Dear Friends,
We, the staff of HMD—Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero—write this as team.
For many months we have been imagining a different future for HMD. We share this news not as a form of virtue signaling, but to be transparent about how we're aligning our internal structures with the cultural and racial equity values that drive our public programs.
There is no such thing as a race-neutral arts organization; every arts organization is producing either racial inequity or equity. HMD was founded and has been led by a white woman since 2008. For white-led organizations, a commitment to institutional re-structuring is an essential step in becoming a fully inclusive, anti-racist, multicultural organization. As HMD’s programs have become increasingly driven by a commitment to cultural and racial equity, it has become clear that there is a pressing need for the organization to evolve toward distributed leadership and increase artist ownership over programmatic decisions. Only in this way will we align our internal structures with the values that drive our programs.
This is about more than perfunctory title changes. It's about going beyond the optics of diversity or handing out checks to artists of color. It's a sea change in organizational culture.
We're committed to questioning our relationships to time, efficiency, and control: an ensemble makes decisions more slowly than a soloist. We're committed to challenging logics of self-interest and scarcity. We're committed to greater transparency with artists about budgets and funding.
We are taking action toward distributed leadership through the following steps:
The Bridge Project is now co-directed and co-curated by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero.
We’ll be working with LeaderSpring, an equity-driven consulting group, to help us navigate these shifts mindfully.
We're moving away from the traditional model of a non-profit Board and re-imagining a Board that builds bridges between artists, activists, and professionals in other sectors.
We’re bringing artists into decisionmaking roles in our programs; for example, by bringing former Community Engagement Residency lead artists onto the selection panel for future CER lead artists.
We're implementing pay equity among staff.
Organizations tend to calcify. Like skilled dancers, we must constantly re-awaken ourselves to respond to a changing world.
We do this work to re-align our intentions and our organization with collective liberation. We do this work to give power to artists and artists of color. We welcome dialogue about this work so we can grow together.
In community,
Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero