Huntington Theatre Company selected The Wellspring Group as their strategic partner for racial equity outcomes
In the summer of 2020, the Huntington Theatre Company selected The Wellspring Group as their strategic partner for racial equity outcomes. To help The Huntington deliver on their commitment to anti-racist principles and objectives, Wellspring implemented a framework of solutions which would be delivered across the company, including the theater’s trustees, part-time and full-time employees, and community stakeholders.
These solutions included the delivery of internal and external evaluations, large group training, knowledge base development, facilitation modeling for a cross-functional, EDIA working group, as well as leadership training, performance management systems integration, executive coaching, and recruitment process outsourcing for key senior positions. In addition, Wellspring leveraged its capacity to provide strategic Human Resources Business Partner consulting to improve the theater’s capacity to manage the impact of these solutions on their workforce.
Wellspring launched a robust evaluation process by conducting proprietary Culture Carrier Audit interviews with a representative sample of trustees and staff members. This institutional audit surfaced key themes that were each driving racial inequity and helped the theater focus on key priorities for action. Over the next 18 months, Wellspring delivered comprehensive onboarding and training which highlights the drivers of racial inequity in the theater community and Boston area, introduced management and leadership training to reduce bias and increase effective communication across the organization, reorganized staffing structure to ensure an equitable distribution of job responsibilities, facilitated the development of a strategic plan to eliminate racial disparities across the institution, and provided personalized coaching to key staff members to increase awareness of racial identity development, facilitate productive conversations about identity in the workplace, and reduce the occurence of microaggressions and gatekeeping.
Overall, Wellspring led two successive hiring processes for Director-level roles in which the company recruited its most diverse candidate pool ever for those respective positions. Wellspring designed and launched an online learning portal for The Huntington which has delivered training to over 100 staff members, 20 trustees, and 35 incoming guest artists to date and delivered live trainings to over 90 staff members on anti-racism practices, management, and conflict de-escalation. Each member of the company’s departmental leadership team has received three months of personalized leadership and management coaching with a highly qualified Wellspring Coach and over a dozen staff members have completed a three months of Racial Equity Growth Coaching. The company has also committed itself to a multiyear, anti-racism action plan which will implement a series of practices and policies intended to produce racial equity outcomes beginning in FY2022.
