Press Release

Update on Our Open Letter of Commitment to Our Community

Originally Published: November 12, 2020
Gray graphic with red lines and text that says "Foundation Updates"

In keeping with the Open Letter of Commitment to our Community (June 12), the Poetry Foundation staff and Board of Trustees have been working toward making the Foundation a more inclusive, diverse, equitable, responsible, and compassionate organization, as called for by communities of poets and the authors and signers of the Community Letter (June 6). The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine were charged to do more and do better.

During the past five months, the Foundation started its journey to become better—a better community partner, a better advocate for all poets, a better leader, as well as more responsible and accountable in the spaces that it shares with others. This work has just begun, and the journey ahead is not going to be easy or direct; it requires time and fortitude to bring about impactful, sustainable change, and to date much of this work has been internal, focusing on assessment and capacity building.

In the Letter of Commitment, the Foundation staff and the Board pledged action in response to the June Community Letter’s call for us to become proactively antiracist. The Foundation is grateful to these poetry communities for continuing to hold it accountable, as it speaks to a belief in the capacity for change. The Foundation holds itself accountable as well, and has begun to move forward with short- and long-term equity efforts.

In June, staff were invited to join committees, each one devoted to a specific action in the Letter of Commitment. The committees are comprised of staff from across the Foundation, all of whom joined with different levels of knowledge of their subjects, and a shared desire to build a better Poetry Foundation. 

In addition, the Foundation’s Board committed to broadening the Foundation’s engagement with the poetry communities it serves, including its staff, and to increased transparency about the Foundation’s activities. In the interest of transparency, which we think is vital to the work being undertaken, here are updates on the Foundation’s June commitments. This is the first of many external updates on the Foundation’s progress.


Equity Oversight & Audit
The Board instituted the Equity Oversight Committee as a permanent, standing Board committee; the chair of the Equity Oversight Committee is now a member of the Board's Executive Committee. The Equity Oversight Committee engaged consulting partner Ethos to undertake a preliminary equity audit to be delivered by December to the Board with updates to be shared externally in early 2021. This equity audit will begin with an internal assessment and, among other things, review:

  • An analysis of the Foundation’s existing policies and gaps within them.
  • A deployment and analysis of a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging survey across the organization to measure experiences within the Poetry Foundation.
  • Industry benchmarks on DE&I to compare and contrast the Foundation’s current progress.
  • Supporting and engaging staff through healing and reconciliation as the Foundation undergoes the equity audit and organizational transformation.
  • Providing support for the work and initiatives of Foundation staff, as outlined in the later sections of this update, including an assessment of the magazine and digital archives, and Poetry submission guidelines.


Grantmaking
The Poetry Foundation made a commitment to distribute $1 million over the next two years to support individual poets and writers, and to organizations fighting for social justice, and working to advance racial equity in poetry and affiliated art. To date, $500,000 has been distributed including:


While the Foundation is still working to define how its grantmaking can best identify and meet the needs of its stakeholders in the long-term, it will open an application process for emergency grant funding in December 2020 with further details to be provided at that time.

In addition, the Foundation will directly support members of the Poetry Coalition in 2020, and has opened emergency grant funds of up to $20,000 for interested individual member organizations.

Looking ahead to 2021, the Foundation will develop and formalize a process for the Foundation’s grantmaking, above what is currently committed, with an emphasis on incorporating greater transparency, and an equity focus. The Foundation will balance grantmaking goals with the requirements of being a private operating foundation; grants can and will be part of its focus, but not its primary work.

This work includes but is not limited to an assessment of past grantmaking, and the creation of guidelines for unsolicited grant applications. The Foundation seeks to embrace an ongoing, open submission grant process which will serve the broader poetry community.


Anti-Racism
Beyond these specific actions, the Foundation is committed to becoming an antiracist organization, and has deepened its collaboration with Enrich Chicago, through staff training and access to resources. In addition, members of staff have been coordinating with the Board Equity Oversight Committee and applying an antiracist, DE&I lens across all areas of work.

To date, most Foundation staff members have attended a day-long workshop about systemic racism and dismantling white supremacy, led by Enrich. Likewise, the Board has completed an anti-racism workshop customized for boards of directors, also led by Enrich. Based in part on these learnings, the Foundation developed community agreements for all staff spaces and processes, which inform how staff engage with each other, how others enter our space, and a baseline for how the Foundation will start re-engaging with its communities.

Looking ahead, the Foundation will develop a permanent, staff-led, community-engaged group to maintain and oversee the Foundation’s long-term strategic and multi-year (5–10 year) action plan to become an antiracist organization. The goal is to announce the details of this long-term plan in fall 2021.  

