 Thank you for letting me play along. Transformative growth in theater as an art form is only gonna happen through collaboration between institutions. Your gathering here today is important, I think both for all of your future experiences and as a precedent, so it's an honor to participate. I offer this mini case about Woolly Mammoth, the DC-based company where I've served on the board since 1999. I'll be talking about how our board developed over the last few years and how that positioned us to help generate a major initiative at Woolly that we call connectivity and to fund that new initiative and others with novel approaches. For those who may not be familiar, Woolly is a producing and presenting theater company in Washington DC. We've got a 265-seat auditorium, about two blocks off the mall and roughly 200 yards from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution over in the archive, so we take freedom of expression very seriously. The core of our work is objectionable new American plays. Lots of profanity, nudity, sex, violence, all that stuff. Woolly has always been an odd company dedicated by its founders to the notion that if they did very strange theater well enough, people would choose to sit through it. And that by seeing weird theater done well, they would have their worlds expanded, that they would broaden their definitions of what could constitute a valid human life. That if a lot of people had such experiences, we would become a more tolerant and humane species and might survive the enormous threat that humanity had become to itself by the late 20th century. Towards the end of that century, Woolly formulated a mission challenging itself to ignite an explosive engagement between theater artists and the community by producing, presenting, and developing new works at the edges of human experience and theatrical style, a mission that has survived many reexaminations in the intervening years. So it's always been an unusual theater company, but until about eight years ago it had a very ordinary board. We saw our role as a combination of fundraisers, cheerleaders, and volunteer experts and laborers. The staff were expected to provide all of the vision and direction for the organization. Then early in 2008, we had a board retreat facilitated by Ed Martinson from Yale Drama. The topic of the retreat was nominally to explore and discuss three different values of the company that some of us felt were competing for priority, artistry, provocation, and accessibility. We talked about that question, but Ed encourages us to go deeper and examine whether and why Woolly Mammoth should continue to exist. He gave us examples of arts institutions that only validly existed to further the artistic career of one particular genius and how those organizations had floundered when those founding artists retired. At that time, we were just starting to explore the idea of a succession plan for Howard Shalwitz, our founder and still serving artistic director. Ed asked us to reflect on whether Woolly wasn't just the Howard Shalwitz Theater Company. Should we just go away when he retired? And the next question, if the answer was no to that, and we all kind of felt that way in the room, was if Woolly has a mission that supersedes current artistic leadership, where does that mission go during the transition to a new leader? And that was a rhetorical question because he went on to tell us that the mission had to be held by the board since it is the board who have the responsibility to choose and invest the next professional steward of the mission. In fact, he went on to show us that the board should always be the primary holders and defenders of the mission of any nonprofit, and he convinced us. That lesson caused us to embark on an ongoing effort to use the mission of the organization as the spine of the board. We are all in our own ways seeking to ignite explosive engagement. Using that focus on the mission as an organizing principle makes it easier to keep alignment not only within the board, but between the board and the staff. One benefit we've seen from that is that our strategic planning process is much more open both to board members and to senior staff working together. Concentrating on the mission as common ground makes it clear that we're all working towards the same end. Most significantly, that strategy process allowed us to develop the approach and department we call connectivity. A separate organization and set of practices responsible for deepening audience engagement with the work on stage, specifically for the mission-oriented reason of increasing the probability of explosive engagements. As a department, connectivity sits on the artistic side of the organization alongside literary and production rather than on the managing side with marketing and fundraising. While its work is certainly anticipated to increase both our attendance and contributions, that isn't why we do it. The deep mission linkage of connectivity lends its efforts and authenticity we believe audience members detect and respond to. Connectivity's two things at will. First, it is a concept that challenges us to create and frame each work on stage in such a way that it is as likely as possible to engage an audience. Staying with the metaphor of explosion, you need three things for one to go off. You need fuel, you need ignition, and you need an accelerant. For years, our model was the audience is the fuel, the piece of work on stage is the ignition, but we didn't really have an accelerant, and that's connectivity is trying to play that role for us. Conceptually, connectivity includes identifying one or more entry points to a production, usually some kind of informing questions