and inclusive. 

ARTISTS & PROGRAMS

• Goal: Our Resident Artists will reflect the racial, economic, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religious, and immigration status diversity of New York City. 

  • Action: We will begin a pilot program of paid Guest Curatorships for artists of diverse and under-represented backgrounds to redesign and curate our Fall 2021 season of performing artist residencies.

AUDIENCE, DONOR, & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

• Goal: Our audiences and supporters will reflect the racial, economic, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religious, and immigration status diversity of New York City. 

  • Action: We will institute a practice of surveying and connecting individually with our audiences and donors to deepen our understanding of their backgrounds and identify underrepresented communities. 

• Goal: We will build equitable partnerships with BIPOC-led and BIPOC-focused organizations in the arts and culture sector of the New York City area and beyond. 

  • Action: We will begin a program of outreach to organizations in our neighborhood and circles of community to explore potential partnerships. We hope to meet with at least three new organizations in the first three months of 2021. 

POLICIES & PRACTICES

• Goal: We will acknowledge the history of the land where we are privileged to be and honor the legacy of those who came before us and called this place home, including the Munsee Lenape, the free Black and immigrant community of Seneca Village, and the LGBTQ+ and allied activists like the More Light Presbyterians and God’s Love We Deliver. 

  • Action: We will write a land acknowledgement that will be shared as part of all our public programs going forward. This will be a living document that will evolve as we deepen our understanding, relationships, and commitments. 

• Goal: We will continually work toward being a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, anti-racist, and accessible organization. 

  • Action: We will provide updates to our community and the public about our progress on at least a quarterly basis, and we will produce a report for June 19, 2021 with a reflection on the year’s process, what we learned, what we struggled with, and where we go from here. 

To our beloved community—

As we reflect this week on all the challenges we have overcome in the past year, and all the people who have helped us along the way, we see so much to be thankful for.

We are thankful for our three resident companies, Noche Flamenca, On Site Opera, and the Russian Arts Theater & Studio, who are the foundation of our artistic community and have helped us keep our doors open through thick and thin.

We are thankful to our donors, whose gifts of all sizes sustain us and remind us that the work we do matters to so many people.

We are thankful for our 2020 Resident Artists, who used all their creative ingenuity to find new ways of bringing vibrant and experimental theater, dance, and musical performances to socially distant and virtual audiences during this pandemic.

We are thankful to our board members, the backbone of our organization, who made generous gifts of their time, expertise, and financial resources to help us weather the darkest days of the pandemic in New York.

We are thankful for our staff, who have faced extraordinary obstacles and unexpected challenges this year but remained dedicated to the urgent work of making the Center a thriving — and safe! — hub for arts and culture in our community.

We are thankful for every single audience member for every single performance this year, both in-person and online. You are the reason we make our work, and the gift of your time and attention in this overwhelming and stressful year is especially precious.

We are also grateful for our home, the historic West Park Presbyterian Church, which was built on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1889. Today, we remember that this neighborhood was once home to Seneca Village, a free and predominantly black community with its own churches, schools, and thriving civic life. In the 1850s, New York City officials destroyed this neighborhood and displaced the residents to make room for the construction of Central Park and, by extension, many of the buildings in the west 80s.

Before Seneca Village, this neighborhood and all of Manhattan was part of the traditional homeland of the Lenape people. Like indigenous nations all across our country, the Lenape were pushed out of their homeland by European settlers. Today, the Lenape and members of hundreds of other indigenous sovereign nations continue to live here in New York City. Their struggle for justice and recognition of their rights continues.

The Indigenous Solidarity Network has created a Rethinking Thanksgiving Toolkit that offers resources for examining the myths and uncovering the historical truths about this holiday and the origins of our country. This Thanksgiving, we invite you to join us in learning more about our complicated national heritage and the often unspoken indigenous history of the land where we are privileged to live, work, struggle, and celebrate together.

