“JPA. is built on the pillars of storytelling — craft, a unique voice, and lived experiences. That’s why we’re human-driven and tech-supported, not the other way around.”
We are grounded in being journey-driven. We focus on the long game, embracing progress, resilience, and adaptability. Every step forward has value — because storytelling is how individuals, businesses, and industries evolve.
We exist to serve historically overlooked communities by building tools, systems, and platforms that unlock access. Our purpose challenges the status quo, centers equity, and creates new pathways for inclusive growth — in storytelling, business, and beyond.
Authenticity is our anchor. We reflect the world truthfully and reject all forms of discrimination. By honoring lived experience and centering equity, we foster trust and build relationships rooted in integrity — especially when it matters most.
The following represents the values and 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, organizations, 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 that the way we go about doing that job might seem a little different from how 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 VALUES & COMMITMENTS
We are committed to collaborating with our fellow team members to assemble talent, creatives, and personnel 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 all parties involved with a project 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 all parties for success and allow them to present their best work. For example, providing adequate preparation time, clear communication about project scope, and resources that enable meaningful contribution.
ACTION STEPS 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 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, 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 that 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 livable wages that affirm their value and contributions to the collaboration process.
LIMITATIONS, EXPECTATIONS & MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS
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 creative processes and collaborative spaces. We hope this makes a significant impact on the culture in all creative and collaborative environments.
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 that 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 continuing to move toward these ideals and invite you to use the feedback systems we’re putting in place to help us hold ourselves accountable.