that we all think of the show as posing to the audience. We also now believe that the more deeply our artists get to engage with the material, the more engaging it is likely to be for an audience. This has led us to try to escape from the usual assembly line production model under which every production, no matter how long, how new, or how complicated, can be rehearsed for three weeks, tech for one, and tossed in front of a couple of preview audiences while it's done. We now start putting productions together, including as many of the participating artists as possible, months or even years ahead of first rehearsal. Connectivity is also a department which is responsible for two main bodies of activity, audience design and audience activation. Audience design is examining the themes or style of a work and trying to identify what demographics or background of people might make it especially resonate. We then try to seed each audience with a small number of such people, sometimes with comp tickets, sometimes just by encouraging attendance. Our finding is that having a few highly responsive audience members in the house makes the show more engaging for everyone there. Audience activation is everything we do around the show to deepen engagement. That includes a lot of conventional things like post-show discussions, although we are forever trying to improve that model. In some cases, it may mean producing a small video game that audience members are encouraged to play before attending, emails from play characters that show up in audience inboxes, or interactive activities in the theater lobby that audience members can play with before the performance. Both audience development and audience activation are very much works in progress with lots of new stuff being tried all the time. We want to assess the value of this department's output not from a revenue perspective, but on the basis of artistic impact. And that's why it's organized on the artistic rather than the managing side of the org chart. The board learned on one iteration through our strategy process that staff felt a need for a function like connectivity, but they had assumed that any such thing would be prohibitively expensive. There was a feeling that there were problems to solve and opportunities to pursue that either felt like an overlap of literary marketing and development or that fell into the cracks between them. It took a lot of digging on the part of board members to get staff to admit to this need. When the response from the board to the price tag was, well, I guess we'll have to figure out how to pay for what you need, the board gained a lot of trust from the staff, which has itself led to clearer and more open communications. Now, as we started to do that figuring out, we learned that just by explaining to some funders what we were trying to do and why, they responded with offers of support. Even foundations that had no established granting programs for which our connectivity efforts would be eligible found ways to help us fund the effort. That experience led to a board and staff collaboration to examine all our foundation funding critically. Were we accepting funds that required us to do anything that was off mission? Where the answer was yes, we found ways to stop those efforts and live without those grants. Most significantly, we shut down a long standing child education program that was terrific grant bait and that a lot of us loved, but that completely failed to integrate with the rest of the mission or other activities. On the other side, did we have aspirations that we'd never sought foundation support for because we knew there were no established programs for such effort? Where the answer was yes, we started evolving pitches to fund those efforts and just started giving them to people at all the funders we had relationships with as often as we could and amazingly more money started to flow. The big lesson for all of us in the last few years has been that the more deeply our artists are able to engage with the work of art, the more likely the audience will engage with it as well. Further, today I'm asserting that having board members deeply engaged with the mission strengthens the whole organization and also makes mission accomplishment more likely. Finally, running an organization in such a way that everyone involved knows not only what we're doing but why we're doing it has made us much more able to attract money into the organization and has made top artists eager to work with us. The wooly board doesn't function as a countervailing force holding our artists back from extravagance. We are instead pushing them to ever greater extravagance as long as that extravagance is in pursuit of the mission and that posture makes board service more fun and rewarding. In closing, I offer the perspective that as leaders of theater companies our product that matters isn't tickets to attend performances. That is our marketplace product but our real social output is people who have attended and worked on performances. If we're thoughtful about what effect we want our performances to have on those people we can focus our efforts in powerful ways. At wooly we strive to bring people to a state of explosive engagement with the hope that the experience will help them attain and sustain a deeper sense of our shared humanity. We hope we are engendering the kind of radical tolerance that will be required for our increasingly diverse nation to thrive. Whatever lasting effects our productions have on our audiences is the real change we make in the world. Thank you. I'm gonna change the program just a little. We have 15 minutes for questions at the end and I thought it'd be easier for us to remember our