TIMELY: Arts Funding Petition for Gender Parity

Here is the link to the petition: http://1.usa.gov/1Ao26IW

And here is a link to the press release with social media suggestions: http://onepagerapp.com/rm17

Yvette Heyliger (an LPTW member), has come up with a petition 
about how to connect gender parity to public funding. 

It was not written under the aegis of any particular group or network but was submitted by her.

It already has the requisite 150+ signatures for it to go from "invisible" to "visible" on the White House site. Now it needs 100,000 by Feb 6th to get an official response from the White House.

One person who responded to Yvette right away was Gloria Steinem; Ms. Steinem said she would also explore how this effort might be done without crafting new legislation, via Title IX. That said, we must pursue multiple avenues, and this one might very well help that one along. I propose that we:

1. all sign this petition if we haven't already

2. disseminate it widely to others that would sign via email and/or social media.  

3. officially endorse this petition as an organization and recommend that all our member orgs do the same and put a link to it on our home page; get the word out on eblasts etc; encourage other organizations to do same. 

Yvette also has a press release I can forward you if you are interested; it includes some suggested social media hashtags that we at the LPTW Think Tank have compiled. I will bring next week.

A few things are intriguing about the petition:

• it calls for legislation, but given the character count limit on whitehouse.gov, does not actually spell out the legislation, so at the moment has no actual or potential drawbacks

• it does not call for a quota but for equal access and opportunity

• theatre is mentioned as an example, but it applies to all the arts and to all arts institutions — so we should get it to go beyond our community as well