 So welcome back, are we live? Thank you, welcome back, HowlRoundTV, everyone watching. Welcome back to everyone in the space. We're live from Saturday, and I'm just kidding. We are live, and we are back with an incredible panel. I mean, it's immense in its knowledge. There are so many people, but you have to hear everything each one of these individuals have done. It has been an inspiration for me, I will say. And like I said, I track people down who do parent support throughout this country, and who you see on this panel today. These are individuals who I've been able to meet with individually, and it is my absolute pleasure to bring them into the same space. I'm going to do a brief introductions. Garlia, I mentioned her first, but we're just shifting her order after my call so that their content connects in an exciting way. So we'll start with the second one. So if you can raise your hand so we know who you are. Ariana Smart Truman, who's the producing director and vice president of Elevator Repair Service and the co-founder and director of the Summer Institute with the Wooster Group. And then we have Allie Lalonde and Libby King right over here. Allie is the producing director of the team ensemble here in New York. And Libby King is an ensemble member, correct? Yes. Don't worry if I've gotten this wrong before. And then we have Michael Sag, who is the managing director of WP Theater, formerly Women's Project, if you know it from that. And then Roberta Pareda is joining us again, producing director from the Playwrights' Realm. And then Ari Teplitz here, who is the CFP CHFC of the Teplitz Financial Group. He'll explain more. And then back to our wonderful starter here on the row, Garlia Cornelay-Jones, who is the founder of Blackboard Plays. Look them up if you don't know. Line producer of the Public Theater and our first Powell Grant recipient of a mother artist of color. So beyond well-deserved. And she's going to share a bit more about Blackboard Plays. But I will have a happy hour tonight. Garlia has also recently come on to be our Powell chief rep of New York City. So we're very proud to have her. Hey. She's been breaking ground for a long time. And now we're just drawing attention to it. It's exciting. So we're going to start with Ariana here and the work that you've been doing, because Ariana was one of the first people who interviewed with me when the Palhand books started, when it was just a few pages and an idea to gather interviews with people who had done this before. And in speaking with her, she quickly became someone that I looked to because she's so not only generous with her information and her solutions, but she also has a legacy of creating support now. So I'm honored to have her with me in this space. And so the first question that I wanted to propose to her is, Ariana, if you could briefly share with us how long you've been developing child care for the Wooster Group's educational program, as well as the history of ERS and its child positive practices. Yeah. I'm so happy to be here. And I'm here as a parent and as an administrator and also as a teaching artist. So I've been realizing, actually, while listening to everybody talking to you today, that I hadn't quite remembered the origin story for me of how providing significant support to parent artists came about. And that's because I worked with the Wooster Group for a very long time as an intern and then as an administrator and various things. And all along the way, I was working on the Summer Institute with Kate Valk, which we co-founded together about 22 years ago. And the founding members of the Wooster Group had all had kids like in the 70s and 80s. So as I was sort of coming up through working with the Wooster Group, I was several decades behind in terms of where they were at with child rearing. So when the Summer Institute, when my daughter was about two, I realized this is going to be really hard for me to do. And the summer, it's a three-week intensive program over the summer where we work with kids. I was like, she's not in regular school. And how am I going to do this? Kate Valk said, oh, well, let's just give you a stipend for child care. Like, this is obvious. And I went, oh, oh, OK, great. And so then all the teaching artists who have ever worked on the Summer Institute since then, that's sort of one of the first things always is, do you need a stipend for child care? And they always go, mm-hm. So that is how that started. And what we do at the, because it's a very repeatable program and people come back and do it every year for many years, it's easy to just say, this is our policy. And we have a flat fee that is a stipend. And it offsets people's costs for child care. And some of the people say, oh, I don't need it this year, because my kid is going to go visit their grandparent somewhere else. And then we say, OK, well, great. Let us know if you need it next year. And that's a $200 a week stipend. So it's not a huge amount of money, but it makes a difference. At Elevator Repair Service, there's been a real evolution. And my daughter was born in 2007. I started working full-time with Elevator Repair Service in 2006. And I think in that year, the woman who was the managing director at the time, Tori Vazquez, had her first child. And that sort of began the Elevator Repair Service baby boom. And because Tori was working in the office, she was in a position to work with John Collins, the artistic director, about making policies. And they sort of figured out together how to make it possible for her to work and be a parent of a child. So it was very kind of like working around her and flexible schedule and that kind of thing. And then my daughter was born. And so there were some precedents in place for office staff about how to deal with that. And I had a flexible schedule. And I have also worked one day a week from home. I started that when my daughter was a little bit older. But that kind of like working in the office was very easy to figure out. And like Roberta said, because I was in the position to make the decisions, we would just say, well, what do I need? What does Tori need? OK, we'll do it that way. But then a lot of the artists started