Update on the BCMA’s Ongoing Commitment to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: January 2025

The BC Museums Association is committed to supporting justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion within the museum and cultural sector and our own organizational practices. These priorities are woven throughout our current Strategic Plan 2024-2029, which you can find here. A key component of this commitment is being open and transparent with our community. We aim to provide regular updates about our steps to support justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. If you have feedback or would like to share your thoughts, we encourage you to contact us. 

The BCMA has published regular justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion updates since 2020. To read our past updates, please visit this page.

Jump to Recent Updates

We Have the Power to Help

In the days since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, he and his administration have targeted and politicized the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion, issuing executive orders that ban and defund government-funded organizations that focus on DEI and placing all federal staff who work on DEI on administrative leave, a prelude to terminating their roles. In response many major American corporations have terminated their own DEI programs (notably Target, Walmart, Amazon, McDonalds, and Meta) and federally-funded cultural institutions (like the National Gallery) have terminated similar equity-focused programs. With Trump threatening to defund colleges and universities that do not terminate DEI programs, it appears that this new phase of the ongoing cultural war may be only just beginning.

While British Columbia and Canada are currently in a different political climate than the one being created by the new US administration, so much of the global political, cultural, financial, and social discourse is set by the United States. Corporations and institutions that posted black squares during the summer of 2020 and made sudden commitments to equity to avoid PR backlash now feel emboldened to end even the most modest and half-hearted of efforts. 

In the face of this very different political climate, it is more important than ever that organizations and institutions commit to equity and speak boldly about the work they are doing. The BCMA has been writing regular JEDI updates for nearly five years and now feels like an appropriate time to reflect on why we do this. Our first equity statement was the BCMA Anti-Racism Statement: October 2020. In it we wrote;

“We recognize that racism is pervasive in our field and in our society, but we are also keenly aware that the BCMA lacks the experience and diversity to be a voice that can speak on behalf of those who face discrimination. While we cannot speak on behalf of IBPOC museum professionals, we can provide our unwavering support and belief, and a platform to amplify these critical voices.”

We are in a time where a lot of support and belief is wavering and it seems likely that things are going to get worse before they get better. On top of all this, our sector is struggling with declining government funding, challenges attracting and retaining audiences, and what feels like an ever-growing list of existential threats. While it might feel like an impossible task for one individual or one organization to make a difference, we have the power to help. 

Every child who visits your institution and learns something about the world, helps. 

Every senior who finds meaning and community by volunteering, helps. 

Every text panel you make just a tiny bit better, helps. 

Every summer student you give a first job to, helps. 

Every artist you employ, helps. 

Every smile you create, helps.

The people who want to consolidate their personal power and who want to regress society back to a mythical past want to overwhelm us until we give up. The work that museums, galleries, and heritage organizations are doing in their communities has always been important, but right now it is more critical than ever. If regressive elements of society didn’t see equity, access, and reconciliation as a real threat to their power, they wouldn’t work so hard to ban it. 

Reflecting on Five Years of Updates

Looking back on the past few years, what has the BCMA done to centre justice, equity, diversity and inclusion?

Since 2020, we have prioritized the allocation of programming funding and contracted projects to amplify diverse voices, and committed to tiered ticket pricing for conferences. We do our best to have diverse representation on discussion panels, conference sessions and other speaking opportunities to ensure multiple viewpoints on sector topics. Working in collaboration with Nations and Indigenous groups on whose lands we are hosting events has been another intentional change in how we organize sustainable events and conferences. We also write our project grant applications in a way that lets funders know we aim to use funds to compensate equity-seeking professionals and contractors fairly. 

The IBPOC Cultural Professionals Network is thriving, accompanied by the 2SLGBTQIA+ Cultural Professionals Network which built on the success of the Gender & Sexuality Inclusion Toolkit. As projects like the Toolkit open windows for us to see and hear the needs of diverse professionals, we continue to strive to respond to them. 

In addition to these initiatives, to ground our organization in the work of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, the BCMA has focused on two key goals: creating new governance resources focusing on anti-oppression and reviewing our internal systems to improve practices.

A few years ago, BCMA hired Mighty Museum to complete research on governance challenges in the sector, resulting in the report Governance Challenges and Opportunities in B.C.’s Small to Medium Non-profit Museums. We also expanded this into the recently released Research Accountability Practices report, which is explored below. 

The 2021 Governance Challenges research outlines a governance “crisis” in the museum sector. One immediate response to this crisis has been the development of the Governance 101 online course in partnership with Arts BC and the Squamish Arts Council. In addition to focusing on core legal responsibilities for board members, the course attempts to centre equity-driven governance and decision-making to provide organizations with a stronger governance foundation. Since its launch in 2022, more than 30 arts, culture, and heritage organizations have registered.

The BCMA reorganized the Indigenous Culture and Heritage resources on our website, made them more accessible, and also added newly created resources like the CARE Workbook and workshops, and the Call for Repatriation. Below you can read more about our recent expansion of staff roles to provide more direct assistance. 

We are committed to improving accessibility in our digital programs and resources. We have incorporated accessibility features into our online learning portal (detailed here). We provide captions and ASL interpretation for select online programming and transcripts for some podcast episodes. We have expanded hybrid/online programming such as our 2023 Digital Dialogues Series, provided free resources to make your online events and digital presence more accessible, and released an expanded online course on Digital Accessibility for Museums Galleries and Cultural Organizations. Please help us prioritize additional improvements by contacting us to provide feedback on our efforts; we update our accessibility statement when we make new changes.

To be a more equitable workplace, we have not just focused on providing an accurate description of our work environment, team culture, and values in job ads but also on finding ways to offer BCMA staff the support and flexibility to thrive in their roles. Many of these initiatives are outlined in our Equity in the Workplace resource. We also have developed an internal succession planning matrix that helps the BCMA Council to assess experiences and perspectives that we may be missing at the board table in order to ensure that our Association is equitably representing our membership.

As an organization, the BCMA attempts to speak transparently with our members and sector about the work we are doing to centre equity in all aspects of our operations and impact. These regular JEDI Updates are one way that we attempt to be accountable for the commitment we made in 2020. If we stopped writing these updates, it would remove an opportunity to check that we are working towards our strategic goals and that our work always reflects our values; accountability, bravery, equity, innovation, relevance and respect.