 Good afternoon, everyone. If you could take your seats, we're gonna get started. We have a very full agenda today, so we wanna make sure we have enough time for all of your questions. So welcome, and thank you for joining us for cultural and racial equity in practice. Whether you're here in person at El Museo Del Barrio or joining us online at HowlRoundTV, we're delighted that you took time out of your busy schedules to be with us today. My name is Samantha Ender, and I'm with JP Morgan Private Bank, where I serve as a program officer for the Booth Ferris Foundation. I'm also a member of the advisory committee for the New York City Cultural Agenda Fund. The fund is a collaboration of seven grant-making organizations that aims to strengthen advocacy, promote cultural policy, and advance equity. Our funds are administered by the staff at the New York Community Trust. Donors to the fund include the Booth Ferris Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Robert Rauschenberger Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, David Rockefeller Fund, and The Trust. The fund makes grants to support research, technical assistance to the field, and other initiatives that seek to advance cultural advocacy, policy, and equity. We also organize convenings like this one. We believe in the importance of bringing together advocates, administrators, policy makers, researchers, and funders to discuss innovative solutions to the seemingly intractable problems in our field. The fund defines cultural equity as fairness in opportunities, for example, access to information, financial resources, or programming, for cultural organizations, workers, and participants. We're especially focused on ensuring that small community arts groups, groups led by and for people of color, and culturally and economically diverse artists are as valued for their contributions to the city's cultural ecology as larger institutions. We gather today during an historic and unsettled time for our city and for our nation. Calls for greater equity and justice are ringing forth, and the results of last week's election have amplified those calls. Only by addressing structural and institutionalized forms of oppression, including racism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, and homophobia, to name but a few, can we begin to build a more equitable cultural landscape and a more equitable society. Many of you are aware that New York City is developing its first ever cultural plan, and our commissioner is here today to share more on the planning process. We want advocates, you, the people in this room, and watching online, to be more informed, effective, and empowered to participate in this process with an equity lens. To that end, we want to provide examples of what an equitable cultural policy looks like, so that when you make suggestions to the city, you ask not only for increased funding, but also for systemic change. Two of our speakers will share their work addressing inequities in Seattle and Nashville. Their experiences will inspire you to think beyond the ATM. We hope that you leave today's convening with a firm understanding of what the cultural plan is, of how equity can and must be woven into the plan, and of how critical your participation is in ensuring the development of a plan that truly reflects the breadth and depth of culture in our great city. We'd like to extend a special thank you to the team at El Museo del Barrio, whose historic El Tiatro we've gathered today. We're grateful to El Museo for having us, and for its dedication to serving as a home to, and an advocate for Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American cultures in New York City. Another special thanks goes to HowlRound, and to the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center for making today's live stream possible. Now for housekeeping. Time is very tight today, and we have a full agenda. As we won't have time to read everyone's bios, we've provided them for you in the program. There will be time for questions for all of our speakers at the end of the program. We've provided you with note cards in your programs, which we encourage you to use to jot down your questions and comments throughout the event. During the Q and A, there will be microphones available in the audience, or you can submit a question by handing your note card to an usher. Please tweet and post about the event using the hashtag cultural equity. Add the hashtag createNYC if you would like your tweets included in the cultural planning process. And now, without further ado, I will hand you off to our first speaker of the afternoon, Karen Atlas. Good afternoon. Can you see me over this podium? A little bit of pink. So I can barely, sorry, can I pick up the mic? Is that better? Good. So I was asked to do a kind of cultural policy 101. And there are so many people here in the audience who know this very well. So I hope in the discussion, all of your knowledge can be shared around this. But I'm gonna get us started. So when people, a lot of times, talk about arts and culture policy, the first things they think about often are more money for the arts and a seat at the table. And while that's valuable, I think it's really important to push ourselves to go further. Once we get a seat at the table, what is it we want? And if we have a vision for arts and culture as part of a just and equitable city, is asking for more money for the arts enough? So cultural policy is both a product and a process, a framework for making rules and decisions that's informed by social relationships and values. It's constructed, systemic, enduring, and both de facto and transparent. Importantly, it's value-based and that's what I'm gonna keep repeating is what are those values? A lot of the work that we're involved in as an arts and culture field is actually about creating the conditions to advance policymaking. And some of the ways we advance those conditions are through cultural and demographic shifts that change values, the recognition of diverse art forms, cultures, aesthetics and ways of working, leadership that values arts and culture and is willing to make change to further equity, connecting cultural policy with other policy areas, building relationships and recognizing the politics of participation and our colleague Roberto Bedoya asked the question, who has access to policymaking? Whose voice gets heard? Building an engaged constituency for those of us who are also organizers here, organizing and direct action and the research data and pilot projects and initiatives that can then get scaled up as policies. And I think what we keep learning is that also policy is really often based on perception and that perception is built on narrative and story and so as a cultural field we have a lot to do around what story gets told by whom and gets listened to. Cultural policies are both proactive and reactive and they can have both positive and negative impacts depending on the values and the vision for the city that we have. So I'm gonna give some quick examples to kind of sprinkle some seeds into the discussion for today of all the different ways that cultural policy plays out. So the one we often talk about is investment with the questions of who does it benefit? How does it further equity? Who makes the decisions and with what criteria? Who's included and excluded and what accountability looks like? Then we have the category of protect and protection and that's become a pretty important one in the last week. So how do we protect people? The diverse cultures and the small cultural organizations. How do we protect languages? And the flip side of that was a policy in Indian boarding schools that actually was the opposite of protecting the language that hastened the loss of the language. That there is protection of freedom of speech and expression and in the last few days I've been in conversations of people very concerned about how the cultural community can speak the truths we need to speak and be protected. There's in the internet realm, not neutrality and keeping the internet open to all. There's the protection of affordable neighborhoods through land trusts or through cultural impact studies which look at what is gonna be the impact of doing something in a neighborhood. There's safety, another key issue these days, what does safety look like in terms of cultural policy when we start talking about what universities and cultural spaces might look like as places of sanctuary? And the protection side can also be about protecting the status quo in terms of funding distribution through funding formulas. So protection can also be something that might stand in the way for change for some people. Regulation is another area of policy. And some examples of regulation are land use through zoning which we're all going through a lot. Regulating labor through the minimum wage and intern pay. There's regulation of expression in public by subway dancers or by street artists. There's regulation plays out in terms of credentialing who gets credentialed as a teaching artist. Does that exclude culture bearers who are not part of institutions? And regulations related to loan payments. Okay, access, there's a lot of policy around access and that could be to public space, capital funding, city programs for small business, tourism, the access to the programs related to recovery post 9-11, or Hurricane Sandy, access to affordable housing, access to visas and fair immigration policy. We experienced that, the challenges related to that, access to healthcare, access to jobs. And we have these examples in the past of the CEDA program and the WPA access to the media to amplify voices and frame narratives, access to media ownership and access to airwaves. In terms of taxes, a lot of policy gets made related to taxes, tax deductions for contributions, the unincorporated business tax, a big issue for freelancers, tax increment financing, historic tax credits around space. The lowering of taxes for commercial businesses that rent to cultural organizations and the hotel tax funds that have been used. And these are just, I'm sprinkling different examples to just push your thinking in these different areas around incentives, incentives for women and people of color vendors for cultural infrastructure and communities that have faced historic underinvestment. Oversight and personnel. We've had examples of policies that have been made in the city, for example, the police inspector general or ombudsman at city council and liaisons and agencies, ways to look at personnel for oversight. There's a set of policies around ending harmful practices and this we know from outlawing discrimination, eliminating redlining and allocating resources from bad actors to support those impacted by them. And we have an example in New York state of the New York state music fund. So I'm gonna close now, but keep in mind that policy is specific and concrete. In some cases, we may be ready to identify particular policies and others we may first need to agree on the broader principles, contexts and platforms. And I'm gonna leave you with a few questions. What's the mechanism to shift and further equity-based policy? In the city, we have some examples from other sectors such as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the Center for Health Equity, Partnerships for Parks and Campaign for Police Reform. Another question is, who are our allies outside of the arts and what are our common values and interests? How has the context for cultural policy shifted post-election? What will need to be protected? What will need to be resisted? And what proactive steps do we need to take? And finally, what's our vision for New York City? How can the cultural plan provide an opportunity to advance a vision for cultural equity and racial justice? Thank you. Everyone? Karen, thank you so very much for kicking us off. And Sam, my name is Michelle Coffey and I think I'll sit in the middle. And I run the Lambent Foundation and honored to be with the Cultural Agenda Fund. And I'm joined today with really our mentors, individuals who have committed themselves to the field that we are practicing in. And friends, Commissioner Tom Finkel-Pearl and Susana Torella-Level. This conversation is going to be a quick one, even though we know that this could last about five hours. So we're gonna be conscious of time. We have about 22 minutes. And the title of this quick conversation is Cultural Policy and Practice. And the way that we were going to formulate, excuse me, the way that I wanted to formulate the conversation is to think about our current history, current practice, and so that we can forecast in the future. So I'm gonna kick it off by asking Susana, given your wonderful decades of committed work with El Museo, so welcome home again, with IMLS, looking at federal, state, and local practices, large major institutions like the Met to the