The Anti-Oppression Committee is dedicated to fostering accessibility, accountability, diversity, and openness for Union House Arts (UHA) as an organization, for membership, and community. While this list is not exhaustive, as a committee we are dedicated to creating action towards decreasing the effects of oppression within systematic racism, ableism, xenophobia, zionism, islamophobia, colonialism, capitalism, homophobia, heterosexism, and others that will be defined over the course of public and private meetings. This committee will serve as a means to cultivate resilience, common space, safety, and to move beyond inclusion and towards security and equity for all.
The first goal for the Anti-Oppression committee is to create a freely accessible living policy that reflects transparency and accountability for UHA as an organization and community. We will be creating an Anti-Harassment Policy and Code of Conduct that is inclusive and represents the values we want to create in our space. Living Policy means that a UHA established anti-oppression policy will change over time and the Policy and Code guiding them will be living documents, able to change with time as values are reflected back to the committee.
Some of the topics we will be discussing and defining include:
- Creating Accessible Spaces
- Decolonization and Anti-colonization
- Creating safe and inclusive spaces for BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA, and disabled Persons
- Language and defining Anti-Harassment
- Accountability
- Harassment Protocol & Mandate
- Intellectual Property
- Harm Reduction in the context of Artist Run Culture and Community Care
- Holding space for challenging conversations
- Navigating our role in local, provincial, national, and global discussions (e.g. challenging political discussions)
The Anti-Oppression Committee will be made up of a maximum of 8 members, with 4 slots held for off-board, community volunteers. Union House Arts highly encourages community members with backgrounds and experience in policy and social justice to step forward. For those who are unable to partake as a committee member, we will be hosting regular, online, public meetings to ensure transparency and engagement with our community. Volunteers will receive a free UHA membership for the year and support from the UHA team for future grant application writing endeavours, projects, and ideas.
We understand that this work is taxing and oftentimes those experiencing oppression are the ones putting the most time, emotion, work, and energy into engaging in needed discussions and implementing change. While UHA is not currently able to reimburse these volunteers monetarily, we will do our best to give back and create opportunities to those willing to afford us their time. We hope that by creating these documents we will have needed structure enabling UHA to work toward paying consultants in the future.
Our first public meeting will be held on February 13th, 2024 at 7:30pm (NST) where we will discuss what our long-term goals are, and vote in up to four interested volunteers. If you are interested in partaking in the discussion, please click the button below and fill out the form so we can contact you with more details about future meetings. This form will also give participants the option to put their name forward to be voted in as a committee member on the day of the meeting. We will also take nominations day-of, so if you are unsure of if you want to partake you can wait until we call for additional nominations.
For more information about future meetings, please check out our events calendar.
Any questions or concerns about our Anti-Oppression Committee can be forwarded to unionhousearts@gmail.com