questions for you if we ask you right away. So if anybody has questions for Pete before we bring Cynthia up. Sir. I think the question was what are our demographics and what's our model for subscriptions? I don't know exact numbers around that. I know that DC has done the same TRG kind of exercise that's been done here in Boston and wooly's numbers skew just a squid younger than was showing for the squid younger and more diverse than was showing for the average of this group of six, but not a lot. There's a perception in the community that we're very younger and browner and all that sort of thing. It's not as much as people think unfortunately. And in terms of subscription, I think our attendance is about 25% subscription and 75% single ticket. Could you just clarify a little more detail when you said that if you explain to funders what you're doing, they give you more money? Yeah. It really just worked like that. Like we went to people who we'd been working with for years and said, hey, here's this thing we think it's really important. It ties directly with our mission. We think it's gonna make a giant difference for us. That's what we're really concerned about. And so we're not gonna be applying next year for this grant that we've been doing because that's not the direction we're going anymore. And much to our surprise, many of them came back to us and said, well, that's kind of interesting. And then foundations we'd never heard of before reached out to us and said, I guess there was kind of a moment for audience engagement that we weren't aware of. And so there was some money lurking out there that we, my contention is that if you're doing things that are on mission and essential for you and you're public about what you're doing, like one big component, we held a conference, a weekend conference in 2009 called Who's in Your Circle that was about doing theater as civic practice. And our message going into that was we think this is important and we know almost nothing about it. Please come to Washington and tell us what you know. And within six months, everybody thought we were experts. And so we started having people come to us and ask what was going on. So that was part of the process there. So the question was what's the annual budget and how much of that is connectivity? We are about a $4 million a year organization now and the connectivity is to employees and a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of program support every year. That's the department. So that's probably somewhere around $150,000 in the budget. Now the other activities that fall under connectivity is a concept like those workshops two years before a production and that kind of thing. We don't attribute those directly to connectivity but that's probably another two, $300,000 in an ordinary year. You said that once everybody on board fully understood and felt like real owners of the mission and fully understood the sort of new connectivity movement that they themselves became better fundraisers. Am I extrapolating that or you said that? I think there's a tiny bit of extrapolation there and I wanna give the impression that we're all clones or anything like that. Like that wouldn't be very interesting and diverse on itself but so different people connect to the mission in different ways. Like there are people on the board who frankly aren't all that activated about the engagement component but for them new is the exciting part of what we do in the mission. Everybody's got some point of connection to the mission and there are board members who are as with any group of people who are enthusiastic fundraisers and who are less so. It didn't turn us all into A plus fundraisers but it maybe took everybody up one letter grade from where they were before. And it's largely because I think sincerity really sells. There's an old joke, sincerity is the great thing once you can fake that, you've got it made. We aren't that good at acting so for us it really took being sincere and that comes across and we find that people really respond to it. Oh it is, but I wondered if you could give concrete examples about the seating the audience with people who are and they become the accelerant. Yeah so three quick ones when we did Luis Alfaro's Oedipus L. Ray we reached out to direct service organizations that do convict reintroduction support and worked with them to have five to seven released convicts in the audience for every performance. That play happens to be set mostly in an imaginary California prison as well as ancient Greece and that was terrific. That was terrific and part of it in that case it's just their lines that Luis put in the play because some convict had told him about it and it's hysterical to them and the rest of the audience just kind of what. But when you've got four, five or seven people all laughing at a line then the audience reassesses why. Two more, Clyburn Park we reached out to neighborhood bloggers. Gentrification is a giant issue in DC and there are people who blog about that and they brought their networks of people in and then I had one more. Oh when we did Denai Guerrera's The Convert we found out much to our surprise and delight that there's a big Zimbabwean American community in DC and worked with again some people who in that case were key bloggers within that community and they invited groups of people in to see that play. Could you give a little bit of a description of the job description of the people in the connectivity department? What do they actually do? Yeah so that's been a giant moving target. We started with theater maker Rachel Grossman who runs Dog and Pony DC. She gets out on the national stage. Some of you may know her. She was our first