February 2024

Over the past nine months, the Board and Artistic leadership of Pro Coro Canada have been actively balancing the needs of our professional singers, staff, funders, and audience during some challenging times as dialogues evolve on values, principles, practices, and policies in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (“EDI”) in the workplace. As an organization, Pro Coro Canada has been actively engaging and listening to its partners and community supporters, garnering professional advice and adjusting its plan, which includes best practices in the space of EDI. This is to ensure that the organization is continuing to live and position itself as a leader in this space. The actions undertaken since last June have occurred at both the Board level, and more importantly, at the operational level under the leadership of the Managing & Artistic Director. 

Looking back

For Pro Coro Canada to move forward, we need to first address interactions of the past several months, which occurred in social and mainstream media spaces, regarding Pro Coro Canada’s approach to workplace EDI. During this time, Pro Coro Canada deliberately took a less public approach out of respect to, and for the privacy of, the individuals involved, and to honour our efforts to work with the individuals who felt that the organization was not responsive to their requirements. Outside of the public view, we reached out, listened, created opportunities for professionally facilitated conversations and sought to work collaboratively towards resolution of EDI concerns and betterment of our professional arts organization.    

Our contracting cycle begins in the Spring, potential professional singers are presented with offers for any number of Pro Coro Canada events (performances, workshops, recordings, etc.) for the upcoming season.  It is up to the professional singer who receives an offer to make sure they understand, accept, and sign the offer by a certain date to establish a contract. If they do not, the offer expires.  Expiry dates are extended on occasion to accommodate prospective singers who encounter unavoidable delays in accepting their offer; however, we need to ensure that a full choir is under contract prior to the beginning of rehearsals for upcoming programming. Unless and until the recipient signs the offer, the contract is not in force, and the organization has not entered into any formal agreement with them. If a singer chooses not to accept an offer, those performance opportunities are then offered to other professional singers.  This is a common practice in professional arts organizations working with independent contractors.

During the 12-year tenure of the current Managing & Artistic Director, Pro Coro Canada has neither fired a professional singer nor cancelled a signed contract. This, of course, does not include the period of mandated public health restrictions during the recent global pandemic, which required Pro Coro Canada to cancel all scheduled events.

Looking ahead

As with any organization, we learn from experience. As part of our desire to learn, Pro Coro Canada has retained an industry-recognized and experienced consultant to provide the guidance and recommendations necessary to help us move the organization forward and become leaders in the EDI space. We engaged our Board, Staff, and singer representatives in workshops. We invited our professional singers to engage in individual-focused discussions with over 50% of them participating in the discussions. These workshops were held with the aim of defining our EDI baseline, as well as highlighting areas that need to be meaningfully addressed in our EDI policy.

As a Board, we have launched a Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging Task Force that includes representation from the professional singers, staff, and Board with a purpose statement that focuses on the development and release of an EDI policy framework before the end of the 2023/2024 season (June). As part of our policy development process, external community members will be invited to help us with this task.  We are excited about this work and look forward to sharing our framework with you later this Summer.

We are also reviewing and updating our Strategic Plan in February 2024. We had previously identified that Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion remain as a strategic priority and in the fall directed that it become a focus of our work in 2023/24. Some work has been done, though there is still more to do. We will share this progress with the community and explain what it means for Pro Coro Canada in the coming years.

We are reviewing and collaboratively updating Pro Coro Canada’s contract template with professional singers. The choir’s standard of dress, included in the contract, was changed in 2020 to provide non-binary members the freedom to express themselves in gender-neutral clothing and address issues such as accessories; this too is in the process of being revised and updated to better reflect the feedback we’ve received. These reviews continue as Pro Coro Canada takes steps to ensure and assure it is an inclusive and welcoming space.

The policies, processes, and tools, once developed or revised, will be shared openly with current and future professional singers, staff, and Board Members. Key foundational elements will also be made public to ensure transparency and such that Pro Coro Canada may be held accountable for following through on the commitment we have made to learn from this journey and to lead in this space.

In Closing

As you come to the end of this narrative, it is our hope that Pro Coro Canada’s actions in the last months and our ongoing commitment to continue this work demonstrate our intentions to live as a performing arts organization that embraces Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion - both in its workplace practices and in the art it performs.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our journey!

Pro Coro Canada