The following is representative of the values and the commitments we’re making as creative professionals, individuals, and professional entities. We hope that the sharing of these values and actions provides clarity and accountability, and we invite you to use them as a tool for measuring compatibility.
We acknowledge that we’re hired by producers, agencies, and brands, and intend to do the job for which they have hired us, and we will do it very well. We also want to acknowledge the way we go about doing that job might seem a little different than it has in the past - we invite you to think of this as a good thing and to ask questions about our methodology at any point along the way. We hope these statements will encourage more fruitful and more meaningful collaboration.
We are committed to using our positionality to work with our fellow team members to create equitable spaces and create an experience that centers the shared humanity of all those involved in the workflow process. We are centralizing and sharing this information in the hope of creating public accountability.
OUR CORE VALUES & COMMITMENTS
We are committed to collaborating with our fellow team members to assemble talent that present an accurate depiction of our world and to advocate for those in historically marginalized communities. For example, continuing to check if the process has fallen into “white as default” or “whiteness as neutral” thinking - as we know that the global majority is not white and that whiteness is not neutral.
We are committed to developing anti-discriminatory practices that can be realistically upheld, while creating a lasting and impactful safeguard.
We are committed to increasing transparency in the collaboration process by keeping talent, talent representatives, and team members updated throughout the collaboration process and upon its completion, as best we can.
We are committed to centering the dignity and personhood of all those engaged in the collaboration process. This means using our positionality to empower talent and team members by advocating for timelines and additional mechanics of the collaboration process that will set up talent and team members for success and allow them to present their best work.
ACTIONS WE’RE TAKING
We are committed to establishing, supporting, and maintaining a feedback loop that can generate honest suggestions, create accountability, and be a tool for engaging in harm reduction, harm prevention, and relationship repair.
We are committed to creating intentional environments that dismantle unhelpful power dynamics present in current creative processes. This includes setting up virtual and in-person rooms in ways that don’t put entire creative teams behind a barrier of tables, as well as being mindful of the energy we share with all those involved in the process - talent, creative team members, etc.
We are committed to asking more questions and pushing through the fear of speaking up and/or dissent and/or making mistakes, in order to remain actively engaged in anti-racism and anti-bias work.
We are committed to de-centering ourselves and allowing space for others to speak up, especially when this will be of greater service to the collaboration process and reflects we all have something to offer.
We are committed to supporting an environment of continued learning for fellow creative and business professionals. Colleagues are exponentially more valuable as co-conspirators and allies than as competition, and in the end, information-hoarding only convolutes everyone’s path towards success.
We are committed to fully appreciating the generosity of talent, our collaborators and the costs of the creative process, many of which go beyond financial hurdles.
We are committed to making time and honoring time with talent and creative team members.
We are committed to advocating for fair wages across the board. We must support the hard work of interns, assistants, associates, etc. with liveable wages that affirm their value and contributions to the collaboration process.
We acknowledge that there is no uniformly accepted standard for ethics within the creative profession. While we cannot force others to adopt this modality, we can lead by example, encouraging an ongoing conversation of how we can reinforce humanity in our respective audition rooms and creative processes. We hope this makes a significant impact on the culture in rehearsal/performance spaces and on sets.
We acknowledge that creative professionals have varying degrees of influence over certain aspects of the collaboration process. As we work to have more autonomy in our own processes, we will simultaneously advocate for environments which serve and empower those who are consistently in less empowered positions, such as actors, as well as assistants and interns, etc.
We acknowledge that for independent creative professionals and offices under a certain size, the list of duties are myriad, and often must be accomplished by one or two people. The ability to implement the kinds of practices named above would likely necessitate extra time, more staff, more appropriate financial compensation, and/or any combination of these. As a result, our progress might be slower than we would like, but we commit to continue moving toward these ideals and invite you to use the feedback systems we’re putting in place to help us hold ourselves accountable.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The above values and action statements represent ideals we are working toward as individuals and ideals we hope to encourage our colleagues to work toward, as well. Our goal in doing so is to create a more equitable industry and more equitable spaces for all involved in the collaboration process.
This document is a work in progress, and we look forward to collaborating with our colleagues to continue moving our field toward a more equitable modality, with a refreshed focus on being of service to both our fellow creative team members and talent alike.
