A BIT OF HISTORY

In 2017, Level Ground started working on a strategic plan that outlined some major changes to the organization.

Having recently moved out of our community arts space in Pasadena and accepting that the scale of our annual festival (our primary program since 2013) was above our budgetary means, we spent the years 2018 and 2019 focused on supporting underrepresented artists more directly. We grew and more formally established our residency program, started supporting artists on projects that were still in production, and began imagining a collective community for diverse artists in Los Angeles. We also transitioned from our founding board to a local board of directors.  

During those two years, our successes were many and memorable. We produced a film that premiered at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. We built an earned revenue stream through a creative studio that both doubled our annual revenue and also created opportunities for Level Ground artists to work and get paid. We started paying our Executive Director and a few part-time staff. We supported six resident artists on their first solo shows and printed our first publication, SKEW Magazine. After launching a major rebrand in October 2019 to unveil our 2 years of internal work to the public, we started working on our next strategic plan. 

In January 2020, we surveyed Level Ground artists to help us imagine our future. We planned to launch a new program, the Collective, with a potluck in April 2020. And then, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. We immediately called over 50 artists in our network to see what their needs were (creative and otherwise) and we built a digital home for the Collective. In responding to the crisis, we put our strategic planning on hold to focus on building relationships within the Collective and providing mutual aid and COVID-safe creative outlets for artists.

In June 2020, our staff and board identified three long term priorities and six immediate action steps we could take to stand in solidarity with the racial justice uprisings that had swept the nation. Shifting our programming to intentionally center Black artists, audiences, and stories led to several major achievements in 2020, including the second issue of SKEW Magazine that featured over 50 Black artists, our first Syllabus Project on Black dreams, futures, and mutual support, and a Black Artist Directory. 

With the new priorities and action steps as our guide, in late 2020 we sent out another Collective survey to hear directly from our community as we re-launched our strategic planning. What follows is meant to guide the vision, goals, and labor of Level Ground through the end of 2023. That being said, as a small and nimble organization that prides itself on considering everything as an experiment, we acknowledge that our plan can only serve as a starting point, or best guess, regarding how we will experiment, grow, and create together.

JUMP AHEAD

Level Ground is more than just an arts organization

We are an incubator for diverse artists, creators, and audiences to experiment with how we approach and address the nuances of social division and inequity. Beyond any one particular project or program, we see our work as rooted in the process and posture of experimentation, collaboration, and empathy. These commitments, along with the diversity and talent of our community, has allowed Level Ground to consistently reimagine and scale our work. We see this agility as one of our greatest strengths.

Furthermore, we are a small, mostly part-time staff, and we largely desire to stay that way. Our size reminds us that we cannot and should not do this work alone. Instead, we are interested in unique and unexpected partnerships that build collective power, leverage resources for those who have yet to be heard or included, and cooperatively create the liberated future in which we hope to one day live.

Organizing an artist collective isn’t easy

Founded by two cis, white women, Level Ground’s mission, programs, and community have historically centered whiteness. To resolve this problem, we must engage in major, ongoing, and intentional transformation. Although artists and the arts have played a lasting and significant role in activism, we are not necessarily participating in liberation just because we have organized a collective of artists.

In addition, we acknowledge that, as a 501(c)3 organization, we are part of a non-profit industrial complex that sustains itself through exploitative capitalism and unengaged charity rather than community ownership and mutual support. In any and every attempt we make to untangle ourselves from this system and divest from its practices, we swim upstream. Moreover, we also acknowledge there is a complicated hierarchy and power dynamic at play between the “staff” and “artists” of our Collective. We observe this dynamic as we consider who has the privilege of receiving compensation for their labor and examine the authority or title given to the different individuals who do such labor. Though it will always be difficult to extinguish these tensions entirely, we aim to reduce their impact through cooperative practices regarding ownership, decision-making, collaboration, access, and funding. 

1. Destabilize white supremacy in our art, imaginations, and organizational practices.

How we understand this priority: 

• Dismantling oppressive systems is ongoing, generational, and global work. Within the scope of our collective, Level Ground commits to joining these efforts. 

• This priority comes with a commitment to work and create in solidarity with prison abolition, reparation, disability rights, and landback movements. 

2. Intentionally center Black artists, audiences, and stories.

How we understand this priority: 

• The fight for Black dignity and equality remains of utmost importance. Our specific focus on Black artists and audiences is not meant to exclude other underrepresented artists and audiences from participating in Level Ground, but is an acknowledgement that anti-Blackness is at the root of all racism. Our liberation is tied up with each other. 

• This priority includes a commitment from the non-Black members of our community to do the work of recognizing and dismantling anti-Blackness. It also includes documenting metrics and improving decision-making around the programs and projects that receive organizational support, the artists who are hired to join our staff, the partners we work with, and the location of our events.

3. Foster a cohesive and consistent audience.

How we understand this priority: 

• In the ways we’ve previously shared art and scheduled events, we’ve unintentionally grown an audience that (despite overall demographic markers) is separate, disjointed, and even segregated. One audience may show up to a single program or event, but not others. This internal division does not reflect our mission and as such, mere diversity is no longer our goal; cohesion is. 

• This priority comes with a commitment to consolidate our resources and audiences around these priorities, as well as to provide consistent and transparent communication with all stakeholders. 

Our Mission

Through organizing and creating with artists, Level Ground is committed to destabilizing oppressive social structures through art making, community building, and resource sharing. 

our Vision

Level Ground is a cohesive, horizontal community representing multiple and intersecting identities. We build solidarity across imposed social structures designed to keep us divided as our community strives to be rooted in right relationship with one another, the planet, and our means and economies of survival. We hope to inspire new, collective ways of imagining and organizing public and private communities in the arts and beyond.  

our Values

We build creative collaborations based on equitable access to resources, participation, and influence. 

We support artistic experimentation by protecting space to see differently and create what hasn’t been tried before (and might not even work). 

We provoke empathy by being open to the discomfort of seeing things from a new or opposing point of view. 

We foster nuanced conversation, especially between people who wouldn’t otherwise connect with each other. 

We cultivate diverse relationships because progress is realized when we build solidarity across the imposed social structures designed to keep us divided.

signed by the 2021 Level Ground Board of Directors