 of the Women's Leadership Project from your teaching director, Macy T, and if you haven't, how many people have never been in this space? So this is the strand. This is our amazing new performance venue. It was a porn theater. We are not very complicated neighborhood, and many, many people helped to resurrect it as this big red cloud nose of space. It has this gorgeous space. It has an amazing flexible space upstairs. It has a great lobby. It has a great lobby back. You're going to be meeting in some corner of this building at some point during the course of the day. So I would be remiss because I always have to start this way to thank the woman who actually made this building happen. It's our board chair, Nancy Livingston, and she's here somewhere. It doesn't get better than Nancy. So we're here today to convene, to converse how you move the dial about what we trust in leadership. The challenge you can for us in the theater in the nonprofit world in America is that unlike other industries like, I don't know, academia or medicine or the law where you are peer reviewed as you move along your career path, for the leadership jobs in these theaters, executive director or artistic director leadership jobs, those jobs are chosen by a board of trustees who are civilians and they're not in our industry for the most part. And that's a very complicated, interesting challenge. So it's a big question to say, how are these people from all over the country who are entrusted with our theaters in making those leadership decisions? And how can we help open that pool out and change the image of who is trusted with leadership in our field? It also has to do with who's doing the searches and how do search firms think about how to look for and calibrate competency and skill set in our industry. So there are lots and lots of questions that came up in the survey and out of those we teased out a series of aggregate areas that we're going to break out and discuss this afternoon. So the course of the day is this. Subramanianica from Wellesley are going to present their research which is completely fascinating and don't get dispirited because there's light at the end of the tunnel and action to be taken. Then this amazing group of women is going to have just a brief response in each of their own areas to what they've heard. We'll open this up to you all to share thoughts, questions that you hope for for the day or responses you have. Then we get to eat lunch. And then we're going to break into groups to talk about, to try and tease out areas, mentorship, skills building, child care work balance, board advocacy, visioning leadership in different ways to share thoughts. And what I hope is for these afternoon sessions is if you're an expert in one of these areas, bring your best practices, bring what you know, share with us links that we can go to to learn more, bring your best questions. And out of this we're going to collect an email list. We're not assuming you all want to opt in unless you do because we don't want to violate your privacy and just take your email. But if you want to stay part of this dialogue, it starts this morning with HowlRound. We're blessing you from how far is their live streaming message. It's all a real gift. They've been amazingly supportive of this and they're live streaming this session all morning. So do those of you watching from other places. We hope you will also join and be part of the conversation. And then we will, you notice I hope at the end of the day, even though it is a room full of genius women who could solve anything. We're not going to solve all of this today. But what I'm hoping, what we're all hoping is that enough specific sparks have been lit that people will take corners of this that matter to them, stay in their aggregate and run with it. We are sophisticated enough as business people, theater makers, artists, board members, collaborators to figure out how to do that, how to move the dial on the things that we most care about. So we've all been to a lot of conferences where there's great talk and events today. So our conversation has to not end today as to keep going in very specific tangible ways. There are many outlets to help make this happen. Theater has great service organizations around the country. There are lots of people here from the areas outside the theater that can help us learn best practices in their field. So that's sort of the goal of today. And I just want to say about our team. This conference, this convening, happened because of three women at ACT. Bethany Herron, Rose Ozer, some of my day jobs. They raised money for ACT. They worked at ACT. They produced ACT. And they took this on as young women leaders and said, this conference matters to me and we're going to make it happen. I can't even tell you, hundreds and hundreds of hours over the whole last year to make this happen. So when you see them, thank them because they really carried this journey forward. And the person who's the spark plug behind it all is ACT's associate director, Michelle White. To be here today. So I just want to know how do y'all feel today? If we can make it in the stands today on one, two, three. Thank you so much for doing this with us. We are here today to dial up questions and bold strategies for moving conversation deeper and further around women and men of color of leadership in the American theater. Give a round of applause for that. We are here at this point today. Art is a reflection of life. We exist in a country that right now is deciding between this very question politically. Revisioning what a leader looks like. It has been proven that women are leaders, that women have the skills. It has also been proven that opportunities for women and people of color in leadership positions in these larger budget theaters are not plaintiffs. How do we shift that? I'm sure we are asking the same questions that pioneers Zelda rest in peace, Barbara Antier rest in peace, Ellen rest in peace and for that Carol rest in peace did as well as they crafted spaces at the beginnings of the regional theater non-profit movement. For let us not forget the women that were the leaders of the regional theater movement. Let's clap it up for them. Look at what leadership is. Without a new question we cannot create a new space. So today I hope that we all ask a question we've never asked before. I hope that we cover back when our thoughts in a beautiful way. I hope that we are open to a new way of thinking today that we can envision our field five and ten and fifteen years later different than it is now. Do you think we can do it? So before we move to our rock stars of the hour, I just want you to take a moment and to think within yourself. Think about a woman that influenced you. Think about a woman in your life that's special, that you feel helped you to get to this space. Just take a moment. Remember that person. And when I say one, two, three, scream that person's name out into space and bring them here. You ready? You might even want to draw your arms up. Do something that reminds you of them. Ready? Two, three. By the people we interviewed and some of you are in this room and you may recognize your own words, it's our privilege to know who you are, but we will, as we promised, never share who said what. I'm delighted to be opening this research panel to share with you what we learned from you. And I really mean that very seriously because we learned as researchers in the field of women's leadership, we came to this with our own language and had to learn theater speak. We didn't know the difference between what a producer does and what is a production director's job, you know, in English, but those two words sound so much alike. But we have to learn. And we have many wonderful teachers. Some of you are in this room. Thank you for being patient with us. Some of you couldn't be here and said break a leg. Passed into the English language so we all understand. Okay, in our program and in the notes for our research summary, we're going to thank a number of people who made this work possible. And that includes not only the people who thought it would be a good idea to do the work, Carrie and Ellen, but their boards that supported the board members that supported this as a good idea, including Nancy who's sitting here, who was extremely helpful. And one of the Wellesley Center's four women's board members at the time, Alex Sanger, had the wisdom to say, consider applying to the Tolman Foundation. They might be interested in supporting this work. And we did. And they were very generous, as was the Valentine Foundation. And then our home institution Wellesley Center's four women also pitched in with money for dissemination, which we were very grateful for. And then there were individuals who donated money out of their pockets. And some of you are here. Thank you. Thank you for believing that this is an important thing to do and support. I will now go on to talk about what we set out to do. There are so few women in leadership positions in the Lord Member of Theatres. So let's just stop right there. As social science researchers, when we study a topic, we need to know what we learn, who it will apply. It is always important from the point of view of making generalizations to have a sample that's well-defined. And the Lord Membership Theatres became our sample because it was easy to understand, well-known, and defined. And as Harry said, this is not about studying Lord. It's about studying individual theaters that were members of Lord. The scope was diversity, defined as gender, and race and