Lunch With
KAIT BLAKE
Administrative Director, Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture, Vancouver, B.C. Interviewed by Lindsay Foreman Managing Editor: Roundup Magazine
L: Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture was founded as the Society for Disability Arts and Culture (S4DAC) in 1998 and was the first disability arts organization in Canada. Would you like to share some of the past and current initiatives of the Society? K: Kickstart is a professional arts organization that works with disabilityidentifying artists. We want our artists to be seen as artists and let their art speak to their experiences as people who live with a disability.
Kickstart was originally a festival organization that coordinated events every one to three years. We shifted our approach to offer programming more frequently throughout the course of the year, providing disabilityidentifying artists opportunities, which were lacking in the mainstream arts and culture sector. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear very early on that members of the disability community are not necessarily willing to go back to “normal� life as quickly as others. Kickstart has been revising its strategic and operational plans so that we can offer meaningful programming for the artists we work with, while carefully considering the challenges and restrictions of in-person events. During the COVID-19 lockdown, we were successful in pivoting and launching a digital version of our festival from May 31 to June 6, 2020. We are currently planning our next event as part of the BC Culture Days celebration on October 25. Ideally, we would like to offer a mixture of inperson and digital events, the highlight of which will be our 10 x 5 Artist Talk.
