PAAL Announces International Digital Summit For Caregiver Support

The Parent Artist Advocacy League announces the second annual PAAL Summit, a gathering for institutional and individual training, networking, and community for caregivers and the performing arts and media institutions who support them.

The summit will be hosted digitally to allow for engagement from a global audience. Expanding on last year's inaugural summit, this year's event will feature classes and workshops from industry changemakers throughout the U.S. and the world who are breaking ground in finding new ways to support parent artists in every aspect of the performing arts industry.

Programming for the event is underway, and sessions will include:

• Creating a Caregiver-Supportive Budget with Radical Parent Inclusion
• Anti-Racism and Caregiver Support
• Beyond the Binary: Inclusive Language for Caregivers
• Building Caregiver-Supportive Schedules
• Managing Remote Teams: Support for Everyone in COVID (from PAAL HR Health)
• Best Practices for Successful Childcare Matinees
• The Global Conversation
• Vocational Affinity Spaces (including spaces for Mother Directors, TYA Artists Who are Parents and Caregivers)

And more to be announced soon.

This unique training opportunity will offer one to two weekly sessions over the course of five weeks from October to December, with individual paths available for every ticket holder. Each interactive session will include digital resources for engagement with the topic at hand. At the end of the event, participants will leave with the knowledge and tools they need to put the ideas discussed into practice at their home institutions.

Institutions and individuals experiencing hardship due to COVID will also have the opportunity to apply for scholarship support in order to attend.

Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL) is a national advocacy organization serving as a resource hub, community, and solutions generator for caregivers in the performing arts and media and the institutions who support them. PAAL created the first all-gender, all-discipline national PAAL Childcare Grants for individuals and institutions. PAAL hosted the first national summit on parent and caregiver support in December 2019 in partnership with The Public Theater, co-hosted by A.R.T./New York, and featuring guest keynotes Emily Mann of the McCarter Theatre Center and Director Mary Hodges (assistant director, Slave Play; board co-President, League of Professional Theatre Women), and Motherhood Happy Hour facilitator Corinna Schulenburg. PAAL continues to provide digital training, consulting, and creating active and on-going affinity spaces for all caregivers in the performing arts and media every month, Third Thursdays, which also includes affinity spaces for BIPOC mothers, Black mothers, Single Mothers, and more.

With over a dozen local chapters throughout the country and growing, PAAL has also engaged with active solutions-generation, including partnering with Philadelphia Women's Theatre Festival on the first Motherhood in Theatre Reading Festival and the annually celebrated viral campaign for visibility, International Mother Artist Day, which focused on BIPOC motherhood in 2020. PAAL received the Story Changers Award in 2018 and partnered with American Theatre Magazine for their April 2020 issue dedicated to parents and caregivers in the theatre.

PAAL's work has been mentioned in numerous publications, including The New York Times, American Theatre Magazine, Hartford Courant, HowlRound Theatre Commons, WAMU for NPR News in Washington D.C, and the recently published book From Aphra Behn to Fun Home: A Cultural History of Feminist Theatre. On International Women's Day in 2019, PAAL was selected as one of ten "Changemaker" organizations invited to take the stage and present at Disney Theatrical's Women's Day on Broadway in New York City. PAAL partnered with The Playwrights Realm to create the first-of-its-kind Radical Parent-Inclusion Project for the production of MOTHERS off-Broadway. PAAL has participated internationally in think tanks, on panels, and facilitated workshops on parenting in the arts at multiple gatherings, including the national TCG conferences, BroadwayCon, Actors Equity Association, Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, and the first national conversation on caregiving in the Latinx community at the Latinx Theatre Commons Annual Convening, Miami in Motion, in 2019.

PAAL commits to anti-racist roots in structure, practice, policy, principle, and production, through Vertical 50/50, centering support on BIPOC artists, and gathering resources for active anti-racism in caregiver support. PAAL is a transgender and non-binary affirming space. All language referencing "mother," "parent," "dad," "caregiver," and their derivatives include and refer to any individual who identifies with them.

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