having children. And Elevator Repair Service does a lot of touring. We do a lot of extended rehearsal periods, sometimes in New York, sometimes out of town. There are the sort of main ethos or the mission of Elevator Repair Service is to make work with an ongoing ensemble. And so that means the ensemble shifts and changes over time. But there are all these people who, you know, the investment is in making repeated work experience with the same group of people. And so those people have a huge range of lifestyles. Some people are parents. Some people are teachers. Some people are working in law offices. Nobody's really a waiter anymore, but certainly people were for a time. So trying to sort of adjust to this huge range of lifestyles is very complicated. And it takes a tremendous amount of time and thought and some compromise from everybody in one direction or another. But a big part of what we were able to do for parents is to not rehearse at night all the time. Just could you do one night a week? So we do a lot of sort of asking people, what would work for you? And some people will say, it's easier for me, you know, to get a babysitter on a Friday than on a weeknight, I like to help my kid with their homework. So we say, okay, we take that into consideration. So we create these very sort of complicated schedules to try to accommodate the greatest number of people with parents being one part of that. But we also early on tried to make sort of policies that we thought could sort of be a little bit one size fits all. So we thought about what, you know, touring was a big thing. We take people on tour, we go out of town for nine days or 14 days or five weeks. And it seemed obvious that if somebody was breastfeeding, they needed to bring their child with them. And then if they were bringing a breastfeeding infant with them, they probably didn't want to just hire local babysitters on an ad hoc basis, but they would want to bring somebody with them who was, you know, very familiar with their child and their parenting style and could probably share a hotel room with them or apartment. So that meant, well, what do we need to do to make that happen? You don't have to pay for a plane ticket for an infant, but you do have to pay for a plane ticket for a caregiver. And you have to make sure that they have accommodations wherever they're going that are family friendly. And you probably need to pay per diem for that caregiver. So these are things that we would sort of build into our tour budgets. And certain things, some presenters of our work would be sort of willing to be a little bit flexible and accommodating around some of those, but more often they were not and put the burden back on us to make it happen. So that just became something that we budgeted for. So in addition to, so that made sense for a little while, but then also people started breastfeeding, some people only breastfed for three months and some people like me breastfed for three years. So then it was like, oh, there's like an inequitable distribution of resources here based on this breastfeeding per, maybe that's not the marker that we want to be using. So, and also there were some things early on of like, well, if like four people are bringing their similarly aged kids on tour, let's hire one babysitter and that babysitter can take care of all the kids, to which all of the mothers said, no, that doesn't, you know, my kid goes to sleep at four, my kid goes to sleep at six, that's not gonna work. So we couldn't impose anything on people that was one size fits all and that became clear very quickly. So then it became just a question of us always saying to parents, what do you need? How can this work for you to come on tour? Do you need money? Do you need more people to be there with you? What do you need? And then it was just always, just not being afraid that what they were gonna say is, oh, I need the moon, to which we would have to say, oh, sorry, we can't afford the moon. That never happened, instead what people said is, well, I usually spend $600 a week on childcare, but I'm gonna have to spend $725, you know, to meet this rehearsal schedule. We'd say, well, we'll give you the $125. You know, that's obvious, that's easy. So everything became a sort of personalized and individual conversation about that and we started building it into all of our budgets. Oh, one other thing actually that I thought of while I was listening to people talk is that we hire pregnant actors. So if somebody becomes pregnant, that doesn't disqualify them. Somebody could be eight months pregnant and playing Daisy in the Great Gatsby. And that meant that we were proactive about recostuming people and saying, let's think about what you're gonna need to wear. We might need to buy you two different costumes because you're gonna grow over the course of this. And instead of making a woman sort of say, like, you do realize I'm gonna need like five different kinds of spanks to fit into that costume. Like we would say, you need spanks probably, you know, or whatever, coming to people and saying, what are you gonna need? So over the years, it's become very normal for us to just think in advance about who our company is for any given production. We know people's lives, we know who is a parent and budget for what we think they might need. And if we don't know a full company, we say, like, well, maybe one of those people will be a parent. We build in a little extra cushion. And over, I have the data from going back to 2011. In every fiscal year, we have spent less than 1% of our entire budget on all of these really family friendly policies, buying plane tickets, paying extra for hotel rooms, per diem, giving childcare stipends. So much so that everybody in our company, you know, constantly calls us out as like leaders who make it possible for them to work with us. And it's, you know, 0.4 to 8%, 0.186%, 0.069% of the budget. It's such a small amount of money and it makes such a huge difference. And I'd looked also, I was curious, this year or this past fiscal year, we budgeted $7,900 for family friendly expenses. And we ended up spending 2,975. So we had all that money available and we weren't, you know, we