The Involvement Strategist: Geoffrey Jackson Scott
A resilient and more equitable sector would seek to bring together all of its many resources of wealth, networks, time, attention, and so on to forever shift the policies that come together to swallow up progress.
5 QUESTIONS WITH Geoffrey Jackson Scott
Co-Founder, Creative Director, Peoplmovr
Brooklyn, NY
Geoffrey Jackson Scott is an Involvement strategist and creative development consultant, cultural organizer, and creative producer, as well as a facilitator and coach with nearly two decades of experience advancing racial equity in the arts and culture sector.
He is the Co-Founder + Creative Director of Peoplmovr, a creative studio specializing in involvement. The company centers anti-racism and racial equity as part of its commitment to advancing love and collective liberation. This commitment is grounded in the belief that a more just and equitable world is possible.
Recently, Geoffrey served as Consulting Director of Engagement at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI). At MoMI, he led an ambitious two-year community engagement and audience outreach pilot, funded by the Ford Foundation. He was directly responsible for creating policies, programs, and outreach initiatives designed to open up access for a broader public to the Museum.
From 2012 - 2014, Geoffrey delivered a suite of new programming as a senior member of the in-house creative strategy team at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, where he was the Director of New Play Development and Community Engagement. At Victory Gardens, he conceived, developed, and launched a civic engagement platform designed to embrace and reflect the diversity of Chicago rooted in partnership and collaboration with community and cultural leaders from across the city. Prior to Chicago, Geoffrey spent eight seasons as the Literary Associate at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). At NYTW, he led the Artist of Color Fellowship program and supported the cultivation, development, and production of new work made by both emerging and established artists.
A thought leader and frequent speaker and guest lecturer on advancing racial equity in arts and culture, Geoffrey serves on the boards of Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre and the Alliance of Artists Communities.
1. Peoplmovr “partner[s] on the development and delivery of strategies designed to bring people closer.” I love this, and how “bring people closer” can mean a variety of nuanced things, especially right now. Can you talk about this guiding principle of your work, and how it specifically applies to the cultural sector?
There’s a lot bound up in that principle, right? There are the actions of developing and delivering something, the goal that something developed and designed might bring people closer, and then there’s the strategy of doing all of this in partnership.
To say something from where this particular attitude comes and how, for me, it applies to the sector I have to first share a bit about what’s shaped me:
I was born in 1976 on Sauk and Meskwaki land (Quincy, Illinois) into a tight knit Black community where my family has lived now for over a century. Part of the work of Peoplmovr manifests as community engagement and audience development and, in truth, so much of what I can claim to know about how to do this work are things I learned right there at home in my community.
“If I got it, you got it,” was an organizing principle for us. I now see that was a modality of partnership, of sharing power. What it looked like then was a sharing of resources, you know? Resources like time, attention, food, shelter, transportation, money, and so on, moved more or less freely as they were needed. We centered care—for ourselves, for each other, for this community. So Peoplmovr’s focus on partnership finds its root right here in wanting to cultivate this kind of mutuality in the relationships we’re invited to foster between artists, organizations, and communities.
As to how it might apply to the sector, it’s important to know how I came into the field. I joined the sector in 2004 when I moved to New York after being awarded an artist of color fellowship. This initiative was designed as an on ramp to artists of color in the hopes of addressing the dearth of us in leadership throughout the field.
As a Black, Queer person, my being there in that program, in that building, and, effectively at the table, held real meaning and value for the institution. It signaled (or sought to signal) a kind of progressiveness and openness on the part of the place, and, to be frank, a kind of safety and belonging to other artists of color. However, this lack of us—people of color—in those spaces meant we were being “single storied” (to borrow from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and part of how I come to know this is by the number of times I was pulled into debate around the authenticity of artist x, y, or z’s voice when the story they were telling didn’t line up sharply with a narrow view of the racialized ideas of their communities.
So, for Peoplmovr, bringing people closer is in service of disrupting those limiting beliefs that held (and continue to hold) folks of color out of leadership. It’s about all of us deepening our relationships and experiences across lines of difference so that we might better know ourselves and each other in our wholeness. It’s about sharing power and resources. It’s about getting free.
2. As I’ve told you, I am really into the stated core values of Peoplmovr: “Listen, Support, Collaborate, Merge, and Grow.” While these are perennially vital themes, they particularly resonate with what we need right NOW. How can these ideas best help us evolve our systems and structures, and emerge from the many crises and events of 2020 as a resilient, more equitable sector?
There are a thousand thoughts that spark, here, but the sharpest is gratitude. I offer here a deep, deep bow to adrienne maree brown and to her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds for this framing. There’s a beautiful part of the book where she invites us to imagine love as the central practice of our organizing work. And, offers that:
If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there's no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea - but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential. We would organize with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing stories in the communities all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, and grow through fusion, not competition.
This invitation to claim love as a goal and these five words as values that might support and sustain us toward that goal, rearranged my practice. Part of the reason why is their resonance. They reminded me of that particular magic of how I grew up. As core values, they form the root system that supports and sustains our change work.
