Arts & Culture Roundtables
Thank you for your interest in Arts & Culture Roundtables. We will be back in the Fall 2022 with a new Roundtable series. Please check back!
Two Part Roundtable Series with Ayisha Elliott, Recordings
We encourage you to watch this series with presenter Ayisha Elliott.
Together we explored a conversation around white savior complex and where our relationships to privilege can complicate our intentions and our collective impact. In this two-part series, Ayisha, skilled in creating spaces where vulnerability, honesty, and courage can thrive, provided essential reflection and inquiry to support all attendees in understanding the deep and layered relationship of privilege and racism.
Ayisha Elliott, Facilitator
Ayisha Elliott is an award winning writer, a motivational speaker, race equity educator, small business consultant, and the founder of Kids for the Culture, formerly Black Gold Culture Camp. She has designed her work as a direct response to the cultural gap in diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. She focuses her approach on aligning intention to impact. For over 25 years, Ayisha’s distinctively unique approach to this work has created, engaged, and successfully facilitated a developmental understanding of a deeply personal connection to race, equity, and inclusion in both local and national health care systems, as well as state level government sectors and local nonprofits. Her current work continues to focus on aligning intention to impact while lending a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens through consultations, lectures, and training series for small businesses. She is the exclusive content producer for her original podcast: Black Girl from Eugene.
Maree Beers, Artistic Experience Facilitator (Part I)
Ratie D, Artistic Experience Facilitator (Part II)
The arts are an integral and powerful tool in helping communities reflect, grow, and heal, but first, we need to examine how our local arts community excludes some of the most relevant voices. The roundtable series began with two community-guided conversations to get a sense of the perceptions and realities within our arts community. Following roundtables have been planned in response to the needs that arose from those initial conversations. Ultimately, we hope participants will gain new perspectives and information, find inspiration to create change in their organizations and communities, and garner a newfound connection with other artists and arts professionals for support and resource-sharing.
Arts & Culture Roundtables are planned in response to the larger need to address harmful systems of power. It is our responsibility to acknowledge our community’s history and actively gather to have courageous conversations about its current state of exclusion, inclusivity, and representation. Through this series of roundtables, we want to better understand and acknowledge the inequalities that exist in Lane County’s arts community. We are striving to:
- Take an honest look at the issues and challenges in our own arts communities
- Identify strategies to improve equity, accessibility, and representation in our own practices, programs, operations, and organizational cultures
- Recognize gaps and identify existing resources and support for artists and arts professionals
- Cultivate space for the voices of black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and other underrepresented community members to be heard
Previous Roundtable Topics & Presenters Included:
- Roundtable Kickoff Community Conversations, led by Ritu Roy and Eric Braman
- Empowered Spaces – a Panel Discussion with BIPOC Artists and Advocates, led by Michael Najjar
- Finding Our Why, led by by Sarai Johnson
The 2021 Arts & Culture Roundtables are a partnership of Lane Arts Council, Arts & Business Alliance of Eugene, Florence Regional Arts Alliance, Minority Voices Theatre, and Wordcrafters in Eugene, and sponsored by Columbia Bank, Springfield Arts Commission, and City of Eugene Cultural Services.
Please consider a donation to support the continuation of these vital conversations.
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Please contact Eric Braman at eric@lanearts.org with any questions.