alternative art spaces. And an audience member, can you, what do you consider to be the most critical component of cultural policy from your long-spanning career? First of all, thank you for the honor of this invitation. As probably every one of you knows, because I've told you, I am Puerto Rican. And from my colonial background, I had some landmarks of cultural experience. In Puerto Rico, when I was born, there were no museums, official museums. And in 55, Don Ricardo Alegria founded the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. His model and his idea was kind of brilliant and visionary. It was to teach a nation, a country, who had no nation, the roots of their cultural identity, not their art, their cultural identity. And he had a visionary, decentralized plan. The headquarters of the Instituto and the major museum were in San Juan, but he sent out a cultural center, a tiny one in some cases, one room, in every major town of Puerto Rico. I was 11 when the Instituto was founded. Don Ricardo ended up being a very important mentor to me. And so that model was crucial for me. In 1970, I come to New York City, the global candy store of museums. And I worked directly with two of the best, MoMA and the Met. And I mean that it was a highly valuable, abstract part of my career. Where I learned about high standards of governance, professional practice, a kind of closed circle of a world of art history and museological and curatorial excellence. It was a closed world. No consciousness of audiences, basically curator to curator. And the perspective to put it as naked, particularly as I can, was culture for the cultured. At the same time I was doing this, I applied for a job at El Museo del Barrio and I was turned down. And then came in the 80s the most exciting and the praxis of my career. I made a crucial decision in 85 to go and co-found a museum of contemporary Hispanic art with Nilda Peraza. And overnight I became a member of the alternative art world. People actually made panels about alternative, anyway. And I began to work with live artists. And one key resource of that time in my career became, I became aware of, which was the New York State Council on the Arts. It was key to my experience of understanding the cultural life of New York City and New York State, which frankly I didn't even know existed, the State part. The new perspective was culture for all. The parameters were equity, diversity, social justice, beyond always artistic excellence. All of a sudden audiences mattered, artists mattered, women mattered, gay men and women mattered. See change, curators began to listen to educators, began to work with them. And as you know, the New York State Council worked with the highest standards of criteria. Okay. So then came the years of El Museo del Barrio and the resources again that were most important to me. At the city was the Department of Cultural Affairs, crown jewel of cultural affairs departments throughout this country. And at the state, well I've mentioned NISCA. And on the federal NEH and NEA, plus the departments, the professional organizations like AAM, AAMD, CIG, which by default, since the U.S. has no official U.S. policy, no cultural czar, no cultural commission, by default all of these organizations were carriers and vessels of cultural policy in the U.S. And these unique to the U.S., which now everybody's trying to imitate, was the public-private partnership with private foundations such as our host and private philanthropists. So the principle which finally made me self-identify with cultural policy was the democratization of culture. Beautiful, thank you very much. And now I'm gonna pitch this to you, commissioner. Hearing Roots, Open Communities, Culture. Can you speak a little bit to some of the activities that have transpired to date? Because what I'm gonna try and dig out is where do you think we can be most engaged and most vocal? Because I think the big question for me would be what happens after July 1? What happens after we have the plan and where are the entry points? So I think that there's two, I mean what happens before July 1st? So we are by law required to issue a cultural plan on June 30th, which goes into effect on July 1st, right? But what happens with up till then is extremely important and who gets engaged and how people get engaged. What happened in the 80s with the democratization in as much as it happened of the New York City's cultural life was not done idly because no one cared, it was done because there was a lot of spirit in the air about equity and inclusion. So what was the CIG before Henry Geldzaler became commissioner? It was mostly a bunch of very old organizations, incredible, great organizations that give a lot to the city, but we didn't have a musée or a queen's museum or a studio museum or Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning or there's a whole list, long list of CIGs that were included who were brought to the table at that time, both because of political will because by the way, this was a time when the city had no money at all, right? This was the fiscal crisis. This was under coach at a time when Henry Geldzaler was a commissioner that had enough influence and enough pressure coming to him that inclusion was a must, right? So what happens now over these next months is we're out listening a lot. I'm at meetings all the time. This is great. It's amazing to be in front of people and have input constantly bombarding us. But I think that this room, this is a great thing and thanks to the funder group that put together this group to talk to us, but we're listening to a lot of people in a lot of different ways and how it gets mobilized is gonna be a key to what the result is. So what happens, you want me to say what happens after that, that's your actual question. Because then I'm bouncing it back over here. So after that, so Susanna, aside from being the former director of El Miseo, is also the chair of the Citizens Advisory Committee. The Citizens Advisory Committee to the Cultural Plan is a group that's put together half by the mayor and half by the city council to advise on this plan, right? So she and her committee will be in place for a period of time making sure that we have made a series of recommendations that are doable, that are sort of short, medium, and long-term propositions for the cultural life of New York City. And so we're gonna be held accountable by reporting to them publicly on a periodic basis for a number of years. I think of five years is the sunset provision of the committee. So there is, it doesn't end on the day that it gets adopted. It's the day in which things begin to be enacted and we are held accountable by that committee and also by everybody else in the room who's, I'm sure, planning to hold us accountable, right? So I have a little bit more time than I thought. So I wanna bounce something back to you, Susanna, if possible, and it's about this holding accountability. And with your four decades of critical work and critical push-throughs and the mentioning of not having a federal policy and you being on the Citizens Committee commission or a technical correction. I'm the chair of the Cultural Commission. Commission, very good. And Ben Rodriguez-Cubeñas is the chair of the Citizens Committee. This is, we have a problem. We have two committee, committee and commission and they're like, so the titles are so closely. It says yes. Sorry. So the plan for New York, the cultural plan for New York City. You believe in cultural policy? Yes, and I was very freaked out when I was asked to talk about cultural policy and I thought immediately, something women do, I have to do research and read articles and I thought cultural policy is basically what I've lived for the last 40 years. It's just typical of this country, which is so young and looking towards the future and never looking to the past. It had to be, the cultural policy had to come out of the ground, from the ground up. And I'm so glad you mentioned because what happened in the 60s and 70s was the beginnings of a completely new model and I'm so proud to have been part of El Museo del Barrio. I was curator and director and it was a completely different model as all of the other culturally specific museums, a perfect model for a nation of immigrants. It was, they were organizations that came out of, they were born fighting and they were born fighting for equity and diversity and they have broken models, offered models to everything in terms, to all the other major museums in terms of programs and now what will make it work? I've never seen a net cast so wide as this preparation work that is being done. Never have seen such a thing and it's exciting because there's interagency components that I think are new, my understanding has never been done and if we do our job well of listening hard enough we will know who has been left out till now and it will be a new beginning, a new chance to really do it well. Beautiful, thank you. Can I follow up on that? Can I throw the question because I actually know how you're gonna follow up, I think. Test me out. Speak a little bit about the work that your team has been doing inside, linking the agencies to help us ensure the advancing equity for this city. Yeah, so I... First was that, were you wanting to go there? Half of it actually, yes. So when you think about cultural policy it almost always reverts to cultural funding for cultural groups, right? That's actually not what we're talking about 100%. So what we're talking about is that within city government, for example, the Department of Education spends considerably more money than the Department of Cultural Affairs does on culture, right? They have a $22 billion budget, they have $350 million for arts education. So that when you think about, so we need to think about the cultural policy as a city-wide idea that all we do is fund the non-profit sector. Everybody in this room pretty much is connected to the non-profit sector, but what about Broadway? What about music clubs? What about all that other aspects of culture that are not included under the umbrella of the Department of Cultural Affairs? So I think that, and we've already heard people three or four times already say, this isn't just about funding, getting more money into cultural affairs or more money, it could be about that. It could be about rethinking about who gets what money, et cetera, but there's a lot of other stuff involved that is outside of the purview and we want everybody in this room and people who are not in this room to be thinking creatively about those other touchpoints. What about the intersection with NYCHA? What about the intersection with the health and hospitals? What about intersection with planning, et cetera? So cultural policy often reverts just to cultural funding and equity and inclusion often reverts to race, that that's what people are talking about when they talk about inclusion. And one of the things that we're dedicated to doing is to thinking broadly that 10% of New Yorkers identify as disabled. That is not what comes to mind in a lot of discussions about cultural equity, but it's absolutely something that we're dedicated to making part of this plan. So I just think that people have to, we are expecting a lot of good push and we're very thick-skinned. You can yell at us, it's no problem. We expect it. In fact, it's your responsibility to do that. But I also think that we have to think outside the box and the box is pretty much drawn around a set of issues, which are extremely important issues, but they're not the only issues. So as we wrap up our conversation, I wanna ask you both for a really quick one word or response about what might be the most, the important advocacy tactic that you would like us to pick up and move and do. So what is your top advocacy tactic or strategy as a recommendation for us? I'm gonna answer first while you're thinking about it. Okay, because I was just thinking about this. That's why he's commissioner. I think it's great that leaders of organizations are in the room. I think it's great that funders are in the room. I think we need to hear from your audiences. We can't have a situation. When you go to a hearing at City Hall about libraries, you get 500 people in t-shirts who are library users in the audience. Everybody been to those hearings? When you go to a cultural hearing, you see 100 organizational directors. Where's the audience? And you guys, you have to connect with your audience and connect your audiences to us, not just you. That's my number one advocacy. If you read Rules for Radicals or one of those Saul Linsky books, it's all about packing the house with the real people who are the consumers of that product or who are the people living in that neighborhood. Thank you. To me, self-identification is a crucial part of who's going to really look at this plan and say, that is for me, just one tiny part of it. That's