were saying to people, what do you need, what do you need? And that's all that they needed. So that was, that I find so heartening when you think about what you might, what an institution might end up spending on this. People are so, and I'm speaking from my own personal experience, you just feel seen, respected, included, and like you belong, and it takes a very, very small gesture to make that true. And, you know, we try so hard to be proactive and as generous as possible and people don't even take us up on all the offer, all the help that we offer. That's great, thank you. And it raises just such a wonderful point when we're talking about investing in people. It's the human resources and extra benefits you can give people should not only be financial, right? It should be placing that value system on them and saying what do you need? So thank you so much for sharing that and those numbers. You can thank her too. I heard some snaps. That's so beautiful. So we're gonna shift now to Ali and Libby from the team because this is very much in line with the work that you are doing as well. And Libby, I believe we're starting with you. Yeah, because I would love to hear about the, Libby is also many of these people I've interviewed for the handbook that you're all gonna get, but this is the deep dive where I believe you were, Ali was saying, the first person to receive this support and the most recent. So I would just love to hear about your personal experience in receiving it and any insight you have on what it's done for the company. Awesome. I also wanna say Lucy Jackson's here who was, you were there when we started doing a lot of stuff. She was working for the team at the time. So anything you wanna add that I, I was thinking also of sort of an origin story which I was having these flashes of when I was pregnant, I had gotten a few callbacks into a really big gig and I remember like being so terrified that the moment that they found out that I was pregnant that I just wouldn't get the job and ended up not getting the job anyway but I remember that terror. And then I think about what being a member of the team and sort of what I was a bit forced into as I gave birth on October 28th, 2014. And we were set to perform in the Coral Festival at the Vineyard in January. So it was really only a little over November, December 28th like eight weeks after he was born. And I was like, I didn't know, I didn't really have a choice to be like, I don't know if I can do this. And I just, I did with the support of the team. We brought in my dad. He's become my major like he comes to tech with me all the time with my son. But we brought in my dad and the vineyard was like, you can absolutely like hold up shop in the green room or in the, you know, like I had a milk station. I was pumping during, you know, during tech. And it, what it did was just, it just clicked for me. Like nothing, me being a mother, there's nothing in my way. Like I don't have to say no because I can bring him with me in a crisis. I can, so I guess I just wanna point to that like switch that kind of, I got to turn in my brain, which then set my course for my ability and belief in myself and in him and my son to be like, I'm taking you with me to London and we'll figure it out. And it's been such a rich addition to his life being in the rooms with the artist he's gotten to be in the room with. And most I just wanna point to, I think how impressed I've been in his ability to sit quietly in a tech when you think, oh he's gonna be the one disturbing and actually he's the one like, you know, absolutely laughing in the appropriate moment. Like gets the physical comedy and is like, if this is boring, that's when I'm gonna leave. So, and I'm just kind of rambling, but if you could steer me back. I wanna talk a little bit about different modes. So like what we did for primer versus what we did for reconstruction this summer. Yeah, so again, kind of to what Arianna says, when the team has a development period or an upcoming tour or whatever, it is a dialogue between about what do you need? And it always feels like kind of an awesome creative problem solving. And first you're just relieved that you're being asked that in the first place. And so it often depends. And in the instance of this primer situation, there was two other moms in the company that needed support. Sorry, just for clarification. Primer for Failed Superpowers, the title of a show that we premiered in 2017. And that show involved a 32 member ensemble that was evenly divided between teenagers, 37 things and people 60 and up. Singing new arrangements by some amazing composers of iconic protest songs from America's history. And that fell at a time it was the summer and the people that needed childcare, our kids were toddler type, it was an age situation. So we were able to hire a company babysitter in that moment, which was also extraordinary for the kids. It was like a little kind of summer, mini summer camp for them. And then most recently we were up at the lumber yard and my particular needs, we were two weeks in the city and then one week upstate. Again, it fell in the summertime. So my son was not in school. And for the two weeks, usually the conversation around scheduling is a huge one. I think it's a pain in the ass for people, but the parents particularly are the most affected. So if you're doing a straight six and you're starting at 10 and you're getting done at four, it means, okay, I'm only gonna pay for this hour after school, it's such a conversation. And so the two weeks in the city, I was getting a stipend of compensation and then the last week, my heroic dad was given a plane ticket and he came up and we got family friendly housing and he got to take my kid to like little farm and all these things around the upstate area. And also it's just, it's hard to, you're given the ability to do the work that you need to do as the artist and it takes this huge pressure off whenever you're just even in some kind of dialogue with your employer as a parent. Absolutely, when we talk about resources and part of our resources being energy, like mental capacity, emotional sustainability for this work that we do, because