One of the most insidious effects of white supremacy on women and girls of colour is imposter syndrome. It starts when you’re young and your experiences are rendered unimportant and invisible, when you don’t see yourself reflected in books, movies and TV, and on the music charts. You look for scraps of representation and start making yourself small to fit the contours of your reflection in culture. By the time you enter the work world, if that’s what you choose to do, you haven’t learned how to champion yourself and your abilities. Maybe no one in your life ever has. 

While we spent our nights and weekends creating the 2020 Future Forum at the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, we always imagined it to be an intimate event. Small, but meaningful in its impact. Admittedly, Megan felt that she should play small with this event. For reasons of capacity and wanting the event to be a success for everyone involved—attendees, organizers, staff, and special guests—we never discussed the importance of our programming for a wider (and whiter) audience. 

The 2020 Future Forum was meant to happen on March 28, 2020. Incredibly, six months have passed since then. In the meantime, we had the pleasure and privilege of delivering a workshop series for emerging musicians facilitated by Elysse Cloma and Sunny Chen; and we partnered with Cineworks and brought on Tanvi Bhatia to research and write about the experiences of BIWOC in the Vancouver film industry. That’s all an opaque way of saying that we’ve been sitting on reflections, artwork, and resources from the Future Forum community that we meant to put online months ago. 

From just the small group of women and non-binary individuals that made up the Future Forum team, there is plenty of the wisdom we need right now: In “Both/And,” six artist-parents dive deep into the pleasures and tensions of creativity and family. In “Make Space, Take Space,” Miley Leong and Tanvi Bhatia interview Jackie Wong and Abeer Yusuf about navigating power as women of colour. From the “Building Armour,” a panel of poets, Chandikka Thayver contributed a video with questions about art as activism, power structure, self-care, and more. And lastly, filmmaker Joella Cabalu recorded her Instagram Q&A for racialized women and non-binary people in creative fields. You can watch the Stories in “Building Sustainable Creative Careers.” (Links to these articles and videos are in the menu above/to the left.)

Today, we are facing multiple, intersecting crises: the climate, our democratic systems, racial justice are all in limbo. We are still in the throes of a global pandemic. So much hangs in the balance as we, the people, decide if we can and we will choose people before profit. Reading and viewing the entries from the Future Forum moderators and speakers today, we see that many of the answers for a more just and sustainable way forward are from BIWOC. We are honoured to publish and celebrate their work on our platform. They are the real deal. 

Megan Lau & Kristin Cheung
Co-founders, The Future is You and Me
September 2020