Catalyzed by Black Lives Matters, Landback and Free Palestine movements, SEARA formed as a consortium of BC Arts Service Organizations in 2020, calling on Canada’s art world to proactively combat its replication of Eurocentric, colonial, racist ideals in levels of policy, governance and administration.
221A is the fiscal sponsor of SEARA, supporting with administration, finance and facilitation. Together, we can create an equitable society where BIPOC artists and cultural workers have equal capacity, governance, social standing, and visibility within arts institutions in BC.
Organizing Values
Leading with Indigenous Ways of Knowing
We are dedicated to learning from Indigenous artists and collectives who have made extraordinary contributions in imagining new forms of organizing towards resource distribution, guided by their own needs and values.
Storytelling Joy as Resistance
We are committed to building, activating and amplifying archives as intergenerational platforms for knowledge sharing, celebrating leaders who have contributed to this work, and making these available to future publics.
Witnessing as Learning
We prioritize creating safe spaces for difficult conversations about real practices and harms of the system we operate in. With new approaches to old problems, we allow for guided witnessing as a means of Restorative Justice.
Practical Supports and Opportunities
We believe in incentivizing a community-driven archive process that decentralizes knowledge gathering, creating instead generative and contributive platforms to bring together rich, varied, and sometimes contested histories.
Community Council
Jessica Wadsworth
Community Council Chair
Brian McBay
Community Council Voting Member, 221A Executive Director
Joyce Rosario
Community Council Voting Member
Kenji Maeda
Community Council Voting Member
Sadira Rodrigues
Community Council Voting Member
