 So, I want to welcome our live stream audience. My name is Deidre Barber, and I'm your moderator for the next couple of hours. Before I introduce the speakers, there's some important information I want to share with you about today. Governance for Social Impact is a one-day convening being presented by the New California Arts Foundation, which is part of the James Irvine Foundation's investments in California cultural institutions. There are 16 California arts organizations that are part of the New California Arts Fund. They include museums, theaters, performing arts, institutions, and more. And three of them have spent a year working on today's program. In particular, we want to acknowledge Deborah Cullinan from the Yorber Buena Center for the Arts, Susie Faulk from California Shakespeare Theater, and Lori Fogarty from the Oakland Museum of California. Today was designed specifically for board members. And we have more than 40 people who currently serve on boards of cultural institutions together here in the room, as well as many more joining us online. People watching the live stream are invited to join the conversation. Ask questions, share your points of view. You can do that via Twitter using the hashtag New Cal Arts, even in the room if you want to tweet from the room, that's great as well. Before by emailing the address that will appear on your screen periodically. We really do hope all people will, we hope people will add their voices. So we have four amazing and brilliant people here today to help us unpack this conversation about governance for social impact. We have Roberto Badoia, Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, Judy Belk, President and CEO of the California Wellness Foundation, Cedric Brown, Chief of Community Engagement at Kapoor Center for Social Impact, and Jeff Chang, an author and director of the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Thank you guys. So we're going to get to you in a moment, but let's give our audience sort of the premise for this conversation. A community thrives when all its members shape and contribute to its creation. Among many of the established cultural institutions, however, low income communities, communities of color and younger demographics are persistently underrepresented as patrons, collaborators, staff, contributors, and board members. The field has responded with diversity, inclusion, and engagement initiatives. Simultaneously, more have been embracing equity as a value and committing to social impact as a core part of their missions. Many arts organizations are working to evolve many aspects of their culture and processes from the programming they nurture and present to the people they hire, collaborators they embrace and beyond. Less understood are the profound implications that an equity social impact framework has for governing boards. We are framing today's panel discussion and afternoon breakouts with the following inquiries. As arts organizations pivot to become more equitable and relevant, there is a growing sense of urgency and opportunity for us to reimagine the role of the board. What does the pivot towards equity look like for a board? And what does governance for social impact look like? So I want to manage some expectations, right? Those are huge overarching questions. We're not going to cover everything. By no means are we going to be able to solve all the world's equity issues in the next two hours. But what we will do is explore, unpack, dig deep, and attempt to make a dent. Okay. I imagine race, gender, sexuality, class, education, et cetera. Lots of issues will come up. I am going to ask the panel to go deep. We don't want no superficiality here. Bring it. I know you can. And the room might get a little, you know, find itself in a little discomfort. That's okay. I know from experience it's absolutely possible to talk about equity and within that power and decision making without the world ending, right? Without jeopardizing the integrity of valuable relationships, okay? So we got this. It's all good. So we will hear from each of the speakers individually first and then move into some pre-planned questions, enjoy any spontaneous conversations that ensue, and then we'll move to audience folks in the room and folks in the Twitterverse for a Q&A. So with that, it is my pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Jeff Cheng, author and director of the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Can everybody hear me okay? Good morning. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much to the Irvine Foundation, excuse me, the Irvine Foundation for sponsoring this particular event and a lot of love to Deborah and to Laurie and to Susan for initiating this conversation and thank you to Deutra for leading us through this. I wanted to start off in the spirit of discomfort with two uncomfortable facts. There's been a lot of studies over the last several years on the questions of cultural equity and the first stat is that from a Mellon report that was done, something like 87% of leadership staff at museums are white across the country. And the other stat that I wanted to lead with is maybe even more telling. The New York Department of Cultural Affairs put together a study of all of its grantees, a thousand arts organizations, over a thousand arts organizations in New York City, pretty much every arts organization you could possibly imagine. And they asked the question of these organizations, do you think your organization is diverse? And 69% of those organizations said yes, absolutely, we're diverse. But if you looked at the staffing and at the board makeup, over three quarters of the staff and the boards of those same organizations were white, and this in a city that's about a third white. And so this sort of points out, I think, the gap between our intentions, our views, and what the reality is at this particular moment in history. We're hurtling, I tell my students this all the time at Stanford, we're hurtling towards 2042, which is the year that it's all supposed to go to hell. The year in which the US becomes a majority minority. And I tell them the most important question of their time up there with a question of climate change is the question of if for all minorities, how do we form a new majority? Now here in California, we've already passed that demographic point as well, right? We're very much in this. And so these questions that we're actually grappling with right now, here in California are in some ways the questions that the rest of the country needs to be dealing with as well. This is a perfect example of trying to think about what a new majority is going to be looking like as you reach the middle part of this century and beyond, okay? So I wanted to kind of lead off with that. That we need to in many ways catch up as arts institutions. We need to be able to catch up to what's happening right beyond our doors, right? And that the ways that we solve these kinds of problems are going to have massive impacts all across the state, all across the country for a very, very long time to come. This is our pivot point. This is the point that we need to make good on the promise of diversity, of inclusion, but especially of cultural equity. And so I wanted to kind of bring in to some other kinds of studies that have been happening. The Irvine Foundation's been at the forefront of this along with the National Endowment for the Arts, looking at the question of arts participation, right? What we know is that arts attendance has been