Leadership & Hiring
The Foundation has reevaluated how it executes job searches to ensure it develops and hires from a broad and diverse applicant pool of candidates who share a deep commitment to diversity, equity, and building a culture of inclusion, as well as a passion for poetry and supporting poets. Updates on efforts to date include: 

  • Launching a leadership search for the president with the recruitment firm Korn Ferry. In addition to trustees, the search committee includes the current CFO and another staff member; the committee is overseeing the search process. The detailed position description was informed by the Board, the staff, and through surveys and discussions within the broader poetry ecosystem. If you are interested in applying or in making a nomination, please contact [email protected]
  • Opening and broadly promoting staff positions, including guest editors, editorial assistant, and product manager, as well as independent contractor poetry reader positions; these represent changes to how the Foundation conducts searches for open staff positions, including displaying salary ranges, removing education requirements, and emphasizing specific interest in social justice.


Early next year, the Board will also be seeking a cohort of new trustees, with the goal of onboarding new trustees by spring 2021.


Community Relations
The Foundation recognizes that community work can no longer be the sole responsibility of one department, but embedded in all areas of its work. In addition, it remains a priority to devote resources and support to community relations, and to re-center the Foundation’s approach on community. All Foundation programs should be community programs and we are moving to make this the case. To this end, effective immediately, Ydalmi Noriega has been promoted to Director of Programs and Community Engagement. In this new role, she will oversee the programming and community relations teams, and will continue to center the communities with whom the Foundation works—poets, teachers, students, readers, those new to poetry, and audiences across Chicago, the United States, and abroad— while developing and delivering programs to best suit their specific needs. More changes are to come in 2021 and beyond, including new avenues for communities, broadly defined, to return to or come into collaboration with the Foundation. 


Debt to Black Poets
The Foundation’s approach to assessing its debts to Black poets is currently focusing on internal pre-work, including a five-step process of strategic planning. Short-term goals include an audit of Poetry magazine's archive and the Poetry Foundation’s digital archives in partnership with the equity audit, and development of a digital archival issue that will surface the work of Black poets who were either overlooked entirely or whose contributions have not been sufficiently recognized. As a part of this work, the Foundation is still committed to seeking an individual or team of Black historian(s) to research, document, and publish an assessment, and also to help preserve literature by Black poets and published by Black presses while also facilitating the work of future artists.

Editorial, Digital & Programming 
In order to assess the largest online archive of poems, more than 100 years of Poetry magazine material, and hundreds of events hosted over the last 10 years, the Foundation is starting first with documenting current processes and identifying areas of concern and immediate areas of opportunity to decenter whiteness. This includes specifically:

  • For the first time in its history, pausing publication of Poetry for the month of September to put people before production; read more about this from the interim editors.
  • Rewriting the Poetry magazine submission guidelines before submissions reopen in December.
  • Re-evaluating the goals of events partnerships, how the Foundation solicits event proposals, how it compensates performers and presenters, how programmatic decisions are made, and how it will expand accessibility measures.
  • Studying and implementing learnings from resources related to accessibility, anti-racism, and best practices in editorial, digital, and programmatic spaces.


Building Policies

While the 61 West Superior Street building remains closed to the public due to COVID-19, the Foundation is taking the opportunity to make changes to the physical space to become more welcoming and accessible upon reopening.

In the interim, the Foundation is ensuring that all programming in virtual spaces share this sentiment by making use of accessibility features such as live captioning.

Amplification & Response 
The Foundation acknowledges that it reaches a large online audience on its social media platforms, and it is committed to providing access to its audiences by leveraging and opening that platform in strategic, thoughtful ways. As a first step to better understand the Foundation’s current place in the literary landscape, the Foundation engaged DE&I communications experts Flowers Communications Group on a number of initiatives, including:

  • Running a DE&I audit of the Foundation's marketing, social media, and communications activity.
  • Conducting a qualitative report of the Foundation’s use of resources online to aid in a better understanding of how the Foundation is understood, and how it can improve to better serve and develop relationships with communities of poets and readers.
  • Restructuring the Foundation’s social media output and response based on the findings of this report.
  • Developing plans to invite more community access to its audiences, develop guidelines on what it can and will amplify, as well as a mechanism to gather amplification requests.

This audit and planning process will be completed in December to begin implementing in January 2021. In the interim, the Foundation will continue to open its social media activity, such as sharing or signal boosting current partner news and initiatives, as well as confirming consent on materials it is sharing; if you are a current partner with upcoming amplification or promotion requests, please contact [email protected].

Ongoing Communication & Engagement
As the Foundation works to become a more transparent and accessible organization, it invites any poets, writers, artists, or organizations who would like to re-engage with the Foundation and/or ask to be removed from specific programmatic requests, either temporarily or permanently, to contact the following:


For other inquiries:


For ongoing updates:

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