SMPC Anti-Racism Call for First Equity Officer
Last week members of SMPC got an email for several board positions, one of which is the new Equity Officer (a recently converted member at large). According to the email the responsibilities of the position are to:
As current chair of the Anti-Racism and Equity Committee I see it as very important to make sure that the nomination committee has a large pool of applicants to chose from. So to encourage some self nominations and give clarity as to what this position actually entails, here are a few reasons you might be interested:
Firstly, this is resource rich position relative to the size of the organization.
What this means in practice is that for the past three years, the committee has had access to both the personal and financial means to move ideas forward. The current committee has eight people on it from various points in their career and self-declared demographic backgrounds.
Unlike some organizations that seem to only have candidates for board positions list academic accolades (hence turning it into a popularity contest in my opinion, perpetuating any latent power structures within a community), to be elected for this position (and positions on this committee), you need to lead with both your own positionality and also detail what you envision to do while serving.
As a result of this selection process, we have thus far ended up with a motivated group of people who provide diverse perspectives and have access to the money to make things happens.
Seconds, these things you can make happen can then be the meaningful structural changes you wish to see in the society. Following SMPC’s editorial in Music Perception, the Executive Board and Anti-Racism and Equity Committee identified eight specific goals we wanted to accomplish that we thought would move us to being a more anti-racist society.
This included items such as
- creating funding opportunities for under-represented members ,
- tracking demographic information of our society so we actually know what underrepresented means for us,
- coordinate the special session at our recent conference in Portland,
- updating our Code of Conducts, as well as a
- few other initiatives like starting an entire mentoring committee.
We have since accomplished each point and are now in the process of documenting how to run the ship in order to enable whoever takes the reigns next has every opportunity to succeed. We’re also trying our best to carve out some language to lessen some of the emotional labor can come with positions like this (drafting timely, sensitive statements in response to events of national tragedy) and brainstorm new areas of work that seem viable.
I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have about this role! We highly encourage self-nominations as well as nomination people who you think might be a good fit for this role.
Only a subset of the current committee members will be rotating off, so we will preserve some continuity and I will be making myself available to help in the transition for a few months to ensure that whoever is the next chair is properly on-boarded.
Please get in touch, the nominations are due in two weeks!