Our Action Items

The Board of Directors will see if one of SLFS’ many differently-abled champions will serve on the board to help us better understand the needs of communities that need ADA technologies and infrastructure to participate in film art. SLFS board acknowledges that we did not reach this goal in 2019 and is carrying it over.

CEO/President will create a leadership role in the most-needed category for SLFS’ new future post-Covid and we will commit to hiring that role no later than posting it in June of 2021 if budget and Covid recovery allows.

CEO/President will design an internship project for 2022 and committee to build the project at SLFS with aim to build on the work done at the Traveling While Black internship.

Every staff member will be required to watch films about diverse issues, attend training on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging to personally grow learning how to be anti-racist and take action towards recognizing inherent bias, systemic racism and other systematic systems that prevent change. We will present in our all-staff-attended meetings learnings/takeaways. Budget will be provided, and staff may help choose what to participate in.

CEO/President will expand on the current cultural committee, begin honorariums, and dedicate a core program of SLFS’ future to cultural tours to build upon the work we have already done with the Mexican, Israeli, Dance, Czech, and Pacific Islander communities.

CEO/President and Head of MAST will collaborate with Utah Diplomacy to inform artists globally about the state of film-arts in the US. 2020 will be South Africa and India.

Head of MAST will find a way to amplify, free to the public, on SLFSathome.org the Traveling While Black short along with the hundreds of post-cards that SLFS received from Utahn’s learning about the black experience when they saw our 2019 in-person exhibit.

Head of Theatrical will review list of diverse business owners in SLC and have that list available as SLFS fulfills needs with contractors and vendors as they arise.·

MPRC Director will have a post-card after every in-person cultural tour to capture the stories of impact SLFS is having in diverse communities, and in the white communities with regards to understanding of diverse communities. We learned so much from Traveling While Black post-cards, we need to capture more of these stories to track our own progress as well as see where we might improve and learn more about what we do not know.

MPRC will transition all staff signatures to voluntarily include a preferred pronoun in their email signatures, business cards, and on the website.

MPRC Website Coordinator will make the diversity statement available to all publics on our website.

MPRC will create slides to acknowledge native lands for our on-screen program.

MPRC Director will make sure that all our theaters, at all times, have diverse BIPOC or marginalized communities images and visual representation in the theater through marketing materials, banners, our televisions, and the movie posters selected.

Operations Managers will research BIPOC film experience and present their findings to the entire SLFS staff as a team to see where SLFS might improve programming behaviors and bias.

MPRC Director will research the website to include accessibility features and present budget implications to put into implementation.

Head of MAST will ensure BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ representation is accessible in MAST curation programs and podcasts, blog posts, media article curations, and speaker opportunities.

CEO/President will ensure that diversity and inclusion is a meeting topic in all message-to-the-field meetings, board meetings, and actively ask staff to give ideas in this arena on how SLFS might improve, learn, and discover how to do better.

CEO/President and Board Chair will begin to share the unique SLFS philosophy of board management/recruitment/fund raising with the world. TBD on what we can handle bandwidth-wise in the Covid-climate, but we will at minimum: start posting on CEO Linked-in ideas/philosophies around how SLFS manages a diverse board and ensures equity, sharing with ZAP and at least one council member SLFS board philosophies.

Our Accomplished Actions

All accomplished actions continue to build upon, improve, and learn.

The President/CEO will explore and determine if we can afford to hire a position dedicated to community outreach, event logistics, and inclusion at SLFS, this person will be targeted to be a manager with ability to evolve to an assoc. director level within 18 months of hire. In the event that we cannot hire in 2019 for this position, SLFS board will agree that a budget of $10K annually at minimum will be applied directly to costs associated with changing hiring policies, training and other inclusion needs.

RESULT: SLFS spent 65K on the Traveling While Black experience and paid internship project.

The Head of Theatrical will implement sign language for all three cultural tours, and attempt to expand it to other Q&A opportunities with visiting film artists.

RESULT: SLFS implemented sign language for all cultural tours in-person, and in addition, fund raised to achieve a $70K installation of hearing impaired and visually impaired devices in the cinemas, we hosted a screening for the blind for a film called SEEING THROUGH that incorporated hand translation

The Head of our media accelerator, MAST, will recruit from native communities in Utah to see if a storyteller emerges that will be a good candidate for a fellow.

RESULT: While we have not found the conduits to be hugely successful here, we have made great strides in our Pacific Island communities as well as have been nurturing a filmmaker in Mexico who is preserving native languages of Mexico. Our goals are still to engage the native communities of Utah to learn more about their needs. We have connected with the Native American Animation Lab in California to begin to network how the MAST project can help filmmakers in native communities. We produced an online artists voices discussion with animators that included native Hawaiian and the head of the LA Skins Festival to discuss the challenges artists face who are animators.

The Head of Theatrical will include inclusion value-centric language in all training for front-of-house and in Big Staff Meetings (all staff).

RESULT: In 2019 the SLFS Front-of-House staff unionized, so our transition to a union house took up a lot of bandwidth for any normally scheduled quarterly trainings. Then Covid hit. While SLFS employed our Front-of-House for 16 weeks at the onset of the pandemic, we were unable to retain the staff beyond July of 2020. Once SLFS rehires, the current philosophy and action items will be shared with all Front-of-House upon training.

The President/CEO will work with Head of Theatrical to define and reinforce the hiring policies herein and change Operations hiring practices to be more inclusive.

RESULT: SLFS assigned our Assoc. Dir. of Operations to active outreach at Salt Lake Community College to ensure job postings would result in a diverse pool of applicants. We eliminated all barriers we could identify, and endeavor to continue to do so (including removing lifting, education, and other experience requirements if they are not essential to the job). We were successful in having our Traveling While Black internship be 98% BIPOC students and community individuals. The Head of Theatrical and CEO/President engaged with the refugee communities and took training courses and workshops in both how to hire refugee individuals as well as workshops in understanding the challenges of being a refugee. We eliminated posting for jobs at SLFS at the venues only, and instead paid for services to reach out and cast a broader net to all jobs posted.

Our CEO/president will budget all key-staff to attend the 2018 AHC conference on Diversity and Inclusion so they may be coached by professionals in the 4 day conference and offer advice back to SLFS for improvement.

RESULT: All key-staff, including theater managers, attended the 2018 AHC conference, workshops, and events. This conference was centered on Diversity and Inclusion, included many experts. The staff were invited to bring all ideas from the conference to the Head of Theatrical and we incorporated many of these ideas into our operations.

Head of Theatrical and CEO will attend refugee training/seminars and always post each hire with the refugee contacts we meet and get to know.

RESULT: Both Head of Theatrical and CEO networked, met new individuals, and were able to post jobs to the contacts within the refugee communities we met. We were not successful at getting applicants. Feedback was that our pay scale and the fact that the applications were for PT workers at the time, did not appeal. Our contacts remain, and all FT or PT and Leadership positions will continue to be sent through the refugee assistant groups.

We will program and fundraise around differently abled needs including renovation of the cinemas for new hearing impaired devices, and programming visually impaired screenings.

RESULT: SLFS raised $70K to do hearing impaired and visually impaired devices and upgrades, in addition, we created 3 years ago the open captions screening schedule and look forward to evolving this as need. Visually impaired screening was held in 2019 with the Oscar Nominated film Feeling Through.

Our Action Items

Our Accomplished Actions

All accomplished actions continue to build upon, improve, and learn.

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