everyone is under duress at some point in the process for an employer to open up to everyone, this is a conversation we're willing to have, alleviates that burden. And so that parents' emotional resources get to go to problem solving and get to go toward their child and get to go toward their art instead of trying to figure out, okay, how do I convince my employer that this is what I need? You're actually wasting your employees' resources on yourself when you could just come to them and say, I wanna know, I wanna learn. So this is so important to share and thank you. And Ali, you've been involved now in budgeting and fundraising for this conversation which is, I find so exciting and fascinating because my instinct for it, you were like, yeah, it's true. If you wanna share a little bit about that part of it. Sure, and before I do that, I just wanna mention that, so Libby is our second team parent. We are an ensemble of 15 members of which seven are now parents. There are 16 babies and at our gala this past November on our giant timeline of major events in the team's history, each of those baby's births was on there. And, but Libby was, in spite of being the second team parent, she was the first to receive a stipend for childcare and that's because the first team parent after, in the year after her son was born participated in a team process without any support. And so I just wanna recognize that that was a blind spot of the team and we're trying to, and Roberto was talking about blind spots before and we're trying to think more in the future about like how do we avoid learning from a mistake and instead just like learn proactively. But in terms of our funding for childcare stipends and so we, as Libby mentioned, offer a childcare stipend, it's $250 a week for any caregiving artist in addition to any other supports that we might be able to provide. But it started off with my predecessor, Amanda Martin with help from Lucy Jackson, started putting it, putting this line item in our touring budget. So when we tour we ask a presenting partner to offer us a fee for, to cover our expenses of bringing the show to their house. And so we would put childcare as a separate line item and ask them to pay us for that. And what, or what Amanda and Lucy encountered was that some theaters were totally excited and on board with it. Some were not, they got specific pushback against it and some just wanted us to hide it. So like bury it in another line item, just don't break it out because as we've been talking about of not wanting to set a precedent. And so that continued for a little while, specifically with the tour of our show, Rosa Valves that Libby was a key player in. And eventually there was this desire to, in cases where the presenting partner is pushing back and we're not in control of what this budget is and in the same way as we would be on a development where we're doing the fundraising to cover the expenses, how do we have like an emergency fund to cover childcare expenses? And so Amanda made a strategic ask to a donor of ours who herself had put her artistic career on hold to raise her kids to start us off with a major donation for this temporarily restricted fund to cover childcare in moments of emergency. And she did and then became a true champion for helping us to raise more money to put in that fund. And now we continue to fundraise separately for that fund. So if you're making a donation to the team on our website, there's two different buttons you can press. You can say I want to donate to the general fund or I want to donate to the childcare fund. And it has been the easiest thing in the whole wide world to fundraise for because I think that so many people who we talk to have had these experiences in their past of not being supported and are truly delighted that we are trying to do what we can to support our artists. So in our end of year campaign, for example, we send out a series of E-blasts asking people for money. And always every year we include one of those E-blasts that is specifically focused on childcare and specifically directs people to the childcare fund. Always it is our most clicked E-blast and our most donated to. And at our gala when we do the inevitable cash call that we all hate to do, there's always one of the donor levels that we ask people to donate is that $250 because that will pay for one week of childcare stipends. And it's always like the most hand raises at that moment. And I always have people like friends of mine who come up to me saying, oh my God, Ali, I just wrote a check for $250 that I can't really afford, but oh my God, I love so much that you guys support childcare. And not wanting to put people out of their houses and homes, but we appreciate the sentiment. And for context, Ariana, our conversation yesterday pushed me to look at our numbers. And similarly, so in our fiscal of 19, we spent $4,593 on childcare. And that was 1.6% of our budget the year before, very similar percentage. And so the percentage is so small and we have this flexible way of fundraising and accounting for it. And there are also so many ways in which we are supported by friends in ways that are not monetary. So for example, the hotel that we were putting up artists at this summer upstate, when I told them, I have an artist who's bringing her child and her father to care for the child. They gave us an apartment style room instead of a regular sized room for no additional cost. And I'm always surprised by how much people wanna help us in this effort. The other thing I will say is that we have been trying to expand the program. So now the language we use around it, although on our website it still says childcare fund, but we're trying to use the language around caregiving so that it can include people who are caring for a parent, et cetera. And we try and talk about it as the first step in any language, any communication that we're having with an artist. So if we're doing an availability check of an artist to see if they might be free to participate in a gig, we give them the salary information about what that gig is gonna pay and we tell them that the childcare stipend is available if they have caregiving responsibilities