connectivity director. Burned herself out in about 15 months. The two people we've had since as the director have been community organizers by background. So in fact people who had I think in one case come directly off a presidential campaign and the other one had done that in her past and then had been working in the arts somewhere else before we found her. So we're really looking at people who are good at sort of finding clumps of people by characteristics and interests communicating with them through the right channels and organizing events. It's sort of an impossible job. I think it's gonna be a lot more successful when we can grow it up to four rather than right now we've got one full timer and one intern. That's running it a little too tight. Are they working primarily with organizations in the community or individuals and is there any focus or emphasis on building continuing relationships not just for a particular production? Yeah, that's really hard. That's a really hard one because we need like it's only useful as a relationship if we can give something to the people we're working with as well and to go back to the first part of your question. So when we see an opportunity for a continuing engagement we do those are very hard to find the first part of your question. It depends on the project. For the cases that I gave they were all like organized self-organized groups in some way. When we did you for me for you there wasn't really a big organized Korean American group that we could locate or anything. In the end what we wound up doing and I thought this was just the worst idea and I was so wrong was we got a dissident South Korean artist to hang his work in our lobby and then do community events and work with the cast of the show and it was extraordinary. So that was like that was not through a group that was through one individual and he was just amazing. So it really every one of these is an independent act of creativity at this point. I wish we had a cookbook. Hi, I'm Sean LeCount with Company One Theater and we've met and I've heard you speak and I'm always inspired by what you and Willie are doing. I'm also struck by a question I always have and you mentioned it today. You said how we had an early session we looked at theater demographics in Boston and I think had the typical response as a collective. With all of the inspiring work you're doing with connectivity, with engagement, with your explosive mission specific everything, how do you reconcile not having the audience base be as diverse and as young as you want it to be and what kind of real priority is that for the organization? So I'll start with the priority bit and I'm trying to assess it based on our behavior. It's quite important the audience design component for many of our shows because many of our shows do speak to figure a economically disadvantaged, racially marginalized, those are many of the themes and so that gives us a chance to just directly hand tickets to people in the population segments that might not otherwise be attending on their own. The thing we would be doing if we knew how was doing advertising and other communication to stimulate attendance from the rest of that. I still think that's anti-gravity. We don't know how to do it I don't think anybody knows how to do it. We keep trying different things I wish I could even call it experiments but we don't have enough resources to do controlled A, B testing or anything like that. So it's just trying shit and hoping it works and if it works and it wasn't too hard to do maybe we'll do it again. So staggering, groping towards but we're not making the progress that would satisfy us. Right, right, right. Yeah, I want to hear Cynthia's talk too, so. Yeah, thank you, thank you so much. Sure. I'm Cynthia Good, I was a founding funder of the Actors Shakespeare Project and have been involved ever since. I've just gone off the board but have not left ASP. I have a friend of my parents used to say first you have to care. If you're gonna do anything, it has to matter to you. You have to care about it. So as a board, as a staff, we decided that we really wanted to look at diversity and not just in the sort of buzzwordy way because it just gets used buzzwordy in funding, in writing grants and all that kind of stuff that we really wanted to be intentional about what we meant. When we talk about diversity on the board we talk about a whole range of things that are economic sites, what gifts people have, that that's one of the ways that we talk about diversity. In 2011, we looked at a strategic plan to think about what we have said about who we are and one of the things that we asked was would ASP more powerfully accomplish its mission if there was more racial diversity and inclusivity throughout the organization. So we gathered people from around the community, we gathered artists, we gathered board members, we gathered constituencies and we asked them all does this matter? Do we really need to do it? Will it make a difference to the work that we do to the mission that we say we are about and we decided yes, that it mattered, that having diversity mattered to the work that we did. And so we started to think about what did that work look like? Sarah Stackhouse who was our executive producer at the time went to a single day workshop called Undoing Racism with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Then she came back inspired by that work. So she and the director of the Boston Center for the Arts and the Boston Children's Chorus decided that representatives from each one of those organizations would meet into a full three day training with the People's Institute. So for three days we sat in the black box at Boston Center