Road By Walking: Policy Design Through Popular Theatre

Over the last year, Righting Relations Canada has been working with the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, the Saskatoon Anti-Racist Network, and the Prairie Centre for Racial Justice to develop and pilot a workshop that uses popular theatre to gather anti-racist and anti-oppressive policy recommendations directly from staff working in arts, culture, and heritage organizations.

What is Popular Theatre?

Popular theatre is a community-based, participatory approach that rejects the typical passive audience/active performer structure, instead encouraging people to engage participants in a process of exploring, analysing, and transforming the reality in which they live, building pathways for empathy and connection while challenging assumptions, stereotypes, and systems of power and oppression. Deeply connected with popular education, it has been a powerful source of transformations across countries and cultures for decades, empowering people to critically examine their social and political reality and take action to transform them.

The Project

When Canadian Heritage released a call for proposals seeking projects that would tackle racism and oppression in arts, culture, and heritage organizations, popular theatre seemed like a natural response. After all, what better way to explore the way that oppression impacts workers in the arts, culture, and heritage sector than by using an arts-based approach? And in true Righting Relations style, we knew that the answers needed to come from the folks most impacted: people with lived experience of oppression and discrimination who are working in these organizations.

After building a project advisory team of brilliant performers, activists, and advocates, we developed and piloted two participatory workshops using popular theatre to explore experiences of racism and oppression. Dozens of current and former staff from 14 different arts, culture, and heritage organizations participated in workshops held in Regina and Edmonton in Summer 2026; after transcribing and anonymizing our conversations, we were able to identify policy recommendations not only for organizations themselves, but also for funders and governmental bodies.

Now, we’re thrilled to be able to share the story of our project, as well as the policy recommendations that we gathered throughout.

Want to know more about the project? Read the case study here!

Looking for support on your path to cultivating a more equitable organization? Check out our accountability partners map here!

If you have feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you here, or we’ve love to know if and how you hope to implement these recommendations in your own policies and processes.

We’d like to thank our partners, the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, the Prairie Centre for Racial Justice, and the Anti-Racism Network, as well as our grandmother and the inspiration for this work, Mirtha Rivera, and the members of our brilliant project advisory team. We’d also like to thank the Canadian Heritage Multicultural and Anti-Racism Program for their financial support.