If you are moved to make a financial contribution to address the legacy of European settlers’ theft and violence toward Native Peoples in the New York City area, we invite you to join us in making a gift to the Manna-hatta Fund, which supports the American Indian Community House, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization serving the health, social service, and cultural needs of Native Americans residing in New York City.

As we move forward in this time of tremendous challenge for artists and arts organizations, we are grateful for the opportunity to re-examine our history and how we got to where we are today. We are called to use our voices as artists and patrons of the arts to call out injustice, to call in our families, friends, and neighbors, and to transform the systems and structures of our society to make our world more just and more free.

In Gratitude,

Scott, Zach, Natasha, and Dane
The Center at West Park

To our beloved community:

On June 19, we made a commitment to begin the work of uprooting systemic racism in our community, our organization, and ourselves. Now, we want to update you on our progress. 

Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force, which includes our three core staff members and a diverse group of board members, met for the third time last week. In our first meeting, we identified five areas for anti-racist action in our organization: Board Membership; Staffing; Programs & Partnerships; Policies & Practices; and Audience, Donor, & Community Engagement. To better understand the problems in these areas that exist throughout the performing arts field, we devoted our second and third meetings to reviewing the BIPOC Demands for White American Theater that followed the “We See You White American Theater” open letter. We affirm the validity of these demands and see them as a powerful starting place for drafting our own slate of anti-racist policies and actions. We also acknowledge that there is much more we can do that is specific to our organization and our intersecting communities. Our goal is to present a first round of anti-racist policies and actions inspired by the “We See You” demands for review at our September board meeting, and to enact them by the end of the year. 

We are grateful to have participated this summer in the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) Anti-Racism Training Institute, a series of three webinars providing methodology for examining and undoing racism in participants’ organizations and in ourselves as cultural workers. As part of CCCADI’s #ArtsGoBlack campaign, we pledged to “embark on a one-month introspective period to take concrete steps that create change within [our] institution’s internal structures to address racial and social injustice.” We are humbled to do this work in the company of exemplary leaders from New York’s arts and culture sector and to benefit from so much wisdom and support from BIPOC cultural leaders like CCCADI Executive Director Melody Capote and the institute’s facilitator, José Rivera.  

In an email about the Anti-Racism Training Institute, Melody Capote identified a cycle of four phases for the work we are undertaking: Reflection, Detection, New Action, and Evaluation. Applying this cycle to our organization, we see ourselves in an annual process that began in June. The Center at West Park has been deep in a period of reflection this summer, and we are now transitioning to detecting racism in our power structures, operations, and organizational culture. This fall, we aim to begin a period of new action that will continue through the spring, and we will complete the cycle with a formal evaluation that will deliver a clear-eyed report of our progress and challenges by next Juneteenth. 

Thank you for your engagement in this critical work with us. Please look for more updates from us as we move forward and feel free to reach out to me for further dialogue on the pursuit of anti-racism in our communities. 

Gratefully, 

Zachary Tomlinson
Artistic Director
The Center at West Park

To our community: 

This is a commitment to begin. 

For the past three months, the staff and board of the Center at West Park have been working to preserve our organization and protect the community of artists we serve through the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the last few weeks, we have awakened to a new understanding of a deeper crisis, one that has been over four hundred years in the making: the crisis of systemic racism in our society. 

We are outraged and we are heartbroken by the murders of Rayshard Brooks, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more Black and Brown people by White police officers and vigilantes. We know their deaths are part of a long tradition of racist violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the United States stretching back through centuries of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, exclusion, internment, exploitation, mass incarceration, and systemic racism, and that this continuing violence and its perpetual threat cause immeasurable harm to BIPOC communities every day. 