for the Arts and talked about the construct that is race and how that even started. Talked about what it meant to be from our various heritages. Talked about what it meant to be racist. Talked about what that meant in our lives for who we were for our organizations. What we hoped with that was that we would have an underlying language and conversation, a way of discussing as we moved forward. All of the staff was required to go. There were three or four board members who attended. There were some of our artists, our actors who attended. One of the staff members who was brand new said, oh, I hate this. We had lunch in between. He said, I just think this is stupid. I don't even know why we're doing this. And by the end, he got it and he had changed and he had had some understanding of what's the conversation and why do we have it and why does it make a difference and why does it make a difference as white people to be engaged in the conversation? Why are we the ones who need to do work amongst ourselves? So we left that and it's a very, the three days are very intense and very relational, but the end of that is, and now what? So we have this conversation, so we have some shared vocabulary, so we have some shared identity and understanding. Now what do we do? And we're still sort of in that phase. We have decided that it's important, first you have to care. We decided that we all wanted to be on the same page conversationally, that we, all of the board will now go through that training. All of the newer staff will go through that training. That the, we have a resident acting company, that the entire resident acting company will go through that training as well. We just did a, just finished a small strategic plan and Johnny McCorley was the co-chair who is our Othello opening on Saturday and he called our subgroup, We Ain't Afraid of No Race. And what we decided is, this was our rationale. Our mission is to do artistic and educational work that is relevant to and engages Boston's diverse citizens of all races and teaches us something about what it means to be human here and now. To do this effectively, we must have an organization that represents the society we are part of at every level. We understand that people often relate to people who look and sound like them on stage, in classrooms, in the media and in leadership positions. We agree we need to see racial diversity reflected in positions of leadership, creativity and power on stage and off at ASP. Shakespeare's plays are transcendent human stories that often focus on power, outsiders, voice, status and justice. Racial equity in our programming will allow ASP to more powerfully accomplish our artistic and educational mission. Having applied these recommendations ASP will determine how this work has expanded and changed our vision. ASP is both a language based and relationship based company. Language is the root of communication and relationship takes communication deeper. Racism breaks relationships and therefore our language is shallow, blinded by false labels of different or other. We must take steps to embody our beliefs of humanity found in our mission so that our language, communication and relationships company wide are rich. ASP will work to continue relationships with the communities we serve. We also commit to promoting voice and justice organizationally as well as to artistic program design, hiring, economic and geographic decision making. We are committed to having a racially diverse group in power positions at ASP so the diverse set of perspectives and decisions are made for the good of the organization and its constituents. We consider the board, the staff leadership, the resident acting company, show directors and teaching artists to be people with official power and decision making authority at ASP. We are committed to recruiting and supporting racially diverse people in these roles. So those are our most recent strategic plan ideas. We haven't come as far as we'd like. We're still on the journey but first you have to care. First you have to have a shared language that understands who we are and that diversity is not just a buzzword but that it matters. I was saying at our table we do education work as well as wonderful productions and for me seeing kids who are incarcerated or kids who are at BAA, the Boston Arts Academy or Boston Day and Evening find their stories in Shakespeare's stories. Say I know about jealousy so I can play Iago. I know about gangs so I can relate to Romeo and Juliet. I can find my story. Our hope at ASP is that people will see their stories on stage. They will see people who look like them on stage. They will find a way to engage and be connected and that's why we felt like we needed to do the really hard and deep pick and shovel work of figuring out how to undo racism and how to engage as human beings, as part of the city of Boston and as artists. As state purpose we have time for questions and Ramona I depend on you to say when we have to stop. Yeah hi I'm Noe Montez I'm on the board of company one and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more specifically about what happened over the three courses those three days of race training. What was the sort of nature of the programming, the questions being asked, goals, et cetera. Listen a few years ago I'll have to remember. Part of it for the, I did my first white racism training when I was in high school. In that, in the room where I was a good little white person. My parents had been involved in civil rights movement and all that kind of stuff and to have somebody say you're a racist was one of those no no no I'm a good person. So part of it was just dismantling that understanding of when we