all you need. You don't need, sorry, one tiny part. It's something that they can identify with. And you know, the other thing is that this country is always in such a hurry, this stuff takes time. There's no shortcuts. And in other words, after the plan launches, it'll take time to see the stuff moving around, but it will. And we have to set aside the been there done that and really get into one of the most beautiful things that I've seen that I think you started at the Queens Museum is a group called Women Who Dance, who go to the Corona Plaza. Corona Plaza, and they dance every morning, every weekday morning, because just to heal themselves and make themselves feel better. Most people in this city do an immense amount of cultural activity, and they haven't connected the dots that culture and art is part of their lives. And we've got to make that visible and make them celebrate it, help us celebrate it. Bravo. You guys are great, thank you very, very much. As we exit the stage, I actually want, I would like to, you can go any way you like. I would like to welcome Mark Stern to the stage. Mark Stern is with the Social Impact for the Arts Project. And Mark is here to share with us the preliminary findings of SIAP's research on the non-economic value generated by cultural assets across New York City. So one other thing I should say is that private philanthropy has made the research possible, and our colleagues are in the room with us today. And we hope the findings will inform not only the cultural plan, but the field's continued advocacy around cultural policy, thanks. Great, thanks, Michelle. Well, good afternoon. I should apologize, I'm fighting a post-election cold. My goal is to let it last four years so I can stay in bed, but I don't know if that's gonna work out. So for the past couple of years, my research group at Penn, the Social Impact of the Arts Project, and our partners at Reinvestment Fund have been working to document the cultural assets of the city of New York and link them to other dimensions of thinking about social well-being. We wanna thank the Serna Foundation and the Cultural Agenda Fund in terms of funding this research. I've only got a limited amount of time, so I just wanna go through five things I want you to remember. This is a simple one. We all have a right to culture. For me, this is the starting point for thinking about cultural policy. You don't have to take my word for it. The UN agrees with me on this. So how do you take an abstract concept like a right to culture and turn it into something you can study? Well, we've been using international work on the human development and social justice that focuses not just on economic well-being as a yardstick for thinking about well-being, but thinks about several dimensions that you can bring into that conversation. To add to that international conversation, our group has focused on two points. First of all, we've decided to drill that notion of social well-being down to the neighborhood level so that for every neighborhood, we can look at multiple dimensions of well-being. And secondly, we wanna put art in the center of that conversation, both because of its intrinsic importance, but also because of its connections with and how it influences other dimensions of well-being. That was point one. Up, up, one, five. Okay, and as I mentioned, we're developing multiple dimensions of social well-being, so this gives you a sense of the 10 that we're looking at and some of the measures we've used to document them. Okay, here's the bad news. Cultural resources in New York City are highly unequally distributed. What I've done here is taken a set of the cultural indexes we've used and show how they're distributed across the city from the poorest to the richest parts of the city. And you can see the richest parts of the city have three or four times more of each of these kind of resources than other parts of the city. So this is really the starting point and the biggest challenge in terms of thinking about cultural policy. These are the indexes that we've used to look at it. Over the past two years, we've documented 4,000 non-profit cultural providers, 17,000 for-profit cultural firms, employed artists across the city, and finally by aggregating data sets we've collected from a variety of our non-profit partners, 1.4 cultural participants. And what we do is we geocode those to see what neighborhoods they're in and then look at those indexes and then aggregate them into a set of indexes. Finally, we've complimented that research with qualitative work, interviewing people in several neighborhoods in the city to give us insight in terms of from the grassroots level what, how they would make sense of our data. Okay, let's keep jumping around. Anyway, there's five maps here and they all look alike, which is the bad news, which is that essentially, if you, whichever map you look at, this is non-profits, Manhattan below 125th Street, sections of Brooklyn and sections of Queens near the river are the areas that have the strongest in terms of non-profits. They have the strongest in terms of for-profits. They have the strongest in terms of artists and they have the strongest in terms of cultural participation. If you take those four together and then say, okay, we're gonna create an index, you probably are going to guess that the index looks pretty much like those as well. So, as we look at cultural resources across the city, there are clear neighborhoods where these are concentrated and there are clear areas that aren't fulfilling our obligation to provide a right of culture to every citizen in the city. Point number three is the good news. I told you I had a cold. It's the good news, which is that in spite of this high inequality in terms of the distribution of cultural resources, if we look at low and moderate income neighborhoods in the city, we find the strongest relationship between the presence of cultural resources and a variety of social benefits, benefits in terms of security, in terms of good schools and in particular in terms of health. We've gathered data on such things as the frequency of diabetes, hypertension, the number of cases of abuse and neglect, child abuse and neglect, to studies of teen pregnancy and birth outcomes. All of that data come together and it says that if you're in a low and moderate income neighborhood and we correct for the influence of income, race and ethnicity, that areas with heavier concentrations of culture do much better on these index across the board. So this is very good news, I think. Okay, so point four is the, well yeah, point, which is essentially that this isn't simply a causal relationship. That what we're essentially looking at is neighborhoods in the city where the presence of cultural resources are part of a neighborhood ecology that brings together institutions, brings together social networks to create an environment that produces healthier outcomes for the population and other sets of social benefits. This map, actually this map's a little, one of the things we do across the 10 dimensions we've looked at is to classify neighborhoods as either having concentrated advantage or concentrated disadvantage in terms of across those 10 dimensions in a variety of neighborhoods that are kind of in between challenged and struggling neighborhoods as well. Point five is so what? So essentially in terms of our research team we see three kind of things to think about in terms of implications of the research so far. So first of all, there's a set of low income neighborhoods out there with very few cultural resources. This isn't to say that they don't have culture but in terms of the official formal research resources in those neighborhoods that these neighborhoods are buying. If we're going to see this commitment to a right to culture as meaning anything, these neighborhoods have to get a number one priority in terms of thinking about what to do next. Secondly, there's a set of neighborhoods out there that are economically challenged but that also have many more cultural resources than we would expect given those challenges. We see these as neighborhoods that, we call them civic cluster and we see them as having this capacity to kind of leverage other elements of social well-being. Oh, shucks, I went back two slides. All right, so you got the point. So essentially these are neighborhoods that are doing better than we expected and we see them as points of strength that we can build on. Sorry, the final of the three strategies I wanted to talk about, we did a lot of interviewing over this past summer, very hot summer I should point out with people. And one of the things that came out of it was that the city is really impressive in terms of its connections between cultural organizations, city government and city council, those kind of connections compared to other cities in which we've done work, they're very impressive. What we'd like to see is to that be complimented more by grassroots work at the ground in terms of working out to other organizations in your neighborhood. This is, when we talked to people about what was the nature of their connections, what we were finding was that a lot of those connections they were preoccupied with were these vertical connections up to the city, up to city council. We think there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of working outside. I've got three minutes, that means I can talk more slowly. No, actually, you've seen this slide already, this is just summarizing the five points. So my point is we're entering a very challenging period that other people have alluded to. It's really critical that the cultural sector step up in terms of assuring that this notion of a right to culture isn't just something that we throw up in a PowerPoint every couple of years, that it actually has lived by, so that every citizen in this city has access and opportunities around culture, regardless of their economic status, their race, their disability status, et cetera. So thanks very much. So what I offered to a couple of people before we got started today is that I believe that this is the first time that we've had a kind of city-wide gathering since the election in the cultural sector. Is that fair to say? Yes? Okay, so I just wanna acknowledge that and that even though we're making illusions to this kind of new moment, that we haven't unpacked what that really means, right? And we're gonna chat a little bit, but then we're really gonna try to quickly get into Q&A because I think clearly we need to have a conversation about all of this in this very new context, right? And so what I also wanna do is kind of revert back to a kind of three-year flashback that I stood up on a stage and said, I don't know what I'm going to say and it was true at the time and it's true now and I'm going to bring back what I said then, which is, when we have these conversations, what we're really talking about is power. So the messaging that this is more than an ask for more money, I don't want the takeaway to be that a bunch of funders stood up here and said, don't ask for more money. That's not the takeaway. The takeaway is who has power in this city, who doesn't and what can we offer in terms of a vision for this city that shifts that, right? And so the larger frame of this conversation is what would we give up in the name of equity and justice? That's the larger frame, right? Done and done. In that spirit, right? Here are two people, Jen Cole, Randy Eggstrom, who have led conversations in their respective geographies kind of in a similar spirit, right? If that wasn't our norm before, how do we address that? So I wanna invite you each to kind of share what that work has looked like and maybe, no pressure, any lessons, any sort of in reflection, how could your local community have contributed, like help to facilitate that process or as a kind of case study for us? You ready to dive in? It's dealership, yeah. Okay, okay. Hi, New York. How are you? Thank you for having me. It's a big honor to be able to be on this stage and to be able to talk to all of you. I'll give sort of three disclaimers. One, I have to sort of acknowledge and own my privilege as a cis straight white male married legal citizen to sit on this stage and talk about racial equity and the most diverse city in our country. I just have to own the privilege that I hold in doing so. Also, I had probably a much more sophisticated talk I was gonna give and then November 9th happened and so I'm just gonna be a little more raw with you than I think I thought I would be. And context matters and I have to own that I represent the People's Republic of Seattle where Democrats and socialists work to outflank each other with the most progressive version of policy they can. For real, y'all, we have a dog park master plan. That's where I'm from. We don't have a cultural plan but we do have a dog park master plan so good news for