Why Do Safe Spaces Matter? A Primer for Mastering The Hustle: Creating Safer Spaces

This Saturday, the Mastering The Hustle workshop series returns to the KEXP Gathering Space this Saturday, April 14, with the conversation topic “Creating Safer Spaces” – moderated by the City of Seattle’s Office of Film + Music Director Kate Becker. This eigth installment in the series is a collaborative effort between KEXP, Upstream Music Fest + Summit, MoPOP, and The Recording Academy. Safe spaces is a term that gets thrown around a lot. But what exactly are “safe spaces” and why are they so important?

The concept of safe spaces is multi-faceted. In the arts realm specifically, it’s about creating room that is both comfortable and equitable for everyone. It can be in a physical sense – making sure that the room is up to code and accessible for everyone – as well as being aware and attune to the needs of people from all walks of life, specifically giving space to marginalized groups and making sure they feel welcome. This means for the artists, audience, and anyone working in the venue or space. It can sound like a no brainer to have your venue be welcoming to everyone, but taking the steps to ensure you’re following through and creating processes to ensure safety for all groups takes foresight and action. 

"Comprehensive prevention and response strategies are important not only because they help ensure that people make money, have a good time, and get home safe but also because qualified programming contributes to the national mission of 'Ending Sexual Violence in One Generation,'" says Mastering The Hustle panelist and Interim Executive Director of Proper Grove, Ta Pemgrove.

What Pemgrove says is at the core of this weekend’s Mastering The Hustle. Creating a sustainable plan for venues and arts spaces to best serve their guests is a crucial step in creating safer spaces. The panelists at this Saturday’s workshop will explore what this means from different angles. From protecting against sexual assault, ensuring representation for all groups in our community, as well as the structure of your room. Learn more about the work they’ve been doing locally  below and come hear them in discussion this Saturday.

Building sustainable creative communities has been at the core of Kate Becker’s career. Kate currently spends her days (and nights!) working to build Seattle’s creative economy, keenly focused on the film, music and nightlife industries. Prior to working with the city, Becker served in leadership roles at Seattle Theatre Group, Art Share LA in Los Angeles, and The New Art Center in Boston, MA. She co-founded legendary Northwest all ages venues The Vera Project and the Old Fire House, talent pipelines for the music industry. Becker has produced more than 1,000 all ages shows, and numerous large scale events and fundraisers. She was a charter member of the Seattle Music Commission and has served on many nonprofit boards

Ta Pemgrove is a rape-prevention professional and sexual assault advocate who loves listening to people. She got involved in this work to find ways to better center victims’ needs at the core of services and is taking her crime victims advocacy certification in February of 2018. After serving as a Funeral Director - Embalmer for a decade, she is now working to complete her degree in human services. Her activism started in 2011 when she helped found Slutwalk Seattle after learning about her daughter’s survivorship. She has dedicated herself to advocacy the past two years and serves as the interim executive director for Proper Groove, a non-profit dedicated to creating programs to fill service gaps in social and community spaces and legal advocacy. Besides gardening, she spends her spare time canning and preserving food...or eating it!

Kitty Wu is Co-Director of 206 Zulu, a grassroots community-based non-profit organization based at Washington Hall that utilizes Hip Hop arts and culture as a lens to unify, educate, and empower youth and families throughout King County. Kitty is a mother, activist, and community organizer who is deeply involved in music and arts events in Seattle. She handles programming, artists, and media for Coolout Network, FreshChoppedBeats.com, Washington Hall and Folklife to name a few and has just completed her 6 year term on the Board of Directors of the Vera Project.

​S. Surface is a Seattle-based curator, designer, and lecturer o​n the public consequence of architecture, design and art. Surface is currently a curator with The Alice, a project/exhibition space and writers' residency. Surface serves on the Seattle Arts Commission and on the board of directors of Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility. As Program Director of Design in Public from 2015-2017, Surface organized the annual city-wide Seattle Design Festival and curated exhibitions at the Center for Architecture & Design. Trained in ​graphic ​design and ​photography at Parsons School of Design, and with a M.Arch from Yale School of Architecture, Surface has been co-curator of Out Of Sight 2017 - a regional survey of Pacific Northwest Artists, an architect with super-interesting!; an organizer with Architecture for Humanity and Artist Studio Affordability Project; visiting critic at the University of Washington Department of Architecture; research coordinator and editor with C-LAB, Volume Architectural Journal, and the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and a teaching fellow in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department at Yale University. 

Matthew Richter joined the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture in 2013 as the Cultural Space Liaison, a new position aimed at stabilizing and increasing the number of cultural square feet in Seattle. Matthew is an arts entrepreneur, and was the founding director of both the Consolidated Works contemporary arts center and the Rm 608 gallery for visual and performing arts. He comes to the office from Shunpike, where he spent two years building the Storefronts Seattle program. He has served as the Performance Editor of The Stranger, and is a nationally published writer. He has created a series of Dinner Theater productions at On the Boards and elsewhere, is an accomplished furniture designer and builder, and has lectured internationally on the state of the arts.