ethnicity, which leaves out the full range of human potential. And in terms of gender, we worked with the gender binary, male-female, knowing full well that gender expression can take many, many forms and other forms of identification that influence a person's chances. Exposure to discrimination did not become a focus of this particular research because we needed to focus on a large enough group that we could do statistical analyses on. We left out physical ability. We left out sexual orientation. We left out immigration status. A whole lot of sexual orientation that I mentioned, that gender expression, we left out class, even though we couldn't ignore class when it was really well-mentioned, and you will see it in our words. This is what we focused on. Why are there so few women and what can be done about it? This slide that shows what leadership looked like in the 2013-2014 season in the sample of theaters we were studying. And during the silence I will give a definition of the word executive director, which was our shorthand for referring to the person who on a theater's mass head is listed at the top position of the administrative side. And in many theaters the word managing director is used. In other theaters there can be other words. Sometimes general managers are listed at the top. So that's just the shorthand. Our task had been to understand why women are not leading theaters. Our focus on finding only one woman of color in any leadership position on the artistic or the executive side said to us, we have to look at what's going on with race and ethnicity. So to the extent that our data allowed it, we will be presenting information about that as well. In another way of looking at it, this is what the field of leadership looks like. Others includes 43 women and six people of color. The one woman of color is counted twice. That's up to 48 instead of 49. People listed on the mass head of a theater immediately below leadership. That's what we call next in line. People refer to this as pathway. Many different words can be used. That this could be the solution to the problem. Look that in another way. That what the next in line, the potential solution looks like. Altogether we say that there is a clear unadulterated glass ceiling problem facing women in general. There are enough of them who can see the top but can't get through. For professionals of color, there is a glass ceiling problem. There are sufficient numbers of interested aspiring and well-qualified professionals of color in and outside of theater who can step in. But there's an additional problem with attracting and keeping professionals of color in the theater. We've arrived at these by doing a massive study. As Cary mentioned, we work rather slowly. We don't do things in just one season. But now we learn that putting together a season takes several years to do. We started out having conversations with about 30 people who are placed in the world of theater inside and outside of board about what goes on, what are the important issues, and our conversations with these wonderful, generous people continue throughout the years that we did this work. We next collected resumes, CDs, bios of every single leader in the Lord's system and people immediately will open and examined the prior paths that were shown in each of their resumes, how they got to where they are now at the time that we were doing the work. But 300 of these resumes were analyzed. Then conducted two surveys. Laura Penn, thank you very much, who just said, yes, of course, you can survey our membership. We sent out a survey to about 1500 members, director members of SDC. Some of you in this room answered our survey, thank you. And the response rate we received is higher than anything else we've seen. You get surveys, don't you, all the time. I do. I say thank you, bye-bye. And about 40% answered. They gave us an incredible trove of information. And we also did a survey. The operational side, TCG shared with us email addresses of people who were in executive positions and immediately below those of theaters of a million or more. So we felt that by going to the membership organizations, we could step outside of the Lord's system and look at the wider field of who is out there who could possibly tell us how one cracks the career toward leadership. And not that everybody is going to do that. There are reasons why. And if they had ever tried to get a leadership position, why? They think it didn't work. And we also asked the people who were leaders, why do you think you got selected? Give us some of the reasons that you felt were important. In the Lord's sample, there are theaters of different sizes, and we were alerted that size matters. In the selection cycle, I don't even know if you can say that. But we stratified the theaters in our sample into three different groups and interviewed leaders and people immediately below leadership in 24 of the theaters. And again, thank you for some of you who are in this room who gave us your time on the phone and were very generous. Of course, telephone interviews are not anonymous. We're talking to another human being. And one of our panelists yesterday asked me if people said, well, this is off the record. We didn't have anybody say, well, I'll tell you this, but you can't ever repeat it to anybody because we made a very solid promise of confidentiality. We said that we will never talk about who you are by name or the theater you work with or use any identifying information in our report. And in fact, sometimes we weren't sure if people could extrapolate and guess who might have said what. We went back to our 30 people who were guiding us all along. They said, can you tell who might have said this? I said, no. Okay, so people really confided in us and we strongly hope that they feel we respected their confidentiality and what they shared with us. So we interviewed about 100 people in reviews. That's why it took a long time. So these are the key themes that came out of all this massive information that we gathered. And INCO will come up and explain each one and what we found about each one of these topics. I'll turn it over to you. So after all that, I'm going to look at this data collection. We did a lot of reading and these are the findings that we would like to share with you. And if you could keep in the back of your mind as we dig through these, how each of these elements affect or can affect whether somebody, male, female, personal color or not, makes it to the top if that is what their aspiration is. So we're going to start with familiarity and trust. When we studied the career paths of the leaders in our sample, we found several trends that indicated how one group or another group was favored as they were considered for selection by a more or another theater. We're going to look at each side and women and we'll start on the men's side. As you saw in one of the slides before, because white men have been those leaders for many, many decades now, they have become the stereotype of what a leader looks like. So if you compare 68 versus 32%, that's a pretty big difference. So that image of what a leader is is pretty ingrained in our minds. That's a familiarity. It translates into trust. Who you trust can be a leader of your theater. And it seems to favor the men. This is how we learned about this. Here are a few quotes of how people talked about it. It's hard to imagine what you haven't seen. So if you don't see many women on the top, it's hard to imagine. And if you see white male leadership models in other areas, especially if you're a board member and you come from a corporate environment, that's what you are going to imagine. That's what is familiar to you. That's what you can trust. Or what you are comfortable with in the other quote. Secondly, we found that there was a trust in potential that was also favoring men. And let me show you what that looked like. We looked at a very small number of theaters. In fact, the theaters that had a budget of over 10 million. There are 23 of them. So we had an N, which is a group of people. That's why you call it in research. We get N of 23. And these 23 people were the E's. So the executive board, the board manager, the director, the top operational manager of those 23 very, very wealthy theaters. And as we, Sumer told you that we had the bios and resumes of these people, or we could look these things online, we looked at where these people had been in the past. And what we found was that a much larger slice of men who were leading these theaters came to these large budget theaters from theaters that have a score or from organizations that have a much smaller budget. So 35% of the boards of these 23 theaters had actually trusted a man who had not been at that scale to do okay at that scale. But only 9% of those boards had trusted a woman to come from a lower budget to their 10 plus million higher budget. That is a statistically significant difference. And with a number of only 23 theaters, that difference is very, very strong. So trusted potential is only from them. A third way that men have been privileged is by having a founding experience. More men have founding experience as leaders in the Lord on the artistic practices than women. And you probably all know founding a theater, you do everything. You do soup to nuts, right? That's what we say. You learn everything. Your skill set is the widest it could possibly be. That's an amazing, amazing skill. But among leaders in our Lord sample, that skill has currently only been recognized for men, for women that has not bumped them up to the