right up front. And for us that's about respecting an artist's time because time as money is a problematic phrase, but that the time an artist might take to figure out if they are available and to schedule the time to talk about the gig, to audition for the gig and then be told the terms and realize that they're not sustainable for them. To not give that information up front is not respecting their time and devaluing their time. So we're also trying to look forward about how we can continue to do better. I think Ariana's language about it being an individualized question for each person is something that we're trying to live into because equity and equality are not the same thing. Everyone's needs are different. So we've been trying to put specific language that Powell has been advising on in that information on the caregiving stipend. This is a starting point. Also please feel free to talk to us about what additional needs you might have around caregiving and we can see what we can do to address them and sometimes we can help and sometimes there are things that we just can't do. But really usually I'm always surprised by how very reasonable and not reasonable as a bad word but like how possible the requests are. We're trying to think forward about when we're on tour, much like ERS about how to bring our presenting partners on as partners in the childcare situation. So asking our partners to research things on the ground that might be helpful and fun for kids that we're bringing to do. To ask about instead of like putting a child in a sterile daycare center to ask about like are there baby sitters in your community who are doing mission aligned work who can take care for some of our children. We're also trying to think how to support the parent as well as just the child when we're on tour. So for example, when we're at home there might be after rehearsal one day the entire cast decides to go see a show and if you're at home you might have a support system to like a parent nearby or a partner or someone to help you be able to do that above and beyond the standard workday. But on tour you don't necessarily have that support system nearby. So how can we the team be that support system when we're on the road? And finally the last thing that I will say is also putting the conversation front and center. So we have a new program called the Petrie Projects where we invite like broad range of artists who have worked with us in many different capacities to bring a show to us that we can like fund the seedling of like early development on. And so we have, I have individual conversations with each proposing artist about like what they want to accomplish, how to budget for that. And every single time we have this conversation I ask if there are any of the collaborators that they wanna work with who have caregiving responsibilities. And who so that we can prepare for that. And I'm shocked by how many times someone who I've been speaking to about this has said, oh, you know I don't know. And I hadn't really thought about that or not right now, but now that you mentioned that there's this person who I know who has a kid and wouldn't normally do it. But now that you have like these supports in place they might be willing to work with me on this. And like the light bulb goes off. And it's really exciting and always surprising how invisible this conversation can be outside of spaces like this. So thank you, pal, for making it more visible. Thank you for doing it. Okay, I've been doing really well. I thought this would happen much earlier. Crying. Thank you for sharing. And just to like do a numbers comparison because both of these incredible ensembles are so well respected, I've been so grateful that you're being transparent about these percentages because so many times when you talk about childcare in a budgeting conversation, like everyone in the room tenses up who doesn't really understand what that access means because to them they have to pay for all the childcare of all the people in the world. And then the numbers skyrocket and they're like, we can't do that. But if you consider the childcare of your organization if you still think if you're doing the numbers in your head and you're like, there are a lot of kids in this organization, we're gonna set a precedent, we can't afford all that childcare and you're a large organization with donors who are looking to give you money, then you should also flip that understanding and say if you can't afford it as an organization, your parents probably can't afford it as individuals either. And so that's the accountability that we have to have. When we're looking at our numbers, it's not just the numbers of our organization that we have to make sustainable. If we want a high retention rate, if we want people to feel valuable, we also have to think of sustainability in terms of individual contributors. So to be transparent with my own numbers, I was recently contracted on a regional gig with one of the highest paying contracts. And the percentage of my paycheck that went to it, if I, because I kept my day job going while I did the show. So I had one of the highest regional contracts in the country and I had a full-time day job that I work remotely and got paychecks for on a bi-weekly basis. At the end of tech week, my bank account was $9. So, and this is someone who comes from a privileged place as an artist, as an individual in spaces, I have all the advantage in the world and my number is nine. So I know that with all of that advantage, if the number is nine, since we're so good at numbers, all these people who are terrified of these budgets, we need to look at these numbers and say, if the advantage number is nine, how can we approve upon that? Because when we take it on as an organization, actually the percentage is much lower of the cost impact of the organization than it is of the individual. That's just the reality because under 2%, and let's say $8,000 a year is very gettable when you have donors, but when it's almost 100% of your weekly paycheck, that's impossible. And when we ask the question, let's continue to connect this because we don't talk about this in a vacuum. When we connect it to the