talk about race that it doesn't, that race is a social construct. So that's one of those pieces. It was talking about what privilege do you have as a white person being able to name that and to honor that and just be aware of it. We walked, I was telling my daughter the other day that we went around the room and the way they constructed is they say so tell me what you like about being a white person. And so everybody went around and then they asked the different other racial groups. So what do you like about, and they say oh, the, you know, it was this richness in the story and the white people were like hey wait a sec. Well yeah well if you asked us again we'd go, we'd tell you and say we do that intentionally because there's not a sense of, we don't recognize that. That I don't, my first thing about being white, I don't say oh I love macaroni and cheese. Or whatever, so it was sort of getting at how do you understand who you are was one of those pieces and how do we have those conversations. So it was a real, I mean it was a lot of social stuff. It was a lot of historic stuff. It was a lot of owning who you are and how, what are the privileges in your life. I was gonna say the other piece, my daughter's at the Cambridge School of Weston, just started and, who said who, who, who, there you go. And they have worked really hard at diversity in that school. And one of the things one of the people said to me was we're always working, we're always working and the idea is not that you're welcoming people to the table, to your table, but the table is always changing. So that when you decide with authenticity that you are going to have a diverse community, it's not just people who look a little different than you sitting at the same table, but the conversation changes and the table changes. And I think that's really, really important thing because that's part of the commitment. Yeah. ASP, and to what effect? It hasn't, it did not change the mission of ASP. It changed what we did. It changed how, so we just, we have an interim artistic director, executive producer, sorry, and we're still fiddling with the language, but anyway, we just hired an interim and one of the conversations was, so when we post for auditions, where do we post? What's the language we use so that we're not just using the language that says we're an equal opportunity employer, but how are we proactive in terms of hiring staff, in terms of that kind of work that we do, so that I think our mission has not changed, but the way we've approached it, the way we've done the work has changed. Did you find that the training impacted how you interacted with potential board recruits that were people of color or audience members of people of color on a one to one basis? Right. So one of the struggles in the board, getting new board members, has been trying to get people, so we're asking people authentically, so one of the things we're hoping to do, which is one of the other things we looked at in that the 2011 strategic plan was, do we really wanna continue to be itinerant? Which is, that's our model, we don't have it at home, we go from place to place and we spent some time thinking about that and if we are relating, we do community work every place we are, but we jump in, do something and leave and maybe what we wanna do is really be in a neighborhood for a while and really develop long-term relationships and having people that are new board members coming out of those relationships. So we have not, so I don't think that changed either. I think it's really wanting to have all of the work that we do be thoughtful and authentic, so I don't think it changed those conversations. You feel like who you are as board members together shifted with kind of increasing awareness caring about the race piece? Right. So we have not yet, the whole board has not done the work yet, but we have committed to doing it. Right. I would say, so we've been meeting as a board chairs for two years and I leave all of our meetings going, we are awesome. Because the ASP board is just a really, really good board and so I think we've always engaged deeply in those conversations about what we do and why we do it and so every time we keep thinking about when doing the educational piece, we do deep, we don't do wide. So we've got one kid X who is coming through and is now interning and we got him acting and so we have a few of those stories of kids that we've really engaged deeply with and we ask ourselves those kinds of questions all the time. So I don't know, do you think Austin, do you think it changed things? Yeah. It has. Even though we're still, oh boy are we still at the beginning of trying to figure out what we're doing and how to make this better. As soon as we've started to talk about this out loud and barely constantly, I think I know, I sit there and I think differently. Every time we're having a discussion about practically anything and maybe that's a good beginning. Yes, yeah. She was in our group. She was part of that workshop with us. But yeah, yeah, yeah. And can you talk about organizationally and fiscally what the commitment was to do that training and also to have this commitment that every new board member comes on, that they will also do the training? Right. So the first funding was from the Boston Foundation. We then got funding, which we have in our pocket to do the next level of training, which I think came from BAR to 20,000 to do. We, in this last strategic plan, which is just over the summer, we may not go back to the original group. We may use people more locally, but it does, it's not cheap. And I think it really needs to be, you really do need to spend three days in the dark to get everybody on the same page and get some of that, the hardcore stuff so you're not just floating on that language stuff. Four minutes. We'll do one, two, three, and then we'll wrap up. When I looked at the agenda and I saw the word anti-racism training, that sounded really scary to me. And then once you started talking, I said, she talked about diversity training. What made the board name it anti-racism? So the people- Did you all recognize that you were racist until you had the training? Well, so the People's Institute, which is the group that we worked with, they call their workshop undoing racism. So not anti-racism, but undoing racism. So the intentionality of that is that it's not even just enough to own that I'm a racist because I participate in the racist society, but to say, and what will I do about that? How will I undo, in whatever way I can, how can I help undo that, the system? Hi, Alyssa Choi, board vice president, company one. Thank you for a great talk. I actually wondered if you could comment about how this type of training, if at all, could enhance the potential diversity and opportunities for diversity among board leadership, creative leadership. Just commenting personally, I'm really appreciative of being here, but we could potentially use more diversity even in the room here. I hope I'm not being critical, just kind of acknowledging that. So how do these kind of talks potentially lead to an outcome metric of more diversity? It goes back to that, first you have to care. I mean, I think that for us to decide that this mattered and it mattered enough to spend money and significant time to do some of that initial work, I think, and again, we're just at the beginning, but I think having the language and being intentional has helped a lot because I think the table has to change and I think it matters when different voices around the table and different experiences. Hi, how are you? Thank you very much for being here and expressing your thoughts and also going through the training. You said something to the effect of you had about three or four board members go through this training, is that correct? In the initial training. Initially, and now how many more out of the total number of board members? So we only have nine board members. Okay. That the initial train that we did two years ago was the entire staff, several of the actors from the Resident Active Company and four board members, I think, whatever, something like that. The intention is for everyone in the ASP community to go through the training and that's the next step. It may not be with the People's Institute, but it'll be with somebody else. With the same kind of intensity. So then after staff and board kind of continually go through this process and the organization has therefore gone through this process, what are the three or four concrete goals that you hope to have come out of it? I ask this because it's a very feel good initiative and that's wonderful and that's great and it also feels like for individuals, it's a very positive thing, but what does that look like institutionally? How does it shape the work concretely and not just have it be about awareness? You mentioned something about a table, right? And not just kind of inviting people to the table and I think it's important to kind of posit that the table's always there, right? There wasn't like an absence of diverse folk, right? They were always present, but now there's some sense of awareness and I think we need to move past a state of awareness and conversation and a state of true acknowledgement and making sure that where we make our art and the communities we make our art for reflective of the people that we're bringing into our theater. So I'm curious about what the concrete goals are. Yeah, so I have this glancing back over them. We've got about four pages of them and so this was never intended to be the end. It was always intended to be sort of the starting place is how can we all be on that same page? The next step is to figure out how we engage the communities that was one of those things about the itineracy thing. How do we engage in communities where we are so that we get more directors, we get more actors, we get more participants that can change the story and the way we tell the story. We had one issue, we mostly do Shakespeare but we do a new play, we've done a few more recently. We had a Native American who was on staff who was offended by part of the play and she mentioned it during one of the staff, I think it was during the pick of the play and wasn't heard. And so that was another one of those red flags of when we have a greater diversity in the room around that table, how do we raise those kinds of issues so that my hope is that those kinds of conversations can continue. One of the hopes is to have, trying to think of true colors has done a lot of work and we talked with them about their process and where they've gotten and one of the things they have is they have a white caucus that has a facilitator and a black caucus that has a facilitator so that when there are issues that need to be talked about that there are ways to talk about that and somebody doesn't have to be the one that lifts this, raises the flags or lists the stories. So it's there, we don't for a moment think that just having to be aware of this is enough that the intention is to live that out but authentically and I don't think we know what those issues will be. Great, I think we're out of time. Thank you so much, Cynthia and Pete. Okay, so we're gonna take a 10 minute break but if you're gonna listen to one thing, listen for 10 seconds. At the end of this break, you need to go to the next breakout group assignment. So look on the back of your name.