all the dog owners in that house. That's not where I come from so we're good. Yeah, Jen has a different context and she'll talk about that. But I do wanna talk and I'm very excited to talk about our commitment to equity in general and to racial equity specifically and if there's nothing else that you take away from what I say, please know that what I really believe is that advancing racial equity is an act of strategy. It is not an act of compliance. It is the right thing to do but it is not just the right thing to do. It's the thing that if we do well, we'll do more for our organizations, our communities, our city and our sector than anything else we can do. So don't be afraid of that change. That change is super exciting. In the People's Republic of Seattle, we initiated a race and social justice initiative about 14 years ago, three mayors ago and nothing survives three mayors in Seattle. And we still have that initiative and that initiative is predicated on the fact that our public sector has been complicit in creating a dramatic set of inequities as it pertains to communities of color and immigrant communities and low income communities, disabled communities, our policies, our practices and our institutions have created the reality that we sit in today and as such, we have to make a commitment in policy and practice to undoing the impact of that work. That's the cover that I have to push racial equity through the Office of Arts and Culture because I live in a city that has had this commitment for 14 years and I'll be real, we all go through a training when we join the city, we all learn about white privilege and institutional racism and I wouldn't say that our funding and our policies yet reflect the talking points that we learn as employees coming into the city and as a relatively small department, we're an easier aircraft carrier to turn, we're a little bit more nimble and we have the ability to lean into things a little harder than I think the transportation department can. So our office has been active in RSJI since its inception and it's something that I'm personally passionate about so when I became the director four years ago, it was a space that I was ready for us to lean into and two things happened that gave us a pretty interesting opening. The race exhibits came to our local science center and I was able to partner with the Office of Civil Rights, they run the Race and Social Justice Initiative to co-fund an intern who would use that exhibit to do a whole host of community trainings. They did like 125 community trainings to teach our community about the impacts of structural racism and how people can do their work around equity and one thing that was interesting was that the arts community didn't really show up to that opportunity even though we were the ones co-funding it. Another thing that happened was the very well-meaning Gilbert and Sullivan Society mounted a production of the Makado at our repertory theater featuring an all-white cast. A local Asian-American journalist wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Times, it got picked up nationally, it was decried as yellow face and it sparked a conversation about the intersection of artistic freedom and artistic responsibility and my staff came to me and said, can we hold, I mean, it was like protests and counter-protests and my staff said, can we hold a conversation about this? And so we did at the repertory theater and I think 800 people showed up, which Seattle's a much smaller city than New York, so that's a lot of people who show up to a conversation in Seattle. And it was pretty powerful and people spoke very honestly from all sides of that issue and we knew that we were at the beginning of something. I should also say between the mounting of the show and the meeting that we had, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri and that really brought a lot of gravity and urgency to the conversation and I think made it real for people. So we started to dial it up a little bit and we said, all right, we've been doing these trainings, what if we commissioned Robin D'Angelo to do a training specifically about white fragility and in the third whitest city in America, white fragility's a thing. We all drive Priuses, we all recycle, we all compost, but sometimes people think that that gives them a pass when it comes to unpacking their own racism. So Robin did that, we worked with Carmen Morgan to do a training specifically for people of color about how they deal with the trauma of receiving that institutional racism and being the ones who are always asked to carry that burden when it comes to institutional change. And then we actually co-funded the opposition of the deputy director of the race and social justice initiative with the civil rights office. That same intern actually, a woman named Diana Falchak who was the deputy of that program for the last two years and actually now works full-time in our office as our race and equity manager. With Diana's partnership and our staff, we developed a program called the Turning Commitment into Action Cohort which was an experiment and the idea was you had to apply to get in, you had to have someone from executive leadership, program leadership and board leadership, so three people, we do a cohort of 13 organizations at a time and you went through 40 hours of training assessing where your organization was on a racial equity continuum, building a plan to move a part of your work forward and advancing racial equity in your organization and then you had to sign a commitment letter that you were gonna actually do it. That was all, you had to do that just to get into the program. We didn't know what would happen or how it would be received but we opened the first call and it filled up in an hour and then we opened a second call and it filled up in a day and we opened a third call and it filled up in a week. And so something that we thought we were gonna do once with 15 people we wound up doing three times with 45 organizations, 15% of everybody that we fund and it wasn't just like small and culturally specific and neighborhood based organizations, it was the opera, it was the art museum, it was the symphony. So that was encouraging and we could tell that there was an appetite for people to step into this. I'm gonna read the racial equity statement that we spent five and a half months developing with 18 staff and 40 different revisions and this is the first time I've ever read this in public but I think we've been trying to capture and knit together all the different work we're doing because we're trying to center racial equity in everything we do, not just make it a standalone project. How does it show up in our funding programs? How does it show up in our arts education work? How does it show up in issues of affordability and cultural space? So I'm gonna read this if you'll bear with me and I literally have never done this before. So here we go. The Seattle Office of Arts and Cultures commitment to racial equity. The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture commits to an anti-racist work practice that centers the creativity and leadership of people of color, those most impacted by structural racism to move toward a system that benefits all of us. We also acknowledge that we are on indigenous land, the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. We envision a city of people whose success, safety and health are not predetermined by their race. A city where all artists, performers, writers and creative workers have the freedom, agency and platform to share and amplify their stories, art, culture and experiences. At the same time, we acknowledge that our actions, both conscious and unconscious, past and present have benefited some communities while limiting opportunities and outcomes for communities of color. We work toward our vision by addressing and working to eliminate institutional racism in our programs, policies and practices. In alignment with the city's race and social justice initiative, we seek new solutions that use arts as a strategy to drive not only our office, but the city as a whole toward racial equity and social justice. We will continue to break barriers and build arts integrated tools that challenge the status quo and push us toward the inclusive society that we envision. That's our commitment to racial equity. And it's, I mean, that's great that we have a statement. Having a statement isn't really enough. We're centering our entire 2017 work plan in this framework. We are building measurable goals for all 32 of our staff to implement this across the work they currently do. And I said earlier that I believe racial equity is an active strategy and we are in the whole beyond the ATM thing. But, you know, in the last four years and through this lens of equity, we've doubled our budget and doubled our staff. And if that is an evidence of this being an active strategy, I'm not sure what else is, but it is the impact of our commitment to equity is intractable from the success we've had in growing our work. It did lead to more resources, but I am 1,000% committed to getting beyond the ATM because our office was chartered in 1971, five years after the birth of the NEA, you know, after we formalized arts funding as governments across the country. And that's important work. Investing in our cultural community will always be at the center of what we do, but it is the way in which we work across other sectors. It's the way in which we harness and leverage the work of artists and creatives to solve the most challenging problems we have in our cities. That is the measure and the future of cultural policy, I believe. And racial equity is one version of it. Arts education is a version of it. Affordable housing is a version of it. Transportation is a version of it. But those are the issues we need to solve. And we need to not just pay artists to be artists, but we need to leverage the incredible work artists do to come together and help us solve the larger problems that we're wrestling with. So, that's enough for me. That's a mic drop. That's a mic drop. Thank you for that. So, lots of questions. But I wanna give you space to kind of describe a very different context. A very different context, but still a local arts agency that's part of the city government. So, I live in the racialized south. I live in Nashville, which is about a million plus community, larger MSA. I am really lucky to work alongside Randy in this equity work. And I also wanna own my own privilege as a white straight married woman with legal status in all this work. We began our journey a little longer ago and it's taken us a little bit slower time because government moves at the pace of snails sometimes. When I first came almost seven years ago, the very first question I asked the staff was why are we here? And I got a lot of confused looks and they said, well, we're here to give grants. And I was like, that is the wrong answer. We're not here to do that. And we went about a multi-year process recentering our world around what Mark really just talked about, which is that every person has the right to a creative life. And if you own that and you anchor your world there, you begin to ask and unpack a whole series of questions about belonging. Because if you say that every person, then you have to begin to understand the system in which you are working, the system of local arts agencies is predicated and continually centers whiteness. So it's predicated on facilitating the funding of large mostly Western organizations, facilitating public art creations that are generally created by mostly white men. And you have to sort of ask yourself fundamental questions about the system in which you work and whether it is beginning to facilitate and create belonging for everyone. So we were lucky enough three years ago to be part of the citywide general planning process, which is a city strategic plan, which looks at every city system from transportation to education to economic development. And one of the core and driving questions that our mayor at the time put forward was how is this facilitating equity? And we are a city that has a significant level of migration and resettlement in the last 20 or 30 years from a variety of countries around the world. We have the second largest Kurdish population outside of Iran. We have almost as many languages spoken in our school system as are in the city of New York. So our little tiny mid-sized town is becoming quite a global community and sort of the black-white binary that used to drive many southern cities is not their reality anymore. And so it's an urgency to work across sectors and to ask the questions of how you are dealing with what Gloria and Azula calls the borderlands. Our idea is that most of our institutional race-based systems, including those in arts and culture, in the government, are centered in whiteness. How do we reframe