top level. So that's how men are favored in the selection process for leadership in our sample. Let's look at the women's side. How are they favored in leadership? If a woman is an artistic, excuse me, an associate artistic director in our theater, she makes a much larger chance to be promoted to artistic director than a man did. That difference 40% versus 13% for men, that's, again, a statistically significant difference. So that's a powerful difference. So a woman, when she is very familiar, because she has held a position at the theater before, she makes a much larger chance to become the leader than the man does. So this is how we heard about that. That quote that you see up there is from a board member who was part of a search committee where a woman was promoted from associate artistic director to artistic director. And we saw that with other women in our sample. This is where I have to stop, though, with what favors women. This is the only way that women are favored in our sample, our favorite for leadership. Now, this was our sample. So this was all the regional samples in our theater. This is at how it works outside of the Mord theaters. So as Sunil mentioned, we did a survey with about 1,000 directors across the country. It's a very sizable number and we were very happy with them. Thank you if you're here in the room. And you took our survey. What we learned is on this slide, is that among the women in our sample who were at the point when they took our survey as an artistic director, when we asked them how did you get to this position, more than half of them said, I started this theater. I am the founder of this theater. More than half. That's again with the men. That difference is again statistically significant. So women do not get selected. They have to make their own leadership spot. Remember when we talked about founding a theater? And founding a theater has been helping them to get that second staff, how it's favoring them. Even though we have that many women founders, as we see here across the country, that founding experience has not been recognized yet as a really important wonderful skill set of women across the country to make it to an artistic position within our sample theaters. So here's our food for thought. If you're in a room, what can you do about this? Something's going on here. It's called implicit bias. We talk about this in every arena of our lives. If you are all familiar with that, how can you learn about implicit bias? You can choose surveys, anonymous surveys among all the employees of your theater and ask about it. And if it's anonymous, people will speak up, but then please learn about it. Keep it in mind. Another thing, we've been talking about doing things fast and doing things slowly. If you do things more slowly, you pause and reflect. You can think about your decisions. You can reflect on your decisions and make sure they don't reflect any stereotypes or any elements of familiarity why you took a particular decision. You can give everybody equal chances. It's very easy to say, but think about the Rooney Rule. I'm sure you're all familiar with that. In football, because there were so few general managers of color, well, pretty much all the players were people of color, they made it that they had to interview candidates of color. Think about that. You have to interview somebody you don't know yet as a person that you trust in that top spot. Do blind applications. The orchestra work, World of Lithus, were quite some success and they really, really changed. Something to think about is to come up with industry-wide betting criteria. It's not rocket science. There are things, there are competencies that leaders share with each other, make a list of them and make sure that you look at every applicant and compare them with that list. And please recognize founding experience. It seems to be something that women have. All right, we're going to our next topic. Work-life balance. I don't think I have to draw a picture to you in this room of what theater life looks like. You can tell me more about it than I even know, so there are a few things up there that we did write about. So I'm not going to go into detail. And we probably all do know that in this society, the burden of care, whether it's family or childcare, is still predominantly on women. So knowing this from our lives and our research, we had built some questions into our surveys. Was this a barrier for what happened? We won't be whole. Nobody actually checked out those life-balance issues on our surveys. There were like maybe five people who talked about it. Same in our interviews, nobody brought up their work-life balance struggles. They didn't talk about it. And it became a conundrum for us. What is going on? Because when we looked at blogs that you guys wrote on how well it works, it's there. You talked about it. And we're like, why are they not talking to us about it? Because of this. Because of this, we found that this is a taboo. There's silence about this topic. If there's silence about the topic, nobody can do something about it. We learn to not say anything. People do say about others. Well, they may not be interested in leadership because they have families. When we talked to our informants, some of you are in this room and say, yes, you can't talk about it. These are some quotes about that. We are trained in our field because you won't get the job. I see somebody nodding. The other quote is about somebody talking. They will not aspire for leadership because they have children. It's not about me. I don't have to deal with that. Food for thought. What can we do about it? Please talk about it. Not just for yourself, even if you're not dealing with it, it's going to level the playing field. This is the end result of all our conversations and level the playing field for ourselves, for our friends, family and our children and our future generations. We have to talk about it. Make policies, advertise those policies. Show that you are family friendly. There are models in other industries that we can adapt to the theater world. It's hard and costs a lot of money and somebody will talk about this later, but it should be possible. Start with objective criteria when you select. But once you do select, ask that person, what do you need? Ask everybody in your employees what do you need? Put it out there and also talk about it if you are the employee who talks about it with your leaders. Mentoring. I don't think I need to draw that picture either. Everybody we talked to said, talked about the mentors and how important they were for them on their path. I don't think this can be exaggerated or underestimated. A mentor is somebody who has some clout who will talk about you and raise your profile, connect you with others. When we talked to women and people of color, they often said, I want to find a mentor who is like me. Reflect on who can be their mentor. If the leadership looks a particular way but doesn't look like you, that might be a barrier for you to actually get the mentoring you need to make it to the top. So it can be a disadvantage. Here's how we've heard about this. Women looking for female mentors. People of color looking for other people of color who they can talk to about the struggles that they sometimes have. Whether it's about childcare, whether it's about racial tensions, whether it's about class issues, if going to school is hard for you, or if doing that other paid internship is going to be hard for you, who can you talk to, who looks like you, who has come from there. More particularly, and I'm going to rush through this a little bit, if you are a mentor in this room and if you are mentoring an artist or an executive, these are the particular skills or the areas of mentorship that people who are aspiring for leadership are looking for. In our final report, which will be out sometime this year, you will get many, many more details about why these particular things are important for people to learn. But you can see fundraising is there for everybody directing widely beyond what you look like. What we've heard sometimes from people of color was I'm asked to direct the playwright of color play, but I'm not asked to direct Chase Beer. I need to direct Chase Beer as well, or another class. So those are the particular skills that those aspiring leaders need. So here's a little bit more for thought. Please promote others. Please promote others with search words, with more members on your own or another theater. Talk about their strengths. Invite those aspiring leaders to be exposed to other departments in your theaters. Offensive can be very hard, because departments can be siloed. Take them to board meetings. Let them see what goes on there. Do that fundraising, involve them in that fundraising and talk about career development. Sometimes people told us it really is unclear to me what the career path looks like in this industry. So talk about it. I don't think I ever knew about any field where so many people talked about unpaid internship. It is absolutely stunning, but it speaks to your passion. So as you can see in those quotes, it's hard to afford a theater life. But if we want to move toward diversity, we're going to have to address the financial burden of career development for aspiring leaders. Graduate school is hard to attain sometimes. It's not cheap, although there are many, many supports for that. But it's not straightforward sometimes. So affordability is important. So very quickly, think about creating. And there are already wonderful training programs, but they need to be