Posted on

Letter to our Headwaters Music & Arts Community

6/8/2020

To our Headwaters Music & Arts community,

At Headwaters Music & Arts (HMA), we believe that all people are amazingly unique, extraordinarily beautiful, and treasured as sacred. We value differences in age, cultural background, experience, education, ethnicity, family structure, gender, lifestyle, religious background, perspective, and other aspects that make us each who we are and recognize that without diversity, our world wouldn’t exist. Particularly the world of music and art! Imagine if every composer wrote the same song or every artist painted the same picture. How bleak and boring this world would be!

HMA has been working to ensure our processes, policies, and behavior uphold the values of equity and inclusion. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusions policy states:

To provide informed, authentic leadership for cultural equity, HMA strives to:

• See diversity, inclusion, and equity as critical to our mission and well-being of our staff and the people we serve.
• Acknowledge and dismantle any inequities within our policies, systems, programs, and services, and continually update and report organization progress.
• Explore potential underlying unquestioned assumptions that interfere with inclusiveness.
• Advocate for and support thinking about how systemic inequities impact our organization’s work and how best to address that in a way that is consistent with our mission.
• Commit time and resources to expand more diverse leadership within our board, staff, committee, and advisory bodies.
• Lead with respect and tolerance. We expect all board members, employees, and volunteers to embrace this notion and to express it in HMA interactions and through everyday practices.

HMA demonstrates its commitment to diversity through:

• Recruitment, retention, and inclusion strategies
• Employee training and professional development
• Financial assistance and volunteer time programs
• Program participant and community surveys
• Outreach events and performances
• Evaluating the HMA environment to ensure it is accessible for all

HMA is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all programs, activities, and interactions. We also welcome and invite you to share your ideas and talents to help us better serve our community. HMA has many exciting and important volunteer opportunities available, including leading our organization into a better future through board membership.

Thank you for your continued support of HMA, we appreciate you!

The Headwaters Board of Directors & Administrative Staff