The opera industry and community are finally responding to the grief and outrage that the black community has been experiencing for decades. This is not a crisis; it’s an eruption. We agree that change is not happening fast enough. Here’s the Florentine commitment to this city, to our performers, and to ourselves.
We have taken the ofbyforall.org assessment, and will use their resources to actively operationalize diversity, equity and inclusion to become a more impactful member of our community and to enrich our programming. We will also strive for best practices as laid out by the Black Opera Alliance, Asian Opera Alliance, Race Forward, and other experts in the field.
As the leaders of this organization, we pledge to become educated voices in organizational anti-racism.
As a staff and board, we will individually take the unconscious bias test and will discuss growth opportunities.
We will accelerate our plan to embrace diversity through our hiring practices, to complete by fall 2021. It will appear on our website to hold us accountable.
Our board reflects increasing representation, and we are actively working to empower company leadership from all community perspectives.
We curate excellent opera of and for Milwaukee. All works on our stage will include performers and creative teams with different world views and backgrounds, to ensure that our storytelling is vibrant and moving for all Milwaukee audiences.
We will be incorporating “by Milwaukee”. This includes a local black artist working on our Bronzeville Boheme, as well as designing the set for our school show based on that production that will play to 15,000 kids. It highlights profiles from our black community’s heyday, a history often excluded from the classroom. A Bronzeville expert who knows the community and can speak personally to the stories she’s collected serves as our mainstage dramaturg and school show director.
The Community Circle we launched in 2019-20 specifically addresses accessibility challenges, with $10 tickets to shows ($85 value). We will be exploring how to activate that program more effectively.
To be a part of this community means building on our strengths and acknowledging our less than stellar history in racial equity and justice. It means being part of the conversation around how white the classical arts are. And changing it. And recognizing that we are not the voices that should be leading that change; we need to listen, educate ourselves, and implement that change with people of color in leadership roles. We also pledge to address this annually and strategically in metric-driven fashion. We are aligning ourselves with Imagine MKE and many other arts groups, so that we can create bigger change as a sector. This is our commitment to be part of the civil rights movement, as Milwaukee marches.
We see you and hear you - and step in with you.
Respectfully,
2020 Maggey Oplinger, General Director and CEO; Dr. Peter Drescher, Board President
2021 Cathy Costantini, Board President; Mark Cameli and LaShonda Hill, EDI Co-chairs