expanded. More people are interested, need that support. Masters programs are amazing. They don't just teach you skills, but they put you in contact with lots and lots and lots of people. So those are the elements that those training programs can pick up. And then you have to kind of start questioning that you're not getting paid for what you're doing. Please question that. I know it's not easy, and we all probably do it. But as an industry, we need to start addressing that. Let's pause here and let's read that quote. The worst thing any artistic, any artist of color could do right now would be take an artistic directorship at an institution that is not a good fit and fail. Because every failure, for one, is one that everyone pays for for ten years. That was a very, very powerful statement for us. So this is about culture fit. Right? This is about a predominant culture and a non-predominant culture trying to work together. When you try to get to that culture fit, you have to put yourself on the same level. It takes a lot of work. That's work that needs to be done prior to bringing a person into a situation where they could possibly fail before them. Because otherwise they will not be seen as holding that formal authority. So, both in the training give people formal authority even if they're not part of their dominant culture. Make them see and then your theater could be ready for the next step. Thank you. We'll take us into the future. The theater for tomorrow must address the issue of leadership. What should leadership in theaters look like? Is the model that we have right now the best way to prepare for tomorrow? There's new work coming out, say, from the Hewlett Foundation that says young people today are not so interested in a pyramid structure. They like shared leadership. They want to have a voice even if they haven't yet, according to the people who have been in the field a long time paid their boots yet. They have ideas. They might go, they did internships. They wouldn't understand. So, you want to hold on to the next generation of right idea people? We may be needing to think about leadership in a different way. And leadership is much more relational as it is practiced. And it needs to be recognized as an important competency how you relate to people not just your work not just your audience but to your staff and to your art. And all the research that I've done all the research that I have read says that women in this society have a lot more relational skills than men. We're sort of socialized that way. I don't think that there is a gene connected to some chromosome about relationships. But we're brought up to relate. And that needs to be recognized as an important competency. And this notion about entitlement people who have been in this drama for a number of years and expect others coming up through unpaid internships and low paying jobs working up their fields by their time learn, learn and then maybe speak. My children speak up what do they know? Well they know some things. They have some good ideas and I know that Kerry talks to her daughter and gets ideas from them. We may be shutting ourselves off from what works in the 21st century if we keep to this old time idea that with experience will come wisdom. There's some experience that's right out there and I see young faces in the crowd which makes me feel wonderful. Another issue for the future is to address board development and philanthropy. The current leaders in philanthropy came of age when art education was part of the educational system. It's not there now. Art is not part of the three Rs that the testing based educational system is focusing on. The next generation of philanthropists who will be filling these board seats don't really have an idea what makes an art organization survive and thrive. So going forward board development is going to be a very important topic. And after all audience development is where it's at and I give myself as an example of I'm one of the examples I have subscriptions in many theaters. My children don't even though I started taking them at a young age. Maybe too young I don't know. Well, I'm not the only one who failed. The audience to change. I will be soon not going to the theater anymore because I won't be alive that much longer. Who's going to replace me? And we need to think about the audience in a much more wide and wise way. And one of the wonderful things we heard in our interviews was that artists of color be they in next in line position or in leadership positions had done the most work in bringing in cultivating audiences that are much wider than the present crowd of subscribers and that's a talent that should not be overlooked. These are the topics that we leave you with as further questions and anything that we touch down you have ideas of how to improve what's going on in the world of theater. Please contact us. What we present today is a work in progress. Every time we talk in a public forum we look to get feedback and if you follow our work you will hear and see yourself incorporated into what we present. So it's a joint project. Let us know how we can improve what we put out today and we will work together to make it all better. Thank you so much. So I know we have a lot of responses and questions we have a few responses to give here. So I just want to give people in the audience just 30 seconds to look at the person next to you and talk just for a second about how you are feeling after hearing this research. One big question you have, a strategy that came up and and we're going to hear your thoughts big questions, responses and it's two mics right in the center here for you all. So we're going to start with Sima Suku who is the new Deputy Artistic Director at Arena State. Good morning everybody. Thank you so much for this research. It is powerful, potent and even as I sit here I've read the research several times and even as I sit here hearing and I find myself feeling pulled in two directions feeling both reflected and empowered but I also find I feel deeply sad about it as well. I've been asked to reflect on the research through the lens of mentorship and I think that's because I've been the beneficiary of some tremendously impactful mentorship opportunities. I've had many mentors some are sitting in the audience today but for the sake of this discussion I'll be speaking about two mentors, two mentorship opportunities that weren't just mentors but were sponsorships and these were places where my mentor opened the door didn't just mentor but sponsored me up and that was Sheldon Epps, Artistic Director at the Pasadena Playhouse with whom I had begun a what I call drive-by mentorship in 2011 where I'd meet with him once a quarter and he then hired me in 2014 as his Associate Artistic Director and then Molly Smith Artistic Director at Arena Stage with whom I had a formalized mentorship through the incredible TCG Leadership U grant opportunity and who recently hired me as Deputy Artistic Director at Arena Stage. So as I reflect on those two mentorship termed sponsorship opportunities a lot of times people ask me how did you get that job because in neither of these cases did I ask them for a job they called me up with the opportunity but that's because we had this robust mentorship in place so I've been trying to think about and dissect those mentorships and I've come up with sort of three commonalities of them that led to this sponsorship opportunity the first is timing that with both of these individuals when we met when we entered into a mentorship together they were ready in their careers to be tremendous mentors and to create space and then I was also ready to be mentored I had already founded a company and spent many years trying to prove, prove, prove myself I was ready to improve and the timing was right in both of those cases the second thing was mutuality in these mentorships and what I mean by that is while the mentorship may have started with mentor and mentee over time it shifted and we became peers and I'll maybe share one story through the leadership view opportunity at TCG well one of the questions that was on my mind that I told Molly was to lord or not to lord that was the question I had founded a theater company I was wondering do I want to stay at my theater company or do I want to shift to a lord underneath that question was do I have anything to offer a lord and would I feel could I survive in a lord structure so at my theater company I had founded we had created a couple of methodologies consensus organizing for theater which is an artistic methodology rooted in community organizing and audience development and the green theater choices toolkit which was about creating our theater industry so in my mentorship with Molly I said I wanted to test these out and see if they can live in a lord structure so she sponsored me into a meeting with Edgar the executive director we presented these ideas he said oh what a great idea they sponsored me into senior staff we presented these ideas they then sponsored me into their own departments which gave me the the space to be able to test out these ideas the conclusions we came to together wore that yes to lord I had something to offer a lord and I could find a way to navigate a complex organization though I was coming from a small organization I had founded so that's what I mean about mutuality I had something to offer in these mentorships that shifted the power dynamic the third commonality that I've identified is in these mentorships was vulnerability that with both these mentors I was able to be openly self-critical