What do we mean when we say community? 🤔
Part of the “Soothing the Itch” Series
by Sarah Lewitus
Conrhonda
Hello GIA listener!
In a world awash with buzzwords like ‘community’ and ‘diversity,’ arts funders find themselves at a crossroads. What do these terms truly mean, and are we using them effectively to drive change and equity in arts funding?
In her article, Sarah Lewitus digs into the nuanced layers of these words and their impact. Welcome on a journey to reevaluate our communication and challenge racial coding. Prepare to learn how we can bridge the gap between rhetoric and action.
Sarah
What do we mean when we say community? How about diverse?
The job of an arts funder is to give out money to artists and arts organizations. This article is written by an arts funder, so in this article, the word “we” describes arts funders.
We use words like community and diverse a lot. These words are buzzwords, which means they are very popular. Some places we might use these words are:
Strategic plans: A process to outline the goals of an organization.
Narrative questions: A story someone writes to apply for grants.
Annual reports: A summary of how much a company makes and spends in one year.
Social media campaigns: A series of messages an organization shares through social media.
When we use words like community and diverse, we don’t always mean the same things. But it is important to be specific about what we mean when we use these words. The reason this is important is so everyone can understand our goals for social justice: making sure everyone has access to the resources we have to offer. But sometimes, we don’t do a good job of being specific and clear.
Other people might have a different definition of the words: community, diverse, and social justice. This means the work we are doing might not be understood. It is important to communicate openly and clearly to the people we work with, including:
Grantmakers: organizations that provide money for grants.
Grantees: People or organizations who receive grants.
Boards: A group of people who are responsible for managing an organization.
Funders: Organizations that give money for a specific topic or purpose.
We do not need to use a dictionary to define a buzzword every time we use it. But people should be able to easily understand what we mean when we use buzzwords. The words we choose are important so everyone understands our goals for change and equity in arts funding.
If the meaning of the words we use is not understandable, we can’t communicate about what we are doing or want to be doing. Buzzwords can have different meanings based on how they are used.
For example, the word community can describe:
A group of people from the same place.
A group of people who share something similar about who they are.
Or a mixture of both.
For another example, the word diversity can describe:
Many differences between people or things.
Or one specific way people are different from one another, like race, gender, or disability.
There are many ways to use buzzwords correctly. Many different ways of using words can be powerful if the meaning is clear.
If the meaning is not clear, it can be confusing and even misleading. Even worse, using words without clear meaning can show that the person or organization using the word doesn’t have a good understanding of the relationship between what they think the word means and the work they are doing. They use the word instead of thinking about what the word represents or how it connects to what they do every day.
Maybe we know that we should use these words when we talk about our work because we hear other people using them. So we use them too, even though the way we do our work might not match up with the words we use to talk about our work.
Sometimes arts funders use buzzwords to represent ideas related to the race of a person or group of people. Here are some examples:
A staff member is hired, and their title has the word “community” in it. It is their job to manage programming designed to serve only communities of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color (BIPOC), even though the job description was not specific about the communities the position would work with.
A colleague uses “community” as an abbreviation for “communities of color” within an organization, but nobody explains this abbreviation out loud.
A board of mostly-white people at an organization of mostly-white people sets a goal to diversify their board. But they only think about racial diversity when looking for new board members
When picking a group of people to serve on a grant panel, an arts funder says they want the panel to be diverse. But they only think about racial diversity when picking panelists.
Coded language means that when a speaker says one thing, they expect the listener to understand something else. When arts funders talk about an idea related to race without saying that we are talking about race, that is racial coding. Arts funders often want to talk about race without saying out loud that we are talking about race.
We feel like we are supposed to use these words, so we use them. But sometimes, we use coded language as a replacement for a bigger idea: to talk about race without thinking about the reasons why there is racial inequality in arts funding and in the world, and what power we have to do something about this inequity.
When arts funders say community we mean communities of color, or diverse when we mean BIPOC or nonwhite, as outlined in the examples above, we may not know that we are practicing racial coding through our language. This is because the words community and diversity have become the status quo, or “the way it is”, in the arts funding world.
But “the way it is” has been harmful for many people for a long time. So, using language in a way that keeps things “the way it is” can mean that we don’t know how to make a change for the better, with our words or with our actions.
How can we do a better job using our words and our actions to share our goals? How can we make changes to the ways we distribute funding so our resources reach people who don’t usually have a chance to receive funding from our organizations?
If we use our imaginations to think about how the work we do as arts funders can make positive change from “the way it is,” we'll find better words to describe our work.
We need to give context to buzzwords like community and diversity when we choose to use them. Even if we find new words, they may become very popular over time. If that happens we might have to find new words all over again so that they are clear and meaningful to our goals.
The words we use are important. We must pair meaningful words with meaningful goals. Language is one tool for how we think about and share these goals as they change with time.
It is also important to ask ourselves whether what we are doing is working the way we want it to. One way we can do this is to think about the words we use to talk about our work.
It might feel uncomfortable to think about why and how we do what we do. But grantmaking organizations (and the people leading these organizations) must do their best to think and work in new ways. This should include giving time and resources to people who have some experience thinking and working how we eventually want to. Then, we work together to change our ideas into language (beyond buzzwords) to describe how we change our field for the better.
Process note:
Since the main idea of this article is to look at the importance of being intentional with the language we use, I created this plain language version of my original article to make sure that I, as the writer, was able to clarify my thoughts in a concise and direct way. I also wanted to make the article more accessible for folks with cognitive disabilities and for everyone.
After reviewing both drafts, GIA Reader editor Conrhonda E. Baker suggested that the plain language version become the “primary” version, which I wholeheartedly supported.
I am an advocate for accessibility and disability justice, and have done some learning about plain language best practices, but had never created a plain language version of an article. To ensure that the plain language version used best practices, we tapped Plain Language Consultant Francisco Eraso, who is part of the disability community, to make sure the text is clear and complete.
The original article can be found at this link. The process of translating the ideas from my original article to the plain language version benefitted my writing process. Inadvertently, interrogating my word choice for the plain language version pushed me beyond making my thoughts more concise and direct and into the kind of imaginative and re-evaluative space that I intend to describe in the article. I hope the reader finds some value in having both versions available.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Lewitus (she/her) is a Baltimore-based arts worker interested in performance, space, and turning imagination into action. She is a white, cis, straight, nondisabled woman who works as a program director and accessibility coordinator at a mid-Atlantic region nonprofit funder. Prior, Sarah was an Associate Curator at Dance Place in Washington, DC.
Sarah is a founding member of Area Woman, an interdisciplinary performance collective. She was a collaborating author on Phase 1 of Creating New Futures: an artist-organized platform for advancing equity in the performing arts, and a participant in the Phase 2: Equitable Contracting process through CNF. She serves on the sunsetting board of Dance Metro DC, which is ceasing organizational operation in 2023. She engages the DMV community as an independent consultant, producer and advocate. As of this writing, she is 35 weeks pregnant with her first kid.
This contribution to GIA Reader is her own and does not necessarily reflect the views, strategies, or opinions of any of the entities she works with or for.