A resilient and more equitable sector would listen to understand the roots of how we got here and how it has been complicit. It would center the voices of those most impacted and would listen to understand the innovation and experimentation and learning happening there always already in their work to save their own lives. A resilient and more equitable sector would seek consent to put its support behind those efforts. It would collaborate with leaders from these most impacted communities and seek consent to be an accomplice to shifting root causes of harm to root cares of humanity and to change the material conditions of their lives. It would seek to bring together all of its many resources of wealth, networks, time, attention, and so on to forever shift the policies that come together to swallow up progress. Finally, a resilient and more equitable sector would commit to learning and growth so these changes in power, in relationship, in leadership, in behavior, might survive beyond the moment and into the future.
3. How might those of us working in the creative and entrepreneurial sectors most effectively keep the issues of equality at the forefront, and continue to advocate for the changes we need?
I love this question. Ask me in a half hour and I might offer different responses. But what comes immediately is a Toni Morrison quote from Song of Solomon that’s popped up in the email signature of a colleague: “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
So, if you want to grow a world where equality for all is a value, then you’ve got to search yourselves and find where, how, and why inequality as norm, as right, lives in you and then you need to work that shit out. Taken another way, what are you doing to let that future know that you want it? Have you acknowledged that you’ve internalized the inherent rightness (normalization) of inequality which establishes the people who call themselves white as the most deserving of resources? Are you actively working to understand what’s shaped you and your life in this way? What of your past and present actions uphold inequality? If you value equality, what actions can you take on the small and large scale to act in alignment with equality for all as a value? With whom in your communities can you share this commitment and form a relationship of accountability?
There’s something here for me about reflecting, apologizing, repenting, and changing behavior that I think wants to be underlined. This is grief work. We could all stand to skill up here.
I should also underline how important I think it is to do this work in community, in relationship. Accountability buddies are hot—folks you can count on and who can count on you. I’m blessed with some extraordinary friendships and we’re committed to each other’s growth, to manifesting a more just and equitable world, and to sharing with each other honest feedback on how those actions we take (and those we don’t) are aligned with that vision. So, deepen your relationship with yourself and with trusted people who might hold you accountable to realizing this vision.
And, I have to honor that voice that’s crying out for me to say: “Hire people.” I think it’s also more complicated than this too because if you hire folks and bring them into the same cultures where inequality rules the day, then you’ve missed the mark, but...do hire people.
4. Let’s talk about cultural patronage… we are seeing calls for change to the landscapes of arts funding and overall philanthropy. In your view, how does the system most urgently need to evolve?
I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to Edgar Villanueva. In a recent piece for Inside Philanthropy, he puts it all right there in the title, ”We Can't Return to the Way Things Were Before. For Philanthropy, the Way Forward is Reparations.”
In popular culture: Ta-Nehisi Coates ("The Case for Reparations.") and Nikole Hannah-Jones (“What is Owed.”) and W. Kamau Bell (s05e05 of United Shades, “The Time for Reparations.” )
At the local level: The California Assembly passed a bill to create a task force; Asheville, NC votes unanimously to approve a resolution on reparations; The mayor of Providence, RI signs an executive order on reparations for Black and Indigenous folks. At the national level: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) sponsors H.R.40 to establish a commission to study and develop proposals on reparations for Black Americans.
Reparations is about repair. And there’s a lot to repair, right? The great mass awakening to systemic racism has advanced a nationwide conversation trained on repair and I’m fully aligned behind that. To my mind, the landscapes of arts funding and overall philanthropy would do well to come together in service of repair and follow the leadership of Black and Indigenous folks in doing so. What I’d like to see is nothing short of transformation.
5. How do you think the sector could best facilitate a change in society’s view of the importance of the arts?
I’m not sure that I know what the sector can do that the current crisis hasn’t done already. On the daily, arts and artists are helping many of us hold it together right now.
The arts, artists, and creative thinkers have helped me greatly during this time. I’m deeply grateful to the storytellers, authors, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, dancers, TikTokers, Instagramers, Youtubers, and the ecosystem that has supported them in making during this period. This has been a time of deep self reflection for me and some of the voices I have found (or that have found their way to me) during this time have been a large part of my growth.
Geoffrey Jackson Scott is an Involvement strategist and creative development consultant, cultural organizer, and creative producer, as well as a facilitator and coach with nearly two decades of experience advancing racial equity in the arts and culture sector.
He is the Co-Founder + Creative Director of Peoplmovr, a creative studio specializing in involvement. The company centers anti-racism and racial equity as part of its commitment to advancing love and collective liberation. This commitment is grounded in the belief that a more just and equitable world is possible.
Recently, Geoffrey served as Consulting Director of Engagement at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI). At MoMI, he led an ambitious two-year community engagement and audience outreach pilot, funded by the Ford Foundation. He was directly responsible for creating policies, programs, and outreach initiatives designed to open up access for a broader public to the Museum.
From 2012 - 2014, Geoffrey delivered a suite of new programming as a senior member of the in-house creative strategy team at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, where he was the Director of New Play Development and Community Engagement. At Victory Gardens, he conceived, developed, and launched a civic engagement platform designed to embrace and reflect the diversity of Chicago rooted in partnership and collaboration with community and cultural leaders from across the city.
Prior to Chicago, Geoffrey spent eight seasons as the Literary Associate at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). At NYTW, he led the Artist of Color Fellowship program and supported the cultivation, development, and production of new work made by both emerging and established artists.
A thought leader and frequent speaker and guest lecturer on advancing racial equity in arts and culture, Geoffrey serves on the boards of Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre and the Alliance of Artists Communities.