about my own work safely and I'll share one story in my drive my mentorships with Sheldon Epps I would drive up from San Diego once a quarter we'd have lunch and I'd talk about what was going on at Moa Lalo performing arts company he'd talk about what's going on at Pasadena Playhouse and these were very nice gatherings but I remember after about I think it might have been the third one he said he asked me how's it going and I said you know I just completed a production and it really didn't go as well as I would have liked it to go and he said why and I said well I was thinking about the reversal and I think maybe I micromanaged my lead actor I saw him sitting across from me in lunch shift from leaning back to leaning forward and he said okay let's talk more about that and we started dissecting this and all of a sudden we became two artists who are peers willing to be vulnerable with one another about our work and I felt that as a tremendous turning point in our relationship so as I reflect on the research through this lens of mentorship for me again these mentorships that then turned into sponsorships the commonalities were the right time mutuality and vulnerability safe vulnerability that's it thank you my mom calls me Stephanie so they explain a bit why I'm up here today I've been asked to respond to the research through the lens of intersectionality and the complexity of diversity intersectionality that holds that no singular experience of identity it sums up an entire person so when I look at the research I was really pleased to see that the researchers included this concept pretty fundamentally in the work that's being done in terms of gender parity can't be disassociated with other forms of multiple and simultaneous discrimination so the I helped to develop this project and do early fundraising for it and there was a consensus in the field that this issue of gender parity was not as important as other diversity issues at the moment which was very disheartening to me as I assure it is to everybody because I think gender parity movement and women's equality has been asked to step back so many times and I have faced personally where there have been certain types of minority positions that have been minority positions that have been put in a hierarchy of importance that I think is just not useful to anybody and doesn't promote genuine authentic inclusion and equity so what I take from this is that with all of these steps that we can make to improve the day-to-day circumstances that would make gender parity possible we also need to develop that with examination of what bias and unconscious bias is so in my particular perspective I'd be very privileged to have the career that I have to have been given opportunities that I have which is ultimately completely tied to my education my socioeconomic status and circumstances of my birth I acknowledge that but not all women look the same but I want to say womenhood is not a singular experience and to that also gender in the 21st century is a different complexity than it was in the 20th century so that I believe firmly that fight for feminism is not about preferencing one gender over another it's about eliminating discrimination based on gender and gender presentation it does not match so since identity is so complex and it can't all be tackled at once and diversity is equally complex we do have to take steps towards rectifying systematization of oppression and discrimination but I would challenge us all as an industry and as individuals to recognize that we all have unconscious biases unconscious biases and while we are putting systems in place to make the field more equitable that we understand and sort of examine why or how we can say I trust you even if you don't look like me I used to be afraid of numbers as a kid and when I came across statistical analyses and data reports I found that they could be complex and heavy but summaries and recommendations are what I would always be holding on to what excited me most about this report were the recommendations because I had been experiencing firsthand some things in motion with the inside of an institution like TCG but also seeing that there is clearly so much more work to be had I'm going to share two points from the study that were particularly resonant with me as I think about my own journey to this point one, familiarity and trust in potential what a theater leader needs to look like, white and male because white and male leaders have been the longstanding majority in top positions before TCG for many years I worked with a very small and nimble yet fierce arts service organization dedicated to strengthening Asian-American arts and cultural workers in New York City I received calls with folks who had brilliant Asian ideas Asian director for traditional performances as part of diversity day for a corporation made up primarily of white men not the small Asian arts group and I as an Asian woman was ready to deliver and that was where I was placed to be of use there are a lot of folks striving for diversity but are we asking the right questions and who are we asking and I think that this report really hits the nail on the head in many ways I had many questions back then and I definitely still do now particularly around intersectionality I see lots of women on stage and wonder where are the women of color on stage and how about women of color in leadership positions in the theater offstage on my personal path to leadership role ahead I learned that I had to be nimble with what I had when I didn't see myself in spaces I tried to create my own pathway to access and look to community I looked to folks who understood and were invested in making change beyond just diversity for the sake of looking like the next big thing or something that was cool we have so much respect for folks continuing to do the very important work on the grassroots level to serve the community this report really goes to show that there needs to be a balance in representation on a much larger scale and I quickly saw that this wasn't going to happen with me hoping and praying that folks were going to see me beyond just being an Asian American and a woman but that folks should be able to see me as those things and then saw two culture fit sounds kind of trendy but now what to do when someone is diversifying a larger institution or rather what systems are in place to really thoughtfully support diversifying leadership you know whether I like it or not I've been socialized one way or the other to read the male experience as this kind of universal experience something that we should hope to measure to when it and it gets really dangerous and the computer's culture gets so used to this climate so you know the culture fit point in the report was particularly interesting because yes it reminded me of the times I'd get calls almost randomly for Asian musicians quite out of context to plug into a corporation absent of diversity for this kind of quick plug and play version and my own questions about large scale institutions even like TCG I had heard about before being able to proudly call this place a true culture striving to work towards change I do want to share also that unlike many reports that I've reviewed in the Wellesley study it was very heartening though to see such thoughtful recommendations laid out but also knowing that this work has started already at so many different places and it's going to take so much time particularly on the section of what individual theaters and service organizations do I was really happy to see that you know there were so many things that TCG was hitting ranging from correcting instances of gender and racial bias, opening up conversations and contexts of different programs creating opportunities but that's just one institution when this report covers so many theaters so just to share on an institutional end some of the things that TCG is currently doing to hit things on the gender parity note a lot of our major decisions are focused around this grant making publications choosing speakers for conferences American theater and our continued research on gender parity at the intersection sections within our national conferences on gender parity and this is the key I think for TCG we have sessions like men for gender justice sessions you know I think it's important for women to support women but male allies are just as important in different cases another thing for TCG in particular through the work of the equity diversity inclusion institute is thinking beyond gender binary particularly in building analysis including trans and gender non conforming identities I think that's really key so to summarize I mean there's a lot of things going on in the works within the institution I wanted to share a little bit about my personal point of view and as a late stage millennial if you will have the privilege of being able to be in this room with folks from different unique journeys you know it's easy to feel at ease with a lot of groundbreaking milestones for women particularly in the media but I'm not satisfied and I don't think that we should be especially with and I just support so thanks again Kerry and Erin and Bethany and the team at Wellesley for this because it's definitely a start and there's going to be a lot of push back and hopefully hopefully we can you know pull from some of the findings here and work together as a community it's not about pointed fingers it's really about hey there's something going on here and it's 2016 and I in my 30s my early 30s and yes I'm still aspiring but I want to look