Equitable partnerships
Accessibility and inclusion for community events begins at the planning stages. It starts with asking: whose voices are included, both on the stage as speakers and behind the scenes as planners? Both have the power to shape the conversation.
As a university-community engagement initiative, we work to create the space and time necessary to involve community members with diverse lived experiences and perspectives that have been excluded from academia and mainstream discourse in the co-development of our programs. We recognize that lived experiences and other forms of knowledge are as valuable to the conversation as academic research.
Even when diverse voices are involved, many events still centre cisgender, heterosexual, white, and male perspectives as the default. We must ask ourselves why and how we are inviting people from equity-deserving groups to partner with us or speak at our events, ensuring it is more than simply tokenism.
But it is not enough to simply invite people to the table. We must consider the barriers they may face to their full participation. These barriers can be related to time (do they have time outside of work and their commitments to family and community?) or they can be economic (is this opportunity separate from their job and will they be compensated for their involvement?).
Sharing one’s lived experience and culturally specific knowledge is work, and deserves to be recognized and compensated as such, through honorariums and paid contracts and by supporting capacity building at the speakers’ and/or partners’ organizations.
Here are some of the other considerations we keep in mind when working on accessibility and inclusion at the partnership level:
Budgeting time and giving up control
Working in true partnership means that the other parties are capable of shaping the programming, perhaps in a different direction than you originally planned. It also may take more time to come together to respect all partners’ busy schedules and to work in open collaboration to move forward in agreement.
Incorporate speakers’ accessibility needs
We work with speakers early on in the planning process to incorporate what they need to make the event as accessible as possible for them. By doing this, we benefit by having more options of who can join us as a speaker, and they feel more included as full partners, not just service providers.
Help speakers prepare for accessibility
We work with our speakers to help them understand the accessibility measures we have in place and how they might adjust their contributions to be as accessible as possible. For example, we encourage speakers to slow down their presentations and avoid jargon so ASL interpreters, translators and captioners can understand and accurately convey the content. This also helps people who are not using ASL or closed captioning to follow the conversation.
Empower all staff
Everyone has experience and knowledge to offer. Empower each and every staff member in their role so that they can confidently contribute to the planning process. This includes volunteers!