that to think about belonging? So we did something similar to what Mark just did about cultural asset development, and our maps looked almost the same. In our low census tract neighborhoods, we had a significant amount of lack of cultural institutions, but we had an incredible amount of cultural activity. And so we went about, like Randy, re-looking at every single thing we do in three realms, people, practices, and policies. We initiated 18 months ago a paper called Holding Up the Mirror. You can NPR it and see all the negative trolls of comments that were posted. We asked a researcher to sort of look at the status of race specifically in our institutions, and the findings were troubling. They reinforced what we all know to be true, which is that there are disconnects between audiences. Sometimes the philanthropy and funding community and donor community reinforces cultural product, which reinforces stereotype and reinforces institutional racism. And we decided that we needed to do three things simultaneously and just begin them without a clear sense of what the end would be. One, we need to pull people together and begin to have hard and necessary discussions about the reality of structural racism in the arts ecosystem in our community. We initiated something called Race Equity in Arts Leadership or Real Cohort. We, too, put a call out saying, oh my God, no one's gonna respond, to have a moderated conversation about race. We had 20 spots open. We got 75 applications. People even from out of state applied, which I thought was strange. And it was a mixture of individual practicing artists to the head of our symphony orchestra. And we worked with a community-based development organization and had monthly moderated conversations. That group continues to self-organize and asked us to invest more money in deeper training. So three weeks ago, we hosted a multi-day, three days of dismantling institutional practice training that was attended by some of our largest and smallest organizations. They sent staff, board, and senior leadership. We've now made that a five-year city commitment contract so that work will continue to happen. And here's the thing. Unlike Randy, I don't live in a People's Republic. My new mayor just got, we just got our first chief diversity officer a year ago. Like, that seemed really progressive in the South. The city is working with us. We are leading this with all of the other city departments. My department is pushing them and pushing the city practice. And it appears as if other city departments will now use this same contract that we have to begin to do the dismantling racism work. Our little itty-bitty tiny department of 11 people decided we were gonna do this and it is leading to some structural change. The other thing that we did is practices and really look at, we will come out in the spring with what I think may be the first public art plan in the country that anchors in equity. How is it that people of artists of color are in the public art system? How is it that we're working in neighborhoods of color? How is it that public art is a tool for civic participation and dialogue specifically anchored in equity in our practices? And then the last I'll talk about is policies and we continue to do this work. One of the major challenges of a local arts agency is the way we're required to fund. And we, unlike New York, do not have a lot of culturally specific organizations. So when we started to have dialogues like this and said we want to fund more organizations of color, we had like five formalized organizations of color. We had a tiny Native American Alliance. We had a tiny Native African American Cultural Alliance. We have lots and lots and lots of communities of color and no formalized infrastructure. So I said, well, that's just dumb. We need to figure out a different way. Grants aren't gonna work. We have to give grants to 501C3s. Okay, how else can we fix this? How else can we put money in the hands of artists of color to do the culturally specific work that is critical in neighborhoods? So we found an obscure rule in the city purchasing code that allowed me to direct purchase the services of musicians, petting zoos, musical acts, and magicians. That's it, magicians. I will show it to you. It is real. Yeah, so, and we used that as a lever and said, okay, the grant rule won't work. Will this rule work? We convinced the city purchasing department to let us add artists into that weird obscure definition. We created a workaround with the city payment system so that artists could do a one-page payment processing form rather than the 30-page legal insurance binding things you usually have to do to be a city vendor. We convinced the city council member to give us $40,000 and then $100,000 to run this program and we've run it for the last almost two years called Thrive and you can apply for up to $4,000. You must pay artists a living wage and overwhelmingly, the money goes to artists of color in our lowest-sense track neighborhoods and I can't get it out the door fast enough. Tomorrow we review applications monthly so no one sits around and waits. You get 80% of your money up front so there's no front-ending it for low-income artists of color. I'm probably gonna run out of money and have to ask the city council for it more this year because the program is so on fire. When we talk about agency in this, and I so appreciate Risa talking about power because this is what this is about, it's like we can change who we give money to but what we really need to change in all of our work and that's what we commit to every single day is asking those questions of power, who has power, who doesn't have power, how do we give up power so other people have it in our community and we have to continually work at people practices and policies to do that because that's the way the system begins to dismantle. I like to tell my staff every day our job is to figure out what we're disrupting today and you have 100% blanket coverage to disrupt something and I will cover you for it. And so I think that we can talk a lot longer about the shift that made in staff and people but I believe this is to Andy's point the work and I believe the work got a lot more urgent seven days ago so thank you. So I think it's exciting, right? So clearly for any of us who believed in a world where equity and justice is possible, believed in a world that is multiracial, that is multilingual, that is human, November 9th was a little discouraging, right? And so while typically it might seem strange to have a conversation on racial equity and to have two people who are white stand up and talk about what does that look like? I think actually in this moment, it's really important that we have two people that are white to talk about what that looks like, right? And so I think each of you have really lifted up this notion of being kind of creative problem solvers and how to get around some of the tactical elements of the system but we are a room of cultural leaders and so if you can kind of talk about some of the people to people obstacles to doing this work, do you know what I mean? Some of the intangible cultural values based stuff that gets in the way. Well, part of it is that is helping people see why it will in fact be better for all of us if we can do this work together. I mean, it's not my job to hand hold large wealthy institutions but you know, Michael Culloran who is my predecessor in this job who's now at the NEA used to say that if you ask the arts community to form a firing line, they'll get in a circle. And I don't, you know, we have so little political agency when it comes to our influence in government, in politics. When was the last time you went to a debate and someone asked about the arts? I don't know if it's happened in my life. So we don't need to go to war with each other. We need everyone to be on this journey and the two things that I use are one, this is an opportunity. It's an incredibly exciting opportunity and there's a lot of strategic value in advancing this work and the other is to look at Manuel Pastor's demographic data and be like hey, over half of the kids born today are not white. Like it's not just that I think it's gonna happen, it's that it's already sort of happening and we can get on board or we can get run over by the bus. And I think that it's to everyone's benefit for us all to go forward together embracing the incredible diversity our country continues to have and will have going forward. So it's about creating a sense of possibility. We've seen in our sector lots of attempts, I mean how many diversity initiatives have there been since the 80s, it's kind of insane, but you can't mandate doing the right thing because it doesn't change culture. If anything it just creates tokenism. So hopefully you compel people to join this work with you and at the same time you slowly ratchet up the requirements. It's like we have a question on all of our grant applications that ask people what their work is around racial equity within their organization. They don't have to answer it but if they do they get bonus points on their application. In three years they will have to answer it. Right now it's optional but like we'll slowly move that forward. Meanwhile we will invest in training and we will invest in community to try to bring them along and help them build those muscles. Also I should have said this earlier we don't have this figured out. If I at any point made it sound like we've solved racial equity we have not. And we fail forward and we try and we try again and that's part of it. So I don't know I think we're getting there with our institutional partners. I'm heartened that the opera was one of the first people to jump into the racial equity cohort but time will tell. I would also echo we don't have it figured out and in fact my team gets together every day and we're like how are we doing on our work? Because it's work and we do it every day and it is also written into plans. In terms of cultural leadership one of the things that we've tried is to just one model behavior that we're trying to do and we do have a required question that wasn't a required question. But I did that after we did internal work for several years and said okay cultural ecosystem we've been trying to do this work so now we're gonna ask you to do this work I wouldn't ask you to do something that we weren't gonna model for ourselves. The other is I think creating fundamental spaces for people to come and get together on language. I think the idea that everybody comes to this with the same language and often people will walk in thinking we're having a diversity conversation I'm like no, no, I left that conversation in 1997 I'm having this conversation. This is the conversation about power and equity and that's the conversation we're having and we realize that cultural leaders need to be empowered to own that language for themselves and so that's one of the reasons we created this cohort where I was stunned that the head of the symphony came and is like literally super fired up brought his whole board, his CEO like some of the institutions I thought would not walk into this work without a stick have done so and continue to do so and the other thing that is really powerful I feel like is creating those opportunities for small organizations and large organizations who often are not in the same orbit with one another to practice this together because I think there's really amazing learning there and I think that there are peer and social bonds that our own systems break us from, right? We don't, you know, I don't know if your community is like my community but the CEO of the symphony and the opera don't often hobnob with the Native American Indian Alliance like they're not in the same galas some of them aren't galas at all and so these questions provide us an opportunity to practice the breaking of othering in setting up new conversations, so. So building on that, I think in a previous conversation I kind of asked each of you about unintended consequences of wanting to do good work and so I'm gonna frame that even more specifically. How do we, you just saw the data that Mark and Susan have laid out, how do we avoid an investment in racial equity that ends up being an investment in helping white institutions not believe that they're white institutions, right? Like how do we end up, you know, like where does it become now we're investing a whole new range of resources in these same institutions, honestly. So like, you know, to what degree have you thought about that and then to what degree do you have just lessons from your own experience to offer? Randy and I love each other, if you haven't figured that out we differ to each other a lot. So I think we're doing two things, one is sort of we have an entire strategy that's about the large Western institutions because there's a level of unpacking of privilege that sort