conversation of why is our field hemorrhaging women specifically? Why is our field hemorrhaging women of color? Why is our field hemorrhaging black women? Why don't they make it to positions of leadership? Do they need more mentors? Maybe yes, and also they need intentional financial support for the community to go back to our first conversation about this being a human rights issue, for the community to say you deserve to thrive while you raise your family because you're part of our institution. So thank you for sharing that. And we're going to move on to Michael who has also created a budget and a fund opportunity that we're very excited about and I would love to hear your origin story now as well. Sure, happy to share. It started about, hi everyone, hi. Hi, about two years ago I was in our theater, it was one of the first shows I had done at WP and two of the artists that we were working with had young children that they had brought with them but were sort of hyper cautious about how that child might impact process. Real tentative about asking for the things that they needed and as a parent myself I started thinking we should, there should be a conversation that we're having about this. Why does it feel so tentative? Why do they feel afraid to ask for the things that they need in terms of support? And then I was at a conference about a year and a half ago and I sat in on a session that Rachel was giving on Pal and she said a bunch of things that started resonating really, really strongly with me. Like one of the things she said was there, one of the roadblocks to providing the support is people feeling afraid to ask for the support. So what's a way that you can solve that issue and very simply put the challenge out to the group and said make the resource, then tell people you have it before they have to ask you for it and they will stop being afraid about asking because they will see that you have been thoughtful about what you're willing to put into the mix and how you're utilizing resource. And they're things, I mean the very specifically things that were zero cost. Literally things that I was outgrowing as a parent with my little kids that I said I'm just gonna throw this in a car and put it in my space and make a list and when someone, when I know that someone has a kid I'm gonna say oh by the way we have all these resources that are available and I'm trying to be even more front footed about not needing to know whether someone has a kid or not but saying to every single person that we work with we have these resources, they are available. If you need them they're here for us if you need something different communicate with us and we'll figure it out. Simplistic things like a pack and play. Like bulky things that you cannot bring with you everywhere you go. You should bring your child and a diaper bag and everything else we wanna try and have on site and be able to say we have those resources available. They're here for you to use as necessary and we're a teeny tiny theater with a teeny tiny theater space and it still just felt like this is an easy step that I can take to signal to the artist I'm working with and that I wanna work with that there's resource there and that we as an institution are trying to be thoughtful about how we can provide that type of support. And then she made a second challenge which gave me a lot more pause but has turned out to be great which was allocate some budget. Figure out a way to put a dollar amount aside doesn't matter what it is, how big or small it is and then begin a process of offering that out to the artists and see what kind of response you got. So this last year when I was making my budget last March I just put $5,000 aside and I said this is gonna be a childcare fund and I have no idea if it's gonna be anywhere near enough once we start engaging with the artists. This is basically the point at which I knew what the roles were gonna be in the shows that we were doing so I had no idea who the human beings might be that would fill those roles. And so I was very, very nervous about it. I called her a bunch of times and I was like I'm insecure about offering artists this money because I know the need is so far beyond the resource I have and that I've only allocated the small amount of money which for if we're putting numbers is 0.002% of my budget. It is a small or 0.02% of my budget. Do the numbers. It was a very small amount of money given the whole and it was something that I didn't have to reduce a different expense category to provide. I just said I'm just gonna put this in here and it's gonna work out because it's gonna work out. And another thing that it's really important I think to mention is that I'm the decision maker and when faced with the question of who at the institution can make the change I said that is me. That is my job to do and while I did not have that resource when I was having kids I always wish I did and I wish that people were reaching out to me and saying here's the thing that we can do for you and so I decided and I think that's it's an important statement to say it's just getting the person who is the decision maker to say we're gonna do a thing and that sounds easy when you say it out loud and becomes more difficult in practice but it doesn't have to be much. You're not looking for $50,000 that you can distribute to people all year long unless you're a really giant organization you're looking for a small amount of money that can say I've tried to be thoughtful about this. I've tried to think in advance hear the things that I'm gonna try and provide to this group of people and signal to the community we are here to support you as an artist in this process and so at the beginning of the year I sent on our first production I sent an email to every single person that was working on the show including the 18 year old crew members and got such a volume of response that it was overwhelming but of the volume of response I got only two people on the entire team actually asked for a thing. I had a couple of people who said this is amazing I have an 18 year old who runs the household more than I do and I don't need that money but I'm so excited to know that it