towards the future and not just hope that things are going to change but work with folks to actually make a change thank you I'm Annie Kaufman I'm a freelance director and a board member of SDC I live in New York City and I agree that I also read the report over and over again by sitting in this room with all of you and hearing you guys sort of go through it live I sort of sent my you know I sent me a little bit reeling you guys brought up that sort of like shifting what I was going to talk about so this might be a little all over the place so I apologize for that well first of all I just want to say you know Zella's name has been brought up several times today and what's lovely about being in this room with all of you is I don't really know many of you so the story that I'm about to tell I've told a lot of people but not to you guys so I'm going to say this I'm a little bit late to the party about being outraged at the statistics women in the theater and one of the reasons that is is when I came when I graduated from UCSD they were directing and I returned to New York City and I had an interview with Zella I was supposed to I was interviewing for a job with MFA actors doing a Shaw keys and she took me through this interview and at one point she asked me so you know how's it going how's it going when you're back to graduate school and I was like no it's okay it's hard it's hard being a woman director and she just looked at me and she said what and I was like being a woman director she was like and I didn't get the job I did not get the job but I thought this would take away from me and that point was wow right I'm talking to this woman who's basically responsible for regional theater and the non-profit so she started doing what the fifties you know at the time when all sorts of things were against us and more you know I even translated Russian documents in the world war two so just a little bit here I am I'm from Phoenix Arizona I'm kind of saying this to her so anyway I thought okay this is a great lesson I'm going to put my head down and I'm going to do my work and I'm not going to talk about being a woman and hopefully recognition and jobs will come because of my good work and yeah I mean you know it worked it worked for a while and then I looked at my head you know through the grindstone a few years ago and looked around and thought like here I am still here I am in this position and because I had my nose in the grindstone for so long I didn't realize that you know everyone else is sort of a big a dance people are not my gender so and so I thought to myself right isn't this crazy that Zeldivit Chandler basically built the house right that we're all living in and we are not running it yeah I mean we are not actually and there are rooms that I'm not even allowed in too and there are rooms that I don't even know exist there are opportunities that I don't even know exist so so that was the sort of way that called to me anyway so I'm here sort of talking about I think alternative definitions of leadership because I for one I've had many conversations with the people up here and I don't want to be an artistic director of a theater at the moment it's frightening to me it feels claustrophobic to me and I you know to be sort of tied to to a theater I really love my freelance it's a hard life but I do I like my freedom and so I ask myself what is leadership then what does leadership look like then if it's not to be a leader of a theater and I've been pondering this for the past few years and I think a leader is someone who takes responsibility for a community for their betterment, for their well-being and for their cultivation that can mean many many things and around that time I joined the SDC board and with the amazing leadership of Laura Penn who we've already mentioned today that is an organization for directors and choreographers it's basically like a grassroots activist organization helping directors with visibility and diversity and promotion and I know it sounds crazy but directors in this country have a very different kind of recognition than they do in other countries this is a playwright's nation and it should be playwrights are incredibly important but I think that you know we are also artists in our own right so that is something that we are promoting and something that you guys are talking about in terms of leadership kind of mystery surrounding how does one become a leader in this field and I think that part of the issue in the theater is we're so in love with our own mystery we're so in love with protecting the rehearsal room and the magic that happens in the rehearsal room and no one is allowed in and so I think that's kind of extended to the practices of how we rise to leadership of what leadership means et cetera and so I think by being part of the SDC what I'm really interested in what SDC I think is interested in is sort of making transparent what it is that we do it's not a secret society that art that we are artists and that is I don't know special or whatever but that's not it's also not overused that term in a way that cuts us off from transparency and that goes with everything with identity and with diversity et cetera so I think that is the form of leadership that I am taking at this moment alright I'm a teacher of acting and also I'm Michelle Shea Fox Foundation grants a study connection between healing and acting for the purpose of knowing more than just falling into the power of what we do I wanted to know what was it energetically that could allow me as a performer as a performer to connect more deeply with the hearts of the audience because for me being an artist especially an artist of color had to do with people seeing each other in ways they could not see each other in 95 reality and hopefully dissolving some of the issues that separate us from the huge humanity that we're all a part of and I firmly believe in what we do as an amazing place to research what it means to be human and to tell the stories that we we live out of and creating meaning together we confront in the community as an audience the questions that face us about the phenomenon of being alive and within this construct it made me study many things and invited to many opportunities one of which was to work as a leadership presence coach in a five year program at Goddard Space Center at NASA for leadership development called leadership alchemy which put me in the cauldron of what it means to be a leader when of course I wasn't thinking of myself that way however what was at stake for the scientists and engineers there was being able to make such an impact that they could get lots of money to do things to save our planet and to explore space so there was a lot at stake and so I feel that the time that we're in right now there was a lot at stake for us as a theater community because in the future what theater is going to be is definitely not going to be like it was something else wants to come forth something else wants to be born and we're in the question of what that is we don't know what it is but one thing that definitely is not one of the door is inclusion for everybody and we don't know what that means and we do have to we live in as I've been contemplating all this in a a world duality meaning you know the protagonist and antagonist exist at the same time so somehow we have to make friends with what is in a way that doesn't drive us crazy so interesting culture that we talk about we forget that we made it up yes and at one time a couple people got together and said you know this is a problem here let's do X, Y, or Z somebody else agreed and then became a culture a family a tribe and eventually an institution that at one point was alive like all of Lord was an answer to problems then they became institutions which were buildings that got stuck in practices and ways of thinking etc and then it's a thing versus the people that are in it and so part of our issues I think is finding where the real responsibility or the cause of the problem is we can't find it because it's embedded in the networks of conversations we've been having both the recognized conversations and most importantly the web of deep emotional I don't know what garbage conversations we hold about each other what's going on I don't know what to do with so this is what I'm hoping will change for us during this research because to me we're at such an amazing place as human beings when we have the question of who are we beyond gender and who are we within gender in terms of for me I find I'm still trying to step into the power of being a woman all of it and let go of all about how dangerous it is to do that but and I believe that what's exciting about I'm going to call it the feminine versus feminine is the principle of femininity there is an aspect of the resistability that's in it that how that's packaged we can we can each explore in a way that I hope will soften the resistance that you inevitably will face anytime you're trying to do something different that antagonist is there in any sector anywhere that's what I recognize now but what we have is something that's so alive in theater that we have the potential through what we do on these little spaces to really cause something amazing to happen and that leadership can happen from any place because anybody can be called at some point to be to take center stage and the question is what are you going to do with it what are you going to do with it I want these words in my mouth and you need to know what I am what are you seeing or what are you seeing I went to strips college after the