Participant Info

We are grateful for the stories you have shared with us during the intake process.

Based on what we have learned about your context and interests, we have matched you with a Pathways Guide who is well-suited to support you in your work with the program this year.

While Guides provide one-on-one support, they are not consultants. They are here to support you in identifying goals, offering learning resources that are relevant to your specific context, and being a sounding board as you work through ideas and actions.

Pathways or your Guide will send out an email introducing you to your Guide. This email will contain a link to their Calendly calendar app and instructions for you to schedule your Wayfinding meeting.

Book your Wayfinding meeting with the Calendly app. Please ensure that both participants from your organization are available to attend this meeting.

Meet with your Program Guide to share your organization’s context, interests, challenges, and current position, and explore potential areas for advancing equity and accessibility practices.

At this, and over the next several meetings, you will co-create your organizational and participant learning plans for the year.

During the Wayfinding meeting, you will also set up your monthly meeting schedule. If possible, we recommend meeting on the same date and time each month. Your Guide will set up the monthly meetings in Zoom and will send a meeting invitation so you can add them to your calendar.

The monthly Guide meetings are a place to review progress, explore challenges, share successes, and adjust your learning journey as needed.

Guides and participants co-create learning plans based on goals, capacity, and areas of focus. Hosted on the secure online Pathways platform, there will be a plan for your organization and focus areas for each participant. Plans are tailored to your learning style, capacity, organizational context, and updated monthly after your guide meeting.

Pathways focuses on learning-to-action. Part of the process includes reflecting on your experiences, actions, and ways of working. Throughout your year in Pathways, we ask that you continually practice critical reflection as you engage with new ideas and difficult questions.

Integrating new information or ideas into our lives and work looks different for everyone. Part of the reflection process is considering how the content relates to your own experience and work, and what actions (big and small) make sense for you.

The Platform has areas for you to write your reflections to capture your experience and thoughts on resources and for each month.

After you have written your reflections, press the “submit” button to ensure they are saved.

You can add more reflections at any time.

The online platform can only be accessed by you, your Guide, and the Pathways Team (for tech support). Your partner does not have access to your reflection submissions

We recommend that participants save any reflections or resources they’d like to keep within one month after their time on the program ends.

All resources are focused on equity and/or access, and are co-selected based on the preferences of the participants.

Resources can be:

• • Physical items like books, card decks, or board games.
  • Digital items like audiobooks, podcasts, blogs, or online workshops.
  • People and experiences
    • Affinity groups
    • In-person workshops
    • Conferences or symposia

Pathways seeks to amplify the resources of folks working in the equity, diversity, inclusion, and access sector, especially those from the Global Majority and with lived experience, and to ensure that resource creators are paid and credited for their work when shared with participants.

We’ll help connect you with resources and workshops that fit your needs and amplify the wealth of great work already happening across the sector. Pathways occasionally creates internal workshops to respond to emerging themes and complement existing resources.

Beginning several months after the program starts, and guided by two experienced facilitators, participants are invited to join a small group made up of Pathways participants from across the arts, culture, and heritage sector. The cohorts meet at the same time each month over nine sessions.

These are not just meetings—they’re spaces for learning in community. Cohorts offer a place to reflect, test ideas, and practice new ways of being together. Participants are invited to show up as their full selves, bringing questions, challenges, and insights into a supportive and accountable space.

Moving at the speed of trust, cohorts model what it looks like to be in good relationship with ourselves, each other, and the work ahead. Over time, these groups become small experiential community labs: places to experiment, reflect, and build the relationships and skills needed for long-term change.

By practicing together, participants lay the foundation for continued collaboration, deeper equity work, and a more connected and caring arts sector.

Participants can choose the cohort that best fits their schedule or aligns with the facilitators they feel most drawn to. Before cohorts begin, participants will receive an email with the available schedule options and details about who will be facilitating each group.

We invite Pathways BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or Person of Colour) participants, guides, and advisors to join our optional and informal monthly Affinity Spaces to connect with each other to discuss emergent questions and themes.

**Please note this space is only for participants, guides, and advisors who identify as BIPOC.

Pathways is built on principles of support and community. We are committed to meeting participants and organizations where they are. There is no assessment or judgment from the leadership, advisors, or guides. Pathways does not report to anyone nor share information.

Some participants request resources to support personal or organizational evaluation to better understand where they are landing in the context of the sector, their understanding, and their beliefs. Some organizations and their participants may choose to undertake self-assessment as part of their journey, but there is no expectation or requirement that they do.

Pathways does not share participant information publicly or with any funders.

The question is, “How do we move forward from there?” This is part of the process of learning and being in community with each other. We work through mistakes by working with your guide, learning and reflecting with the resources, and through discussions in the cohorts. We do our best, moving at the speed of trust, to create spaces where folks can “fail forward” in a supportive environment.