Elizabeth Sweeney

What Can You Do? No, What Can YOU Do?

Posted by Elizabeth Sweeney, Jul 29, 2016 0 comments


Elizabeth Sweeney

This post is built out of an interview conducted with Elizabeth Sweeney, Manager of Publications and Communications at Americans for the Arts.

I’m one of the storytellers here at Americans for the Arts. That’s my role: to gather stories in a real-world daily way, and to try to tell those stories the best way we can.


Obviously I’m experiencing some of this epiphany because of my privilege.
I recognize that.
I had the privilege not to act before.


Owning that responsibility is important. We’re in a moment of trying to hear and tell as many stories as we can. As a white woman in this moment, I feel ready—and maybe even required—to accept that challenge. We have committed to have this conversation at work, and at the retreat, it hit me like a ton of bricks—“Elizabeth, there’s no reason you can’t…”

I think there are plenty of people like me, sitting in that room at the staff retreat, who felt like they had never been asked, “What can you do? Nobody knows your job better than you, nobody knows your daily work better than you. So what can you do?” I feel like I’ve been here nine years and I sometimes feel like I’ve never really been asked that question, at least as it relates to equity and diversity. So I think we’ve started on a really good path, and I fully believe we can change the way our staff thinks, change the way we do things, change our policies, change our work.

Obviously I’m experiencing some of this epiphany because of my privilege. I recognize that. I had the privilege not to act before.

I went to this cross-cultural peace education camp from the time I was 11 all the way through being an adult staff member. It was an educational experience with children from all over the world. And so from the time I was 11, my parents infused in me this idea that Americans were different, white Americans were different, and you need to meet people from all over the world and learn a little about what it’s like to be them. So I was introduced to privilege at a very young age, even if we didn’t call it that then.

I think recently that awareness has changed, for me. Maybe it’s because I’m older—I don’t know. But it’s shifted from a simple awareness to: How do I do something with this privilege? How do I become a champion of these ideals? How do I use it?

A good story is a good story—that’s always been my litmus test. But I never pushed people, or myself, to really look hard for stories we might not be telling already. I’ve never said “let’s focus here, we never get stories about this part of the world.” That’s the challenge.

Where I didn’t feel empowered to really push back and say, “Not only does this have to be a good story, but it has to be a story we haven’t told before,” now I do feel empowered. Now, I need to act, because if we don’t do it nothing will change. Because we’ll still be in this echo chamber.

Sure, the long arc of history moves towards justice and gradual inclusion. But what can we do to accelerate that? How can we accelerate that process through the stories that we tell? And how do we deal with change? Because change is scary—and actually, I believe that as an organization, we have had a tendency to start out scared of change. I’ve been here nine years, and I remember when social media became a thing, we were scared as an organization—we were scared to open ourselves up to criticism. I think we were concerned that we weren’t strong enough to say, “We hear you, social media people, and here’s why we did what we did, and we stand by it.” But we pushed through that, and now we have a major social media presence and a different relationship with all those people. And I think we’re not as scared now—I mean, the Cultural Equity statement and the staff retreat, they’re all great signs that we’re pushing past that fear despite it. I think we’re navigating it.

I was talking to my husband this morning about an experience I had in high school. I was on the swim team, and the swim coach, for whatever reason, stopped caring about me, and so I stopped caring about swimming. As a person, if somebody doesn’t ask me, tell me, believe I can do something, I’m not really going to make that jump myself. And at the retreat, what I heard—I heard myself being asked to do something. Being asked, “What can you do?” “No, what can you do?” And that mobilized me, as I’m hoping it mobilized all of us—our stories can be eye opening.

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