of has to happen there that we need to work on all the time. The other is sort of trying to, I mean looking at the map that we have that's really similar to that one is to sort of be and listen in a community without an agenda of doing something, practicing something, investing something. Like I have zero preconceived notion of what my Somali community needs right now. Like I'm at the place of not making up a Somali engagement program but of trying to find leaders and brokers in that community because there are no formalized cultural institutions right now in that community who will tell me what is already happening. So it's changing the work from I'm packaging and delivering to I'm just trying to find people who will be my friend. And then we will figure out what it is that they need. I had an Afghani cab driver at five a.m. this morning when I was on my way and he was telling me, well, do you have any Afghani cultural groups? And I said, no, do you wanna start one? He was like, yeah I do. I was like, oh here's my card, let's talk. Because that's the person to person work that it takes. And I think when you, I mean my staff at this point are community development, they're community organizers at this point. Like that's who my people are, that's who I've hired to make this transition or we've trained people to do that work. And so they just spend a lot more of their time out and with not to. And if we got this work really white, not really white, that was a bad double entendre. If we got this work really right, we would not have engagement anymore. It just would go away. Like the need for, I'm engaging you would just disappear because that power dynamic would have completely shifted. To me that's what success looks like. Which is not really what you asked. But what I'm hearing you say, because I mean again, none of us have this figured out which is why we're in this room. What I'm hearing you say is rather than have kind of prepackaged practices or policies in place that say racial equity looks like X or this community needs Y to be in a listening posture and to build relationships and to be really specific. So the specific solution in that moment was do you want to start one? But that might not be what it looks like in another context. And I'm gonna project this so you can tell me if I'm filling in too much of a blank. But it also sounds like in each of your agencies you've built out a value system that says the priority is going to be that I'm gonna make that offer to the Afghani taxi driver not to the, you know, I don't know, a new opera that's, you know, like, whatever. Right, yes, that's gonna be a priority. And also that the other thing I will say and I think this goes to some of the social welfare things that were mentioned earlier is that we've also said, we've also identified that there are lots of assets in those underinvested communities. They are often not arts assets. So it is begging us to ask the question of well, is there a family resource center or is there a health center that, I mean, for example, we have a residency program now in a community, family service center, which is basically there to administer SNAP benefits and other sort of community-based social services benefits. But we've sort of invested in an artist's residency because in this particular neighborhood there's no cultural assets formalized. But there is a family resource center that is heavily used by that neighborhood and it means working outside of our arts comfort zone into those to Randy's point areas of social justice that are critically important, right? So actually in the interest of time, if you don't mind, I want to try to get us into Q and A as soon as possible. So we want to keep this conversation going, but I actually want to invite all of the speakers back onto the stage to just kind of widen the scope of this conversation, not only to the lens of racial justice, but or racial equity and racial justice, but the full scope of what does it mean to envision the New York City that we want to live in and the New York City that we want our children to live in and their children to live in. Because that's really what this moment affords us. In terms of logistics, I think Sam mentioned earlier that there were index cards in your programs. Is that right? And how are we managing the index cards in terms of questions? So if you didn't hear that, if you have a question that you want to put forward, hold them up and then our lovely, true MC, Michelle will collect them. Okay? Don't be shy. And or you can come to the mics. Okay, so if you are empowered, come to the mics. If or you have a pass to come to the mic, come to the mic. And if not, you can hold up your question. We're gonna mic to you. Thank you. Perfect, perfect. Cool, so I'm actually gonna go here first. Okay. One note is I can only see kind of the first few rows. So do make yourself known if you're in the back. Hi, I represent a newly formed task force on disability in the arts in New York City. And I was very glad to hear Tom talk about acknowledgement of the disability community. There seemed to me many, many issues that I might ask this group around this subject, but I'd like to do it in a two-part, succinct way. One is that there are zillions of diversity initiatives and they very often either do not acknowledge disability representation or lip services given to them. And at the same time, when disability is included in any of those initiatives, it very often has to do with audience and educational programs and not what's on the stage, what's on the page, what's on the screen, what's on the walls. And so what I'd like to ask all of you from your experience, what are the sources of tension and what are the sources of dissension from incorporating disability in a meaningful way into cultural plans and into diversity initiatives? Great question. This is popcorn style, so. Being powered to respond to whoever. So I could say a couple of things and then. So one of the problems, so first of all, I will acknowledge that at whatever, the Queens Museum where I worked, we had something called Art Access, which did produce a very diverse and dynamic audience of people with disabilities, but didn't produce a staff that was diverse in terms of disability, et cetera. So I think that there are steps in the right direction that haven't been taken by our agencies and in our funding priorities. I also will say, and this is something that I'm actually hoping to talk to your task force quite a bit about. There's not good way to, we did a diversity survey as everybody knows of New York City and we got lots of good statistics about race and gender and this and that and very poor statistics about disability because they didn't exist within the organizations. We, the survey included I think 47,000 people. So it was something where we had to go and get information that those organizations had. So one of the things I wanna talk to the disability community, if I may, about is how before we do our next diversity survey, we're able to actually collect good data because collecting good data in and of itself is not a neutral thing, like you're saying. The questions you asked are what's on your mind. So as the largest funder in New York City, if we're asking a set of questions in the right way, that's going to I think help as a first step towards a more inclusive set of information and a more inclusive set of practices. So I just wanted to mention that. A couple things and again, a couple things that we have done and continue to do. One is to really look at in terms of individual artists and cultural organizations, making sure that how we accept applications are multimodal. So moving to audio applications, video applications and sort of the nonwritten capacity that we're continuing to look at what that looks like and how we sort of adjust there. We've made a specific effort to continue to invest in arts-based organizations that are working with artists who have disabilities. And then the other place that we're really trying to go deep and right now as we have a strategic partnership with our juvenile court, where we're really looking at all the points of interventions of families in the juvenile justice system and in that we are also discovering sort of in addition to the young people and their family issues, we're discovering a variety of barriers related to disability, intellectual and mobility related. And it's helping us start to begin to think in that microcosm of opportunities and sort of investments differently. So I don't have an answer yet. It's just raising a lot of questions for us about those issues. And I would just add that one, so the city made a choice to center race and social justice specifically for two reasons. One, because all the data that we have shows that the outcomes for communities of color are worse by a measure of any group that is facing institutional oppression. LGBTQ communities of color have worse outcomes than LGBT communities who are white. That said, it's not an either or. And I think these issues are intersectional and we have to stand in solidarity to interrupt any system of oppression and in our funding where almost all of the additional money that we've gotten has been directed towards our equity efforts. A substantial amount of that money has gone to disability focused organizations, the Deaf Film Festival and Deaf Spotlight, which is a theater company. So I think it's, we can't be thinking in a mode of scarcity and playing either or. I think we are stronger together and we, it's too soon. I think that those of us who are facing systems of oppression who have not had the same level of investment or representation have to find common cause and find ways that we intersect and lift each other's work up. Hi everybody, my name is J.J. Elfar. I'm the co-founder and the chair of the board of the Harlem Arts Festival, just up the street. And I'm sort of living, breathing, sleeping and dreaming about building my board right now. That's what I'm all about these days. And I'm also a new mom, which means I'm doing it faster. And I'm doing it more efficiently. And I'm thinking about how do I reach out to the people that are not otherwise hearing my message or catching my invitation. And we're talking a lot about inclusivity. And I think one of the most direct ways that we can impact nonprofit organizations on a meaningful and specific level is to really encourage more diverse board participation, which is something we all sort of know is a challenge. My question is, what programs currently exist to empower and educate potential board members who are interested in joining a nonprofit arts or cultural organization? How do we get them up to speed and doing the kind of work and thinking this, using this vocabulary, using this language and thinking along these lines? How are we empowering them with this message? And maybe Randy or Jen, I don't know if you guys have a similar kind of crash course training program, something like that. Or if we have something in New York City, that's like that. But if we don't, man, wouldn't that be great? A training program for potential board members who want to empower arts organizations to be more inclusive, particularly serving communities of color like I do in the Harlem Arts Festival. How do we sort of bring this back to the people level and give it back to the board, which is really the functioning leadership of the organization on an ongoing basis? Thanks. So Michelle, maybe you can talk about the work that we were doing with our own cohort here in New York. That brought in, yeah. Keep going, I was thinking something, I have something else, but yeah. Just that there was a sort of similar impulse to this kind of real program that happened in Nashville and the kind of work that you were talking about by application that pulled in not just organizational leadership, but also board members and that we had something similar here. I'm gonna give, I'll catch up with you in a second. Board source is a resource that I think is membership run and push for, I mean use your voices to say these are trainings that we need, where the conversations, but instead of waiting for programs, what we can do is leverage our own resources right now. And I've seen some interesting work within some cultural organizations where a board member will go to another organization's board and speak peer to peer as board members. So I think that would be important to do around aligned organizations and boards that you emulate and admire. One side note as just a civic participant and an audience member, that's a lot of work to put on people of color to sit on boards in an all white organization. So really be prepared for the conversation and the hard, hard work and the recognition that it's gonna be very, very uncomfortable. One of the things that we did as a funder collaborative, which you might identify a little, be parallel a little bit