This email was sent to Spektrix users across all of the organizations we work with on Friday 5 June 2020.
We have spent the days since the killing of George Floyd listening to the pain and frustration being expressed by Black people across all of the communities we serve. This has opened us up to the realization that we have not done enough as a company to rectify the inequities faced by Black people.
We are committing to play an active role in dismantling systemic racism and anti-Black bias as an employer, as a tech company and as a partner to the arts sector across all the nations where we work.
Two years ago we set our target for diversity and inclusion within our team: to reflect the diversity of the great cities we work from: New York, London, and Manchester. We have made some progress, but we acknowledge it has not been nearly enough. We know it takes energy, focus, resource and commitment and not just policies and good intentions.
Both the technology and arts sectors are historically poor performers in workforce diversity. We haven’t worked hard enough or creatively enough to solve this problem. We are committing to prioritize improving our own recruitment and to playing a part in supporting an overall more diverse workforce in both the tech and arts sectors long term. We are committing to ensuring the work we do to improve diversity in our team explicitly includes a focus on recruiting Black people.
The lack of diversity in the arts sector, both in terms of audiences and workforce, has been a well-documented problem for a very, very long time in all of the communities we serve. This state of affairs simply cannot continue and we are determined to do what we can to break down the barriers which exclude so many from opportunities.
Supporting arts organizations to develop the broadest possible audiences is our mission. But again, good intentions are not enough, so we are taking action to address the audience diversity problem with the tools we have. These include aggregate data, analysis, and reporting and the know-how to apply these to build and maintain audiences.
To make lasting change in the sector we want to champion the development of an appropriate and effective measure of audience composition.
Many in our sector are doing great work to bring in diverse audiences. To celebrate and emulate these successes and to highlight where we must improve, it is vital we can point to, and report on clear data about audience composition. Without targets and measurement accountability for making positive change is exceedingly difficult.
To do this, we are building a working group, supported by experts in measuring diversity from other sectors alongside the arts organizations we work with, to tackle this issue. This group will commence later this summer - please contact one of us to register your interest.
Michael Nabarro
CEO & Co-founder
michael.nabarro@spektrix.com
Mike Geller
President, US & Canada
mike.geller@spektrix.com
Spektrix is a partner in the Tech in Culture EDI Alliance