exists that is an incredible gesture and I had younger people in the show who were saying this is an amazing thing it just makes me reflect back on the institution in such an amazing and a positive way I wanna encourage people to work there I wanna tell people what a great experience that we're having and I had two people ask for money and when I gave them money they were weeping they were so full of gratitude not because the money actually offsets real world expenses but the way that it was presented was I'm trying to be thoughtful I don't know what your additional expenses are gonna be during tech week but let's presume you have some I wanna help cover that costs and here's 500 bucks and both of the people that got that money were extraordinarily moved and have you know that's the artist community I wanna make is for those folks to come back to me and say I'll do any job I wanna work for you again because at the end of the day you're at least being conscious and thinking what are the needs of the community what are the needs of the artist that I wanna wrap my arms around and so of my $5,000 fund I'm halfway through my year and I've only used $1,000 of it and I feel kind of incredible about that and I'm ready to offer that now in a more broad way to a more wide group of people and also making the conscious choice of echoing what a couple other leaders have said I wanna present that information to people when I'm first talking to them I wanna say to them here is the paltry fee that I can pay you because that's what I can afford but I have this other fund if your inability to say yes to this job is because the fee isn't high enough and your parent and your childcare needs are gonna go up here's a pot of money that I can allocate towards that because that shouldn't be the roadblock to you making art with this institution I want you to say yes I want you to go for it and I wanna support you however we can and so far I mean I'm literally my big toes in the water so far it's been amazing. Thank you, thank you. I'd love to hear from Garlia and then we'll move to Roberta and just so you know our close Q and A is our lunchtime session I just want you all to engage with each other after we hear from these two stories but Garlia I would love to hear I'm not using my microphone I consider Garlia a ground breaker in and of herself like for over a decade of her work with Blackboard plays probably longer sorry if I'm off on the numbers but it's extraordinary and then to also be the recipient of our own paltry amounts like we are only in our second year of our childcare grants which for anyone watching or anyone in this room applications are open and are open until December 15th individuals can apply and institutions for match grants if you want to create that budget line we want to help you with that but for us to say we have such a micro grant but we believe in your work we want to help like this because it also taught our organization about who this artist was I read her resume and was floored but I had not heard of her yet and I was also angry so I would just love to hear your origin story as a parent in your experience and then in the context of like what's been shared so far thank you Rachel and I'll promise there'll probably be tears as well so I've been in this space at this institution for almost a year and so when I applied for the the Papel grant I was on the edge of like final interviews and wondering where my future would lie and so when I received it it was at this very crazy time where I was both in this space of being a sole provider and then also like being here and my kids are in school and I'm like I have this paycheck which is a salary which I've been a freelance artist forever so that was like wow there's real dollars but then it's like oh there's childcare that's gone I mean you know what I mean so there's that and then it's like oh it's so there's so many things so when you talk about the nine dollars when you talk about the banks I know how to call chase and get you know fees reversed and those are real things that I think people don't talk about they're exposing but they're also true and so that grant kind of got me through at least a few weeks of childcare when I first really started this job and that was huge and just really and you know the times before, before you know so I started this series called Blackboard is for Blackfoot a playwright and we used to be we were with this one institution for about 10 year years of the cell and it was just it was a really be beautiful time to build both this support for Black a playwright and then also being a very very small institution but that was with moms and women women women women women women and so I was learning as the the artistic director there had her first child and was figuring out you know childcare and strollers and all these things I'm just like seeing all that she's going to go going through and thinking oh my god it's going to cost so much money and what's going to happen so you know I didn't know it was going to happen so I think a couple years later I was you know I got married and I was pregnant and then I was like what's going to what's going to happen here so just figuring all of that out and then ended up being being home and I stayed home and I stayed home until I got this job but through that time when I say this job I mean at this institution not specifically with that pal but over that time being home I just I took my kids everywhere and I was also I had a lot of fear about applying for a job because there wouldn't be the fun for childcare and so every time that my for a partner and I would kind of discuss it was it was okay well this salary is going to equate everything that we would have to pay for childcare so I might as well just stay home that's what I did I just stayed home but I did my best to be very active I'm a photographer you're seeing here so I photograph for a lot of theater and I still do and I also you know because I had both a blackboard which has been making space for black playwrights for 11 years now we worked with everyone and I feel like at this point but we gave Jocelyn BPO the first reading of school girls and then Jordan Cooper