to boards, is what is our collective learning? So I think you might be referencing, we actually started a book group and a reading group and started with John Powell's race, oh I guess so sorry I can't remember the title, but there's so much literature, there's so much expertise out there, place that out as reading groups and active learning communities. Yeah I would say like the, I think it doesn't, to your point, doesn't advance the work if we're asking people of color to bear the weight of sort of the entire diversity conversation on a board, right? So I think some training across the board around the work of equity and yes. Can I just clarify one thing? I'm not just interested in bringing new people on or serving the people that are already on. I guess for folks that are interested in advancing social inclusivity, encouraging them to join a nonprofit board as a means of doing that, yeah. So now I get it. Sorry I should have made that clear. No it's okay, I mean this is why it's a conversation. So in the meantime, now you know about some places to recruit new board members, but also some resources for deepening that service and I think actually just underlining your point that yes, programs are ideal, but you know we're also in kind of like urgent times. We need to be able to move with what we have and so leveraging that wisdom in our community. So I also just wanna, I wanna make sure that we get in all of these questions and there's also some questions on cards. Absolutely thank you. Can I, I'm sorry, can I just make one other point and it's not on board so maybe it'll tie into some of the other questions but I've been kind of feeling this as the person from the field sitting up here. You know these are really great programs that are from the city, pretty much city leadership into the community and I think it's really important also to acknowledge the work that's going on the ground where groups are really training themselves and I direct a network of networks. There's networks out there. One example I wanna really draw attention to in New York City is a number, this is artist led process of getting people from the field to take undoing racism trainings from the People's Institute. It's organized by artists. It's subsidized by cultural organizations that participate and it's been going on for a number of years and it really makes a difference because there's a critical mass of people who've gone through it and you start seeing how it impacts every meeting you go to where there's a critical mass. So I think it's, I guess the thing I wanna put out is how are we connecting our top down and our bottom up work so that we can support each other rather than be parallel tracks? And Karen, do you want us to actually explore that question? How are we connecting the bottom up and the top down? So I'm gonna bring one of the questions from the cards into the room to build on that same idea, right? Because I think there's also a thread of like, how do we make sure that what has been, oh wow, wow, y'all are giving me some hard work today. That's a lot of handwriting to read. How do we make sure that what has been perceived as invisible is getting visibility and what hasn't gotten voice at the level that it's necessary has voice? So tie that idea of making sure that the grassroots conversation is not eclipsed by a kind of top down conversation, also acknowledging your point that this is very much an urban conversation this moment and that even though this is a local conversation, we should acknowledge that there are poor white communities everywhere, right? And that I think we have this perception that they are very much a rural phenomenon. But how do we bring in a class dynamic and how do we bring in to your point about groups who have felt like they have been left out and groups who do not feel like they have equal access to opportunity as allies? So that is actually a question. Sorry, I know it's hard lifting, but how are we wrestling with bringing in the grassroots conversation and bringing in, and I'm sort of overlaying working class and poor communities as part of that space? So one of the things I've been thinking about a lot about is the library system. So New York City has 215 libraries and there are three systems. And our calculations are the participation in libraries about the same as participation in cultural institutions city-wide. Just from our statistics, it's about attendance of like 45 or 47 million people a year are going to the libraries, which is the same as the culturals between the CIGs and the program groups together. The difference being, so that's every New York, so the libraries are New Yorkers for the most part. There's some scholars like Mark probably comes in town, goes to the New York Public Library, but there are 70 million tourists coming to New York City, half of whom say that culture was the number one or number two reasons. There's 35 million people, you think about the Met, has 6.7 million people coming, three or four million of those are tourists. If you go to a community library in Queens or Brooklyn, it's all people from that neighborhood. And that's 45 million people visiting those libraries. So that means every New Yorker's going to, on the average, man, woman and child, senior to toddler, is going to their library what, five or six times, right? So what about if you're talking about the Democratic Open Public Institution of New York City, it's the library system, right? CUNY's another one, right? So the public school system, which, you know, again, Chicago's cultural plan said the number one priority should be better public school arts education. So we have these systems that exist that are equitable, that are spread throughout the city, and how do we connect to those systems that already exist? And I'm not saying even, you know, I'm saying how do you connect local cultural institutions in every single neighborhood to the place that people are already going? So I was up in the South Bronx in Mott Haven Public Library, beautiful, oh my God, the beautiful building there. And there was a book club, Gracie mentioned book club. The book was written by a young Jewish author from Brighton Beach, Russian immigrant. And the audience was like completely into it. It was, there was no, first of all it made, it was important that she was actually an immigrant like most of the people sitting in the audience who had lived with her whole family in one room and so she kind of connected on a, let's say, economic level. But it wasn't something, it was a great bridge building cross sectorial arts event at which a bunch of people were sitting around learning about a part of the town they hadn't been to. For, anyway, I said there's a lot of potential there. If you made a map, Mark, I'm not asking you this to do this yet, that showed the library and that showed the library investment would be a completely different situation. So again, if we're not completely, what are the democratic public institutions that already exist? Yeah, I just wanted to make a point about the libraries. I think if, in terms of our first strategy, in terms of looking at neighborhoods with low kind of external cultural resources, I do think the libraries are critical. Susan Cybert, who's my co-conspirator in this work and I were in New York this summer doing field work. And on a Friday afternoon, Sue suggested we go to a writing workshop that was gonna be at the Brooklyn Public Library. And I said, who's gonna show up on a Friday, beautiful Friday afternoon to sit around and respond to prompts by some writer? We got into the room, it was standing room only. It more or less reflected the demography of Brooklyn. It was really quite an experience for us. So I really support that notion. I just wanted to say that in recent years I've been fortunate to be part of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And one of the great lessons for me has been to learn about the extraordinary work of libraries and their internal collaborations which are leave museums in the dust. We have no idea how to collaborate in the way that libraries have and do. And that in every way, and struck me, for instance, they have had brilliant ways of bringing people in. Many, many people go to libraries because they are also centers of job create or where they go to do research for jobs. And some have merged with post offices. How smart is that? So I think that those are really smart answers and it might seem like a masked answer, but what I'm hearing you say is if we want to get better about matching these kind of grassroots and top-down processes to look at some of the existing infrastructure for a more democratic set of processes and libraries being this kind of example of one. Yes. Yes, libraries, public schools, thank you. Yeah, thank you, okay, got it. Hi, my name is Catherine Green. I am the Executive Director and Founder of Arts East New York. So thank you so much for, thank you, for the dialogue today and the research study that you've done is extraordinary. It's something that we've always known but it's great to see it on the big screen. One of the things that I wanted to ask about today is exactly what you let into, we said that the top-down, bottom-up approach is so many of us on the ground level and in the grassroots communities, we are working so very hard on solutions ourselves and then lots of times we have funders that come up with wonderful programs and initiatives that we have to now work into, right? And it sort of takes away what we have already built in structure. And so it's very important. Actually, I wanna give one scenario. I sat down with, I believe, New York Community Trust and another funder, Ella Weiss from Brooklyn Arts Council and the great question that they asked is what do you need? What is it that you are facing and what is it that you need? And from that, we were able to create a program that really helped us to build capacity and build into program growth and it was such a, it just created an infection within me and I started to research other communities, San Francisco's one, New Orleans, those communities who really went into the neighborhood find out on the grassroots level, what do you need and how can we address those? So they came, you know, public-private partnerships and funding, you know, so my question is, what are some of the best practices that you have seen or done to help in that way? How do you usher in change on the ground level instead of the tap down? That's a great question. I think you're absolutely right and I think that we sort of honor and acknowledge the expertise that community already has and in a lot of cases, we actually hire community partners and organizations to help the other organizations get their act together and I think the point that was made earlier about, like it's great that a local theater company decided to do a season of all black female playwrights and the black run theater companies have been doing that for 30 years. So great, welcome to the party. We shouldn't give you the money that we should have been giving them and so I think it's about telling the truth about where you're investing your resources and I think there is great power and value in the wisdom that communities built both in the arts and in community organizing broadly and I think it's about resourcing that well and meeting people where they are and not asking them to fit into a confined box of whatever. I mean, the city is a little more progressive than some private philanthropy, at least in Seattle, but I think that we have to not kill people by making them use our analysis. I think we have to meet people where they are and recognize the value they bring. Yes, yes, you're exactly right. So I think without getting really boring, one of the reasons we don't have a lot of culturally specific organizations, 501c3s in our community, so one of the ways we've tackled that issue about sort of being of community, not down to community is really investing in artists and so in looking at sort of individual artists and practitioners that are sort of coming out but might not be associated with an organization and have done that in a handful of ways in terms of open artist training, having community-based conversations where we go out to diners and coffee shops and barbershops and just sort of say, listen, we don't say anything, we listen. What's happening here, what's interesting here, what do you need, right? And a lot of our conduit, because our C3 structure is not as formalized as this, is really through those individual artists who then beget other artists and other artists and other artists and so that's really the space that we have shown up in is really multimodal listening in lots of different kinds of places and really looking at leaders who then help us identify other leaders. That's not very formal, but it works. That's great, thank you for that question. Yes. Hi there, I'm