On June 2, Black women leaders in the entertainment industry called for #BlackOutTuesday. They said #TheShowMustBePaused “to intentionally disrupt the work week” and “take a beat for an honest, reflective, and productive conversation about what actions we need to collectively take to support the Black community.” We heard the call and, like many predominantly white performing arts organizations, wrote a statement of solidarity to share with you all. But we realized that our statement was inauthentic. We were not prepared to pause, we did not take the time needed for the conversation that the day called for, and we did not have the record of action and advocacy to call ourselves allies. We began to realize why the call for pause and reflection was so urgent. That evening, we had a conversation with artists in the Object Movement puppetry program about undoing racism in our communities and in ourselves. 

On June 8, three hundred BIPOC theater makers posted a call to action, “We See You, White American Theater.” If you have not read the letter, we strongly urge you to pause and do so now. We read it and recognized ourselves and our actions. The Center at West Park is a predominantly White institution with a predominantly White staff and board, serving predominantly White artists and audiences, located in one of the Whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods in New York City. We were called to overcome our white fragility, our resistance to accepting responsibility for our own part in systemic racism, and to examine how our white privilege has shaped the Center and its programs. This message was reinforced by the powerful Broadway for Black Lives Matter Again forum June 10-12. 

The Center was founded to stand at the nexus of art and activism, of beauty and justice. Our mission is “to build a more inclusive community” through the arts. This ethos inspires our artist residency program, which has presented works centering the voices of BIPOC artists like Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom by Linda Blackmon Lowry, Black Panther Women by Jacqueline Wade, and the Open Choir’s Will Be Heard. However, we recognize that we have not yet lived up to the promise of our mission. In focusing on our own struggle for survival, we have sometimes forgotten that our survival is bound up in the survival of all, that we cannot thrive until all are thriving. We neglected to put the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the center of our work, which led to these core values being pushed to the margins. This has resulted in racially inequitable outcomes in our board membership, staff recruitment, artist residencies, and audience engagement. We wanted to build a new, equitable home for the arts and we didn’t get it right. We are committed to doing better. 

First, we must declare that Black Lives Matter and they have always mattered. Black lives mattered in 1619 and in 1865 and right now and forever. We must and will be more intentional in showing that Black Lives Matter in every facet of our work going forward. 

This is our commitment to begin: We will engage in deeper listening, learning, and self-examination to better understand our own privileges, biases, and blind spots. We will organize conversations, workshops, and strategies to explore and define our role in undoing systemic racism in our organization, our community, and our society. We will launch programs that center BIPOC voices, policies that ensure that more BIPOC hold power in every circle of our organization, and partnerships that expand, diversify, and strengthen our community. All these steps and more are needed to begin to more deeply understand and fulfill our mission to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community through the arts, to undo our culture of white fragility and false supremacy, and to contribute to a truly antiracist society where there is never any doubt that Black Lives Matter. 

We do not yet know what all these steps will look like. Right now, we are holding a series of internal conversations to better understand where we are, where we need to go, and what next steps to take. We are forming a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force with members of our staff, board, and artistic community to guide this process going forward. Please look for more announcements and commitments to specific action from us soon. 

This will be a perpetual process of growth, healing, and accountability. Joyfully, it is also a process of liberation. Today is Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This day reminds us of our shameful history, and that the wounds of this history are still fresh, but it also reminds us that great change is possible and imperative. Accepting our role in making change is not a burden, it liberates us from the weight of supporting systems that oppress us all. We must remember that justice is intersectional. The work of antiracism intersects with the work of LGBTQ rights, of gender equality, of accessibility, of workers' rights, of immigrant rights, of the rights of religious minorities, and of economic justice. This is the struggle for our collective liberation, and we are humbled and grateful by this opportunity to begin again. 

In Gratitude, 

The Center at West Park

Scott Pyne
Executive Director

Zachary Tomlinson
Artistic Director

Marian M. Warden
President of the Board

If you are looking for steps you can take right now, we are inspired by the Movement for Black Lives, Communities United for Police Reform, New York Budget Justice, and Broadway for Black Lives Matter.