In our most recent fiscal year, 45% of our hired staff and contractors identify as BIPOC, while our current board leadership is 80% BIPOC, 80% Detroit-based and 80% identify as female.

Since 2018, we have served over a whopping 25,000 attendees through our programs and performances, with the majority of those events being free to the public.

Our DE&I practices include programs that build equity into our operations, such as enlisting a stipend-based neighborhood advisory board of residents and small business owners; incorporating multi-language and image-based programming for those whose first language is not English; and committing a percentage of our annual operating budget to professional development opportunities for Detroit and Hamtramck artists.

In addition, our insistence of a majority BIPOC board, vendor audits as we staff each production and at the end of each fiscal year, our use of contracts for community collaborators that include residuals and royalties for works that tour, and our work to establish a land trust to transition ownership of the Detroit Puppet Company greenspace to neighborhood residents within the next 3-5 years are internal methods we employ to address lack of equity in our industry and in our community. We reevaluate these practices annually to increase efforts in areas where we can do better as we take responsibility for institutional bias and address our complicitness in processes that are systemically racist.