had the first reading of Aino Moe in our series and then it was really exciting when Jordan had a full production of Aino Moe at the public and I started the public at the same time I was like wow this is just really cool so those have been some really full circle moments with this with my experience but I had kids during all of those like I won an OB award with Harlem Nine so Harlem Nine is a group where a group of six black producers and we produced 48 hours in Harlem and then we also expanded to the Bronx and then we also last year won a foundation grant to do it in my hometown in Detroit so we went back to Detroit this summer and so we'll go back this next summer so we've been doing that so in like 2014 we won an OB award for our workers or producers and I was like nine and a half months pregnant and so I said to my child I said don't you dare come out when we get this award so we're sitting there at the OBs and I'm like just about to have a baby and I feel moving and I'm like uh-uh, and I go yeah and then a week later I gave birth on the sidewalk so yes it's a true story I wrote it in the New York Times you can go and Google it it really did occur but also right before I gave birth like a couple hours before I was at a meeting for Harlem Nine like just hanging out and a waddling like I was about to give birth and so my daughter was on my lap my kids have literally been through all this creative work because that was the only option I really had like if your other partner is a war working and you're gonna do your side projects which are not so side like an OB award isn't a side thing you just get you know so I just went and got one so you know through so like all of this I you know I literally drop kids on the sidewalk I'm gonna pick them up and I just keep on moving and so it's been the way for me to have my children but I also I did apply for jobs at institutions throughout that time and just hope and pray that the dollar amount would be something I could say okay I can figure out child care but it was always not something and so it's really like to hear the institutions of now are really advocating and making actual space for those things when you know in like 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12 that really wasn't the case and all of us are having our kids in hospitals or sidewalks and just really you know fearful I mean I was always fearful like I'm gonna have a job but then that means you know what does that mean? I mean when I see when I saw the child care space child care space upstairs it's like I just I think about all like I think of all the years I walked around this city with my ergo and my stroller and my kids and my nursing with my kids for like two and a half years and all the meetings I had and like taking them to theater and asking friends could they like my friends are fantastic they've been my free child care and sometimes they would refuse payment and help me in other ways but that community I built is literally the only way I got through all those years and then all of those experiences helped to put me here in this institute to do the work that I've been doing here which has a whole set of its own challenges as I've been working for Black and Black organizations all of this time so that's a whole other set of things so how does one human kind of balance both of those things? We can often follow up you know that is the challenge and question but so I mean so I just applied any institution that's making space for child care funds and I know that the grant I received was like if like and I would also say that just because you have a full-time job does not mean that those grants are not needed I think they're needed they're just as you're not gonna I'm not gonna say that someone who's working from home doesn't need it as much they are just as important I had this dream when my daughter when I had my first child that she would sit on a play mat and I would do all my work and I said I said oh it'll be great she has this high chair she's sitting there with a little toy and I will work all day and I was like that's happening why is it happening? Thank you, thank you Incredible Roberta is our final piece but we actually have a community session coming up in Ari community session coming up we're already over are you able to stay through lunch are you able to stay through lunch? we have time after lunch in our community session we just also need to allow parents to connect with their children in the childcare space right now please engage with each other over lunch we're gonna invite you two back to share our first in the community session I just want to highlight a few things before we sign out go on to HowlRound and find the series that was curated this week Nicole Brewer is one of the authors of a piece in there and also Mickey Rowe and Sally Lobel who are incredible artists and they also advocate for theater artists who have disabilities and we talk about interconnected access in PAL and that means creating access that applies to a larger group of people such as more humane work schedules stipends for major life events people who have elder care responsibilities and also PAL is interested in partnering with the National Disability Theater and other advocates to say you know for me as a pregnant woman I went a year knowing that the world was not made for my body and that was just one year and it made me a passionate advocate to say like how are we creating our spaces for people who have mobility that is different than mine so check out interconnected access check out those HowlRound article pieces and also just to speak up for parents who have children with disabilities who aren't able to bring them into the space or bring them into the office even if that's an offer we are going to be hosting forums to have conversations in how to create support if a parent has a child with disabilities because that is a unique circumstance that deserves just as much value and investment so that they can be welcome participants so thank you so much for joining us online enjoy your lunch, connect with each other we're coming back at 1.20 so thank you so much now you can clap, good, yay thank you so much