Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314367
Fall 2020 – LOCAL695.ORG 29 Women, Latin-X, and our LGBTQ members are all coming together to be heard within our Local. To create change, you must have a seat at the table. We should be seeing more representation from these groups on our Board. On October 3, the Local followed up its public event with a virtual town hall chaired by Ronald Hairston Jr. This event— which was limited to Local 695 members, persons of color, women, and allies—acted as a venue to engage these issues in more depth than the original open forum allowed. Meanwhile, work continued on the public livestream event "Diversity in Local 695: A Conversation." The key to a great panel is a great moderator. It seemed obvious that this person should not be one of our own, and of course a person of color. On the list of potential moderators was Anna Everett, PhD, whose many accolades include professor emeritus of fi lm and media studies at UC Santa Barbara; a scholar of Black fi lm history; former Interim Vice Chancellor for Diversity Equity and Academic Policy; activist; and author of several books and innumerable articles. As an academic, she is a veteran of many panel discussions. As a friend of many years, I knew she would be perfect for this role. Still, it was quite a pleasant surprise when the Board passed over all the big industry names on the list to unanimously select Dr. Everett, who was honored and thrilled to accept the opportunity. In addition to moderating the panel, which included a fair amount of prep to understand what we do, who we are, and the Y-16A Program (a major talking point), I tasked Dr. Everett with opening remarks in order to provide a broader historical context to frame the discussion. This she did brilliantly, drawing on her research to illuminate the importance of sound in Black cinema since the earliest days and to Black audiences. If you missed the livestream, you can view it here: http://www.local695.com/html/diversity.html Diversity. That is a word with a lot of possibilities and subject to a great deal of misinterpretation, a word heavily freighted—especially these days. It is one of those buzzwords like "affi rmative action," "empower," "identity politics," "quota," or "minority hire" that, while seeking to describe and remedy the baked-in inequities that permeate our world, have insinuated themselves into the conversation in a manner that serves to infl ame and divide. Nevertheless, this often-controversial word best describes our goal: to increase the heterogeneity of our membership and give voice to those usually unheard and unseen, and to show not only who we are, but who we aspire to be. The composition of the panel would be critical for a successful discussion and to achieve the representation we're seeking. It required the right balance of our members, professional people, engineers, and craftspeople at the intersection of race, gender, age/career trajectory, craft, and discipline/classifi cation (so many Y-…'s!) And that is to say nothing of the people willing put themselves out there, in public, for what could be a challenging discussion on a sensitive subject. From what we'd learned in our meetings, we felt we could extend our safe space to include this panel and with the help of our experienced and gifted moderator, the conversation would fl ow. We did well. A talented, accomplished, eloquent, and brave group representing who we are and what we do opened up about their unique histories, journeys, the challenges they've faced and continue to confront as people of color, as women, as professionals, younger, older, Black, Latin-X, Asian-American, Sound, and Video. One of our panelists had joined via the Trainee Program and could speak to its benefi ts. We had only one Video Engineer on the panel and it is a major lapse that we had not one Projectionist. It is not easy to distill our essence into only seven little boxes on a Zoom screen! The committee brought some thematically relevant questions to get the conversation started, which was facilitated in part by the hard work of Eva Rismanforoush and Jennifer Winslow. Dr. Everett skillfully worked the questions to facilitate a dynamic event that encouraged and modulated the fl ow of conversation to allow our panelists the opportunity to dig deep and bring out aspects of their lives and careers that would otherwise remain unseen. These experiences are essential for the rest of us to understand and appreciate as we move forward. If you missed the livestream, I strongly encourage you to take a couple hours and have a look. You ED&O Committee Zoom on a COVID Tuesday morning