media project and blown up and I was asked to teach a class and artists social activism and I'm in the professor's house where they house visiting professors and I come down to breakfast and there's a gentleman sitting there and he says to me wow brown belt I said that's too bad was my name too and my good friend a classic drag queen has gone on she said girl don't wear it don't let that dress wear you wear the dress and these are people that have taken me along the way I had to make my own way to theater to give my life to myself health theater I thank everyone I thank everybody for having me here in Shelling I adore you I'm so glad to be a part of this but I am a a high trained drifter I do my own thing I got hired by the counseling arts council to go into the jails and teach aerobics because again they wanted a color girl to dance but I went into the jails and I was amazed that there was so many black and brown women in jail right down to one young lady said Miss Jones Miss Jones you remember me Miss Jones and it was one of my daughter's friends from middle school and my daughter and I were wondering we both were happy and I said what are you doing here she said you know how it is I said no I don't know how it is I said the story is funny a white woman who was back in jail fabulous just a fabulous body fierce little woman and she proceeds to tell us about the trail and she says you know my girlfriend promised that she'd wait for me and I would do the five years for dealing dope and then we had money and we would hang out together we would be together but I came home and we would be up with boys from high school I went to this abandoned Victorian in the hate she says it never showed up upstairs in this house that was being renovated and they decided they stood poker and she said I knew I was it and they were all looking at me with wolves eyes and she said I thought okay I'm gonna take off my pants but I'm gonna leave my boots on I'm gonna leave my underwear on I'm gonna leave my t-shirt on and they're playing she's getting undressed but there's a bag of cocaine and money on the table this girl Tommy or wherever you are bless you she says I'm watching that money and by now I am like so pissed off at the world and that love and that my girlfriend she said that there was a moment and time that said it's now or never she said I snatched the money and I started running and I jumped over the railing and she can't breathe now she's like and we were at State 50 Bryan Street and she said and I ran out to the streets and there was a lady that really hit me and I told the lady I said those guys are chasing me she said Miss Jones I was holding onto money and the cocaine and then she said it was a lady that took me to Davy City away from there they catch her catch her catch her cause she was falling she couldn't breathe she said and I and I and I and we lifted her you live to tell the story the Medellin project is my contribution to theater cause I think it's time as Michelle is saying that we're building something else something else is coming and I find that incarcerated women what they need is the freedom of voice to say where they been you want drama you want drama I met a young woman in prison in jail who killed her baby in a cocaine hallucination and the Medellin project's name grew out of that because she said my husband wanted me gone cause she's like I got really addicted to coke and he could do coke all weekend and then go to work but I was out every day looking for more coke and I started to study about tolerance in women and men and drugs and this young lady her husband said I want you gone you're junky I want you gone the corner don't want you and she said oh really you want me gone and he said all I want out of excuse my language all I want out of this mother fucker is my baby I want you gone and she said really and she said he went to bed she said and I smothered my baby I smothered that baby cause that's what I could do and I'm thinking Medellin I mean it's like whoa this is Medellin the highest order and so she would say to me I'm not going to the gym I'm waiting to die I'm going to heaven because only God can judge me women started telling these amazing stories about survival and they didn't know the stories were drift and shame and sorrow and they were just so embarrassed that they had failed the system I said you failed the system that was not a view of design and as I said in this morning listen to men versus women in legitimate theater it's the same old bullshit yes darling can a baby make his love this session I've been doing this now for almost 50 years theater really precipitated women I've been doing theater around the world I have a theater company in Africa a day out in Africa I'm working with UC medical center as an artist working with women who are dealing with trauma and living with HIV and it's something called performance as medicine and it's been an amazing situation with the hospital with the clinic for them to watch our performances a young woman Bianca Henry wrote the ugly duckling I asked her to translate the ugly duckling from your story and that's what you just experienced duck all fucked up in time and these are methodologies that I developed but I bring in the myth because the myth is something that we all understand it's the universal language is it not doctor me is it not and it's the place where I think we intersect with our artists social change with classic theater I'm about to go on the road with two of my performers one who's living with HIV and the other who's been with me for 20 years she was a former meth addict but we're going to Rutgers and we're going to Howard to work with classical literature these women are going to teach theater artists from this standpoint what is classical literature and I probably schools because they sent for us because it's time we're building something else here and women sit at the center of so much whether we like it or not and women we have to get with it okay I was at a meeting with Alicia Garza in February at Hamilton college and they wanted to talk about she was about to begin a thing on Black Lives Matter but everybody was going to talk about what happened to Huey P. Newton and why he turned out to be such a drug addict blah blah blah blah blah blah and then everybody went on to ask her well what do you do about self-care and she said I'm not interested in self-care I'm interested in collective care and that includes all of us collective care it's about me I want to know how are you doing how are you doing if we're trying to do this theater thing we need to come in if you're not looking to build your own baby say go home we got this and I'd like for you to just help me end this with a piece that we wrote by Bianca Robinson was in my first group at the county jail and Bianca Robinson's daughter was killed in a car at a car in the Tenderloin while Bianca was in jail for prostitution and Bianca lost it she was howling Madana she's howling in this solitary confinement her baby has just been blown away and she said they gotta let me go home she said Miss Jones, I said hey they don't let you do nothing they put you in lockdown because they're afraid that you will hurt yourself or somebody else and the rest of us talked about what's going on here and we wrote a piece as a group entitled Nobody Told Her and I think your resume is swift today so every time I say nobody told her you say nobody ready nobody told her nobody now she can't believe it when it's said words, everything's fine as long as there's no wind nobody told her house, her money, her children her love, her life nobody told her that the one waiting on the street corner in that alleyway in that hotel room nobody told her that she's the one who loses it all nobody told her that not much was expected of her over much nobody told her that she's getting on that train in that car and she's caught in the traffic and what is this destination West Highway Dallas and Taylor Cap Street Suvi Bay nobody told her nobody told her that while doing time for prostitution trying to get enough money to feed her baby nobody told her nobody told her nobody told her nobody brains would be splattered on the backseat of a car in the tenderloin nobody told her our break up sessions in the afternoon we would love to hear them and they're on, we're not from the big area so and she was part of our think tech on this and so I really want to thank Rachel and Randy he's part of our think tech, where's Martha she's the trustee of AC2 who has been in very close with us this is basically a response I'll try to make it short and save the rest of my conversation white men you see on the chart well that's Los Angeles a lot of us have kind of given up a lot of us are just doing activism okay so here's my my thought nonprofits are tax exempt they're tax exempt because the government has determined determined that because they give a social survey they should be exempt from taxes and who pays the taxes the people for the majority were paying taxes we are not represented now two weeks ago we basically changed the face of the music center board there's 50% not people of color here's a woman a woman of color and now there's two plays Latino this season I don't think that's ever happened before so as we go into the session I think we can't forget this is a nonprofit color within the next 20 years so as a strategy for moving forward I'm very pragmatic a great strategy to discuss whether they're here today I have to do it, my name is Mia Fairweather I'm an actress and writer thank you for holding