Andrea, I'm the executive director of the Asian-American Arts Alliance and thank you all for being here. We're a art service organization that supports individual artists and small arts groups in the fibros of New York. We welcome folks who identify as having cultural backgrounds from the Pacific Islands through the Middle East and we're also 34 years old, which is relevant to my question and that's about sustainability. One question we as a grant applicant always have to answer is how are you going to be sustainable? How are you organizationally going to be sustainable and how is this program going to be sustainable? So since I guess to ask you guys questions, I'd love to hear what you feel that the role of government and foundations is in the sustainability of us as an arts ecosystem. Really applaud the effort to foster the growth of community-based and culturally specific organizations. We have a history of that here in New York State, particularly through the New York State Council for the arts, but then what? Thank you. Does someone want to jump in? I'll jump and share that some of the conversations that we have in our team with Lambit is that we don't use sustainability anymore. We actually speak about thriveability. Where's this ability to move forward and grow when needed, when to ease back and we are asking the question, what's the exit plan? Because believing in the lifespan and life cycles of organizations is a critical component of how we live. It's kind of hard to talk about, but I think it's an important question to bring forward. So we aren't asking sustainability anymore because it's almost impossible given the challenges. But if we talk about what is the proposed exit plan so that we actually know that the course is possible instead of pushing it. That makes a lot of sense. Exit plan makes a lot of sense. Can I pause you? So, no, no, no. So I've gotten the nudge that we need to move it along, but we're not going to be able to move it along and hear all of your questions and get rich answers. So this is what I would like to do. In the spirit of listening, what would be helpful is to actually hear all of your questions and see what we can actually answer in this space and then continue this conversation. We're having a reception, is that right? Where is the reception? In the cafe, out in the lobby. So don't want to shut down the dialogue, but also don't want to try to speed through perfunctory answers to questions that are important, we want to hear the questions. Can I ask you a question? Do we, we're going to exit in seven minutes, is that right, at five o'clock, is that right? Where is Michelle, who's the two? The goal is to leave in seven minutes. So the questions have to be. Very succinct. So I know that context matters, but if you can boil it down to like, one literally one sentence, speaking truth to power, putting it out into the room, I know, heavy lifting, but try your best. Okay, I'm going to try my best. At my own organization, The Moth, we're trying to think very carefully about how to create paths, bridges for people who typically cannot pursue careers in arts administration to become arts administrators. And I think that that is also an important part of cultural policy because often the art and the audiences reflect the administrators at the organizations. Okay, great. So how to get more arts administrators of color and of different backgrounds into the field. Great, yes. I don't buy that about lifespan. I think it's, we have in New York City about how many, so many people, art organizations of color in communities and it's the challenge of New York City to be able to address how we are going to sustain the knowledge and the storehouse of information that people of color organizations have collected, gathered and evolved and need to pass on to their community. So I've heard a lot about the system and the city and all of its problems, but I haven't heard very much at all about equity to people of color over the last several decades of inequity. How are you going to sustain that heritage for our communities and our people? Okay, great question. So in a nutshell, we cannot lose our cultural assets and so what are we each doing in this room and particularly government and foundations to ensure that those assets remain? Are we doing 101? Okay, I'm with Mindbuilders Creative Arts Center in the Bronx so looking at the map that Mark Stern had up there and Williams Bridge in Olinville, look thinking about specific examples of how this will become enacted, this plan that will address where we are for example and where so many other cultural institutions of color are. What will be given up? So does that mean that the major cultural institutions, the CIGs will then have to be sharing more of the funding from private sources and city and government sources in order to empower the vision of the community-based cultural and those organizations that are running it, not just hiring artists but the whole vision and the infrastructure and the facility and all of that. Got you. So getting concrete about this plan, what does it look like in the real world on the ground and the second part of that is what might have to be rearranged, given up. What does that look like? What does it take? Thank you. Gonzalo Casals, go for it. Gonzalo Casals. I think this conversation is getting a little too comfortable and usually when we talk about equity, when they're talking about people of color, marginal groups, we need to start talking about whiteness and we need to start spelling out really where the forces are not allowing these to advance faster and easier. And I don't want to forget about that in the context of last week. Thank you. So, go ahead. So it's all love, yes, we're on the same side and we also need to have the hard conversations among them whiteness. Great. Hi, I'm Caitlin Faulk-Wong from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Thank you. I feel more hopeful than I have in about a week. Thank you for all your good work. My question is how you all think about scientific institutions and botanic gardens in your work. I hear a lot about arts and there is a whole other side of culture that is also very interesting and has a lot of democratic principles and values that can be of use in this conversation. Thank you. So just getting more specific overall, and so unpacking culture and the institutions inside of them. I've heard a lot of wonderful comments from everyone here and the word immigrant was used a lot to describe the country and certainly the city that we live in, but it isn't just America's not just an immigrant country. It's a native and an immigrant country. And I was struck as a member of the native community, tribally enrolled community, and as the leader from that community, how often we are ignored. We are not even included in the conversation. It's not just about whose land that you live in now. It's not just about the people from the past. America always was and is now native and immigrant. And we cannot hope to have any kind of justice to seek anything better in any plan for any of us if we're not even mentioned. OK? Thank you for saying that. So in that spirit, and I'm not going to shut down this conversation, they might just have to cuss me because I want to hear your four questions. But I want to acknowledge, I think, part of how we land here in shorthand and inadvertently leaving folks out is expediency and time pressure, right? And particularly in this city, where everything has to be done like yesterday. And so I want to acknowledge my own part in that and not slowing down long enough to think about what I heard and what I didn't hear. So thank you for lifting that up. Hi, I'm Jordana. I work at the Park Avenue Armory. And my question is, how can an employee who is not in a leadership position facilitate an understanding of racial equity and further the practice within their organization? Thank you for that. This is not just about executive directors. How do we bring everybody into the conversation? In light of the election last week, my city governments will be some of the most important lines of defense and oftentimes last lines of defense against an ascendant, fastest regime in our federal government. And so my question is, how can we empower and eject artists and their power as storytellers in the defense of our most vulnerable community, specifically in strengthening the role of local officials? Beautiful. So power of the local, power of artists. Samuel Boucher-Mayes, Flushing Town Hall. I hear a lot about the inequitable results of decisions, but not a lot about the processes that lead to those decisions. So my question is mostly directed at foundations, but also governments. Competitive allocation processes always privilege those with more capacity and more access. So when are we going to see a serious conversation about competitive funding processes and how to change the paradigm through which decisions are made rather than simply the results of those decisions? Fair question. New paradigms for dispersing resources. Hi, my name is Bill Aguado, and I'm the director of Infocal Photography Organization. And my question is, how do you expect to empower artists as a legitimate community, as a legitimate partner to cultural institutions and arts organizations, not as a subcontractor for benefits, for workshops, or any type of commission, but for artists? And I'd like to refer to the CEDA Artist Program, which was a workforce development program that not only provided employment opportunities, but it placed workers in nonprofit organizations. And its value was its collective nature coming together. At that time, I was at the Bronx Council on the Arts. And my colleagues in CEDA were Rosabel Rolone, before she founded Pagonis, because they all came out of CEDA Artist, Fred Wilson, who was the first director of the Longwood Art Gallery. How do we enable artists to have the impact? And as Tom mentioned, arts organizations do an outreach. Artists do outreach every day, but they're not recognized for it. Thank you. Thank you. And so it's appropriate for us to end with the individual agency of artists, and how do we build that out? So this conversation continues, not in this room, but in the cafe, and really encourage anyone who can stay to do so. But also to keep having these conversations around your own conference room tables, around your kitchen tables, with each other, with us. We really do have to flatten out our community and start talking to each other and listening differently. Thank you. Sorry, sorry, sorry. And I forgot, Carrie, I'm so sorry, who is co-chair of the New York City Cultural Agenda Fund is actually going to close us out. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you all so much. I know you're eager for the cocktail. I am too. But hopefully you've recognized today that the Cultural Agenda Fund is really committed to strengthening advocacy, influencing policy, and advancing equity. And we hope you've seen those values reflected in the conversations we've had today, and that we're going to continue to have shortly. And we hope that they will inspire you to take action in the city's cultural planning process. I have a bunch of notes, but time is running out, so I'm going to just cut to the chase. We're going to announce right now that the Cultural Agenda Fund has just awarded $400,000 to Race Forward that's going to be leading some incredible workshops and training for 60 of New York City's Arts and Cultural Organizations around the values of racial equity. And we have with us an excellent trainer. I was just trained by her two weeks ago. Nyantara Sen, please stand up. Nyantara is going to be the lead trainer, and she's going to be facilitating a workshop series. We invite all of you guys to apply. The program is going to be kicking off in February. If you want to know more about it, pull her aside, send her an email. You have the contact there. It's going to be great. It's going to be 18 months intensive lab trainings around racial equity values. There's money involved. If you participate, your time will be compensated. And people are going to create racial equity work plans. And then they're going to be able to nominate your colleagues in the cohorts to actually receive additional monies to implement those plans. So we're really excited about it. And we think it's a good next step in terms of bringing about racial justice in this city, in the city's arts sector. So thank you very much. I also just want to say thank you to the staff, our volunteers, to the members of the Cultural Agents Fund, but especially to Michelle Coombe-Bear, who's sitting in the front row, who, so much grace and so much incredible skill. Thank you so much for everything that you've done. And thank you all to El Museo and to all of you. You guys are rock stars. So thank you especially to Randy and Jen for coming from your cities to join us. Have fun.