Enrich Chicago Programs
Enrich Chicago sponsors and facilitates anti-racism learning sessions alongside national training organizations for arts leaders throughout Chicago. These workshops aim to provide an understanding of systemic racism in the United States and equip individuals with tools to dismantle systemic racism within their institutions. Enrich workshops aspire to leverage the unique skillsets and creativity of cultural workers to find new ways to lead and make art guided by transformative values and liberatory vision. Enrich Chicago has developed a full complement of institutional assessment and strategic planning workshops to support long-term organizational change across arts institutions. These workshops include:
Building Equitable Hiring Practices
Characteristics of Anti-Racist Leadership
Anti-Racist Visioning and Action-Planning for Institutions
Organizational Anti-Racism Audit
Understanding White Supremacy Culture
Managing Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Learn more about/sign up for our workshops Here
The Collective Impact Network brings together arts and culture leaders who know that dismantling systemic racism in the arts and culture sector can't happen in isolation. The Network convenes quarterly and offers workshops and additional programming throughout the year — creating ongoing space for accelerated learning across organizations, shared accountability, and the kind of momentum that individual efforts alone cannot achieve. Together, members work at every level — transforming organizational cultures, shifting sector-wide practices, and challenging the broader systems that determine how resources and power flow.
The Collective Impact Network
Enrich Chicago is deeply committed to ensuring equitable access to resources for BIPOC(Black, Indigenous, People of Color) organizations. We do so by partnering with the philanthropic community to eliminate funding inequities, and support communities of learning aimed at the development and implementation of policies and practices to eliminate disparities in grantmaking processes. Together with BIPOC arts leaders, Enrich Chicago has also sponsored research studies that aim to understand foundation funding models and their impact on the sustainability of BIPOC arts organizations.
In late 2017, Enrich Chicago completed its first funding equity report, Portrait of Inequity. The report represents analyses that had not been conducted previously in Illinois or Chicago and revealed baseline data about the state of inequity in leadership representation and foundation grant funding. In 2023, Enrich Chicago has once again partnered with a steering committee of BIPOC arts leaders and foundation program officers to conduct a follow-up report on the state of funding equity in the arts. This project, facilitated by TDC Group will be completed in June 2024.
The Imagine Just Community program is a collectively led and diverse coalition of artists, cultural producers, and creatives. This is a container for living out our transformative, liberatory values and shifting power and agency to the people who’ve been historically excluded from making decisions about the solutions, interventions, and resources people and communities of color need within the arts and culture space. This work includes a Community-Advised Fund for BIPOC Arts Organizations, a Just Praxis Circle for grantees, and an Imagine Just Artist Fellow.
Anti-racist change is a long-term, generational endeavor. Enrich Chicago offers arts and culture leaders a variety of identity-based and role-specific antiracist lab spaces as opportunities to come to a greater understanding of their racialized identities and the impact of their social (mis)shaping on their individual leadership practices. These groups are also used as professional learning spaces in which participants reflect on their power, assess their organizational policies, and build a culture of anti-racism within their organizations.
We are pleased to provide our current slate of Enrich Antiracist Lab Spaces Here