this space for all of us I think one of the things that stood out to me was the notion of having to earn your space and I feel like as an actor and writer it's very interesting where you can get your stories from but when you want to share it the question that people ask is have you been a playwright which in my case as an actor I had to write my own model to give voice to the things I wanted to say so many weddings I felt like that's me writing however I'm not in the formal program which I felt was very limiting in the way people saw who can write plays and content that could be for theater the other thing is that Professor Jones just shared from New York recently I lived in Los Angeles the last two years and moved to the Bay three months ago the interesting thing is in a way the place I felt most comfortable is Skid Row it wasn't theater it wasn't anywhere else because that's where the stories were that's where the vulnerability is so as far as experience and who gets the tell stories there are so many people in those communities who are artists, who are individuals with stories but often times aren't giving the space to share them so I think in some of the changes as part of the younger generation I guess of this movement is being inclusive of where you seek the talent that you potentially have the content to bring in the audiences because there's a lot of people friends of mine where we're more interested I'm just saying just looking for where inclusion and where the stories can come from versus what looks good on the resume and what's quantifiable because that doesn't always bring new stories. Good juice just a lot of truth. So my name is Laila Moran-Gaster I'm a former board member for the playwright center San Francisco former executive director for one of the most productions and soon to be announced artistic director for another theater company I'm speaking from the experience of smaller theaters in this community there are hundreds of us and we are struggling a lot so my four thoughts that I have quickly were cost of being in leadership in a small theater company means paying out of pocket so a lot of us that are in those leadership positions we pay hundreds, thousands of dollars into making our productions happen because we don't get funding the second thing that I want to talk about was peer mentorship so there aren't a lot of opportunities for those mentorship I find that a lot of people always end up finding peer mentors so you're learning as you go and I think that's an important aspect of mentorship and then the second thing was that Bill I'm not a founder in those smaller theater companies that skill set is still there doing everything from marketing and website development through fundraising through everything so I just like those things to also be discussed and then the last thing was I just it's a common slash question in terms of personal familiarity we were talking about that was the one area that one had advantage one of the quotes up there said they decided well because of recommendations etc etc in the converse of that does that mean that the men had less favorable recommendations good question thank you good morning my name is Emily what I say I work for Mayor Ed Lee head of the San Francisco department of status women I mean to me but the issues are not and I just wanted to offer two potential resources one is we've created the San Francisco gender equality principle initiative we've talked to architects we've talked to advertising creative directors the issues are very similar so it's at www.genderprincipals.org with very granular level interventions that folks might want to think about secondly one strategy that we found very successful is to throw down a challenge to major corporations to increase the number of women in leadership also out of corporations to adopt some of these granular level interventions so I recommend that as a potential strategy thank you very much now the lines of potential strategy my name is Kristen Vanja-Hogan I'm the artistic director of WAMP and the beautiful Berkshires of western Massachusetts one of those founders who does everything and this idea has been brewing over the last few days that I've been talking about with a few people in order to reframe the future of leadership I think a leadership institute summit is in order so I think we should keep our eyes open and you should all keep your eyes open for something that really addresses the massive bolts of the skills that have been addressed in this report as a beginning, as a next strategy as a action move as a Berkshire leadership summit for aspiring women leaders so I put it out there in the middle of the area but what I want to ask and kind of throw to you is a question about resources and costs because that's certainly something that's come up a lot in our conversations and Ruby where's the funding where's the funding for the study where's the funding for 9 Steps you are the goddess of 9 Steps so hold on I'm going to answer this because it's really important that we hear this and those of you who can make something keep making it happen we started the study with zero we went to the Tullman Foundation I hope Alex is listening on this howl round because Tullman let it the Valentine Foundation let this lots of individual people and I need to go go let it we were determined to really support a long term research deep dug and to make this convening free so we are still 30 from the goal that we need to complete this research and all of you listening out there if this is important to you figure out a way to help us match this done it will get done because it's fierce and once it gets done that $30,000 then what we want to do is convene a wider discussion among funders who care about this about where those priorities are and how we can direct resources towards some of these granular things that could get supported in the American theater in the future so 30,000 thanks Rachel this is something new final three go ahead Hi I'm Julie Krupp I'm the artistic director one thing that came to mind to me today while I was listening and also some of the provocations from the panelists around building something new was looking towards where women have leadership and how women have leadership not only looking towards the places where men have leadership and how women can aspire to attain that type of leadership and I think it would be an interesting compliment to today's study to look at how women are actually taking leadership in the arts field and how we can learn from what's coming from that leadership instead of just saying oh you're not the AD you're not the AD therefore there is no leadership because I don't believe that's true it's not my experience so how are we taking leadership that's something I want to discuss in the breakups today I'm only Jones and I'm an artist scholar and I want to say first that this is just fabulous having this experience into all people who made this possible two quick things one to underscore the need for more studying so that now I know I need to go on the Indiegogo campaign and put in some money and encourage people to do that because it's one of many very important things that came up will those women who appear to be next in line to be ADs or EDs do they want it and five years from now will they have gotten that so follow the study I think is really important the second thing very quickly I think it's important to note the variety of presentational styles that were part of this gathering because changing the skin color changing the genitalia of leadership does not guarantee a change in the state it's not changing the diversity and the ways that some of us wanted but the presentations here suggest the kind of variety that I mean when I say diversity so I want to thank you everyone my name is Sarah Williams I work for Berkeley RAF and I just wanted to speak to some other research initiatives that are being developed by Lord in particular this conversation like we said it's not new people are talking about it people in my generation are talking about all generations and Lord in particular looking at how we can expand access to and education about leadership positions and so from those conversations what kind of has come out of that in addition to more questions is a program that's really focused on leadership and I'm hoping to talk more about it in the mentorship group but it's about giving women and people of color access to those top leadership positions through training programs and so we're working to get it funded because kind of one of the quotes up there that I saw earlier was about you know we're tired of working for free but there's these programs and ideas people have but it does take money to make sure that people can be compensated for the work that they're doing and now one of the biggest barriers I think is getting those programs funded and they're really fantastic ideas and we all want them to happen but we can't just make them happen out of thin air so something to think about as we talk this afternoon thank you just a huge yield of gratitude to this amazing group of people for this time and it's amazing to hear so if you're just here for this morning we thank you thank you thank you from the bottom of our hearts for coming spread the word and keep the conversation going if you signed up to be part of a breakout session this afternoon please as you walk out of here head on upstairs to a room that's called The Roof our EU FM but it ends up on the roof for lunch and then we will steer you towards your breakout session so thank you everybody