dropping. Pretty much across the board with maybe the exception of the most sort of expensive elite museums, right? That arts attendance is dropping. At the same time, what the studies have been finding is that arts participation is up. And this is partly a function of, I think, from a research standpoint, widening the frame, thinking of all of these different types of ways in which people participate in the arts in communities. And what I want to say is that we need to continue to open that frame. We need to continue to shift the frame from butts in seats, arts attendance, to arts participation as a whole. And to continue to think about all the ways in which people are engaging in making art and making culture in their very communities. And what this does, the challenge that it gives to arts institutions, is to think of yourselves not anymore as places that people come to, or places that people will consume from, right? But it begs the question of what arts institutions are doing in communities. What is the role of the arts and the arts institutions in communities? In being able to generate cultural change, and being able to generate cultural transformations. And so we need to be able to rethink our roles. And in that regard, we need to think of the way that the arts happens as a kind of a creative ecosystem, right? So you've got the bees and you've got the bears, right? Many of our organizations, our institutions are bears, right? There's a lot of bees buzzing around there. They're doing a lot of really, really important work to make sure that this ecosystem is happening. And then there's all the animals and flora and fauna in between, right? We have to think of ourselves in terms of being a part of this rich ecosystem of culture that makes up the cultural production that we are seeing happening. And in that regard, as we continue to expand this idea of arts engagement, right? We need to then be able to think about the ways in which different parts of these ecosystems might be represented in our institutions on our boards. So I just want to maybe leave it at that to say that the impact of what we're doing here now is going to ripple out, right? Moving towards the promise of a new California. Moving towards the promise of a new America. This kind of stuff is fundamental to who we're going to see ourselves as in 2042 and beyond. Thanks very much. Thank you. And our next speaker, I realize, Judy, I told you you were third, you're actually second. I've heard that. I've got something sticking out my cord, so I just want you to know. But I'm ready to go, I'm ready, I'm back. Judy, go. Can you guys see it? It's not always about me, but I am vain. And I'm also sleepy. Although I view the Bay Area as my home, my California home, and actually a Virginia girl. I'll tell you a little bit about that in a moment. I grew up outside of DC in Alexandria, Virginia, before it was a tourist destination. But made my way to California a long time ago for either love or work, depending on the story that either I tell or my husband tells. And then 12 years ago did something I never thought I would do. I moved to L.A. as a Bay Area snob, kicking and screaming. And so the reason I got up at 4.45 this morning to get on a plane was because of the focus of our discussion. One, the arts. I am really passionate about the arts. The arts have really transformed my life in really significant ways. And if you guys can tap into that, I think if we came together five years from now, it might be a different story. And by the way, just tap me if I'm talking too much, because I am passionate. I also, boards are very much, you know, in my life. I serve on a board for the Cerdna Foundation, one of the larger funders of arts in the country. My bosses are boards, board members. And I've advised a lot of boards. So what I bring to this discussion will be some practical tips. I hope that you can leave with and start working on tomorrow. And as board members and CEOs. But I want to just tell you two stories. Passionate about the arts. I grew up in Alexander, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC, before it was a tourist destination. I'm of the age that when I started school, I was bussed about 10 miles away from my home, even though to school, even though there was a perfectly fine school, a block away. Separate but equal. Separate but very unequal. My mother, who was 25 at the time, got tired of my sister and I standing out, waiting for this bus. That often was late. And one snowy morning, and the bus didn't come, she pulled us into the house and I heard her say, the belt girls are in. And what she had decided, and it was a very courageous decision at the time, was that we were in a lawsuit that was testing the Brown decision. And that lawsuit was funded by primarily a group of Jewish white leaders in Alexandria who felt this was outrageous. Shortly, we won the lawsuit and my sister and I went to that neighborhood school. And shortly after that, another group of philanthropists, a woman, who really believed that art is so important, that she funded a program providing the opportunity for folks like me. We didn't have a lot of resources. We lived 10 miles from the White House but didn't have running water, which is unbelievable. But she funded a program to take children like myself and my sister to experience the arts. So I remember with so much clarity going to the National Theater in Washington, D.C., seeing a production of Carmen. And prior to going to seeing that, we were told about the story and I sat there transformed. It was like, how did, I didn't even know something like this could exist. And that began a lifelong passion and love for the theater and for the art. It was transformative in so many ways. So fast forward about my first board experience. I blew it and the person asking me blew it. I was working at a local university, really young, and I had a crush on this professor of Portuguese studies. And one day he came up, I mean I didn't even know he knew I existed, and he said, would I be willing to serve on the board of a small organization, the Portuguese Cultural Center? And I said, of course. Didn't ask any questions. Went to the first meeting. The meeting was held in Portuguese. The executive director was glaring at me because I hadn't met her, she hadn't met me. And after a while I had never been to Portugal, didn't know anything. I just was like, I had done it for all the wrong reason. So finally I went up to this professor and said, why did you ask me to do this? And he said, because we need a diversity. I was devastated and I didn't think he looked so cute anymore either. And I probably have done my five minutes. You have two more. Oh, two more minutes. So I guess I would say that's a way not to do it about diversity, but it also meant I didn't do my job either. And I guess the part that's still painful is that, you know, as I've gone throughout my career, I would say almost, and even before I got this job where everyone in California is my new best friend, is that I'm still asked to be on boards. And I'm a little smarter. I'll ask up front now and I'll say why. And most of the time folks would say, you know, we're really trying to increase our diversity. And that is still as painful as it was the first time. Because yes, I am an African American. I'm a woman. And I own all of that. But I bring much more to the table. And so as Dan just said, we can't, if we're just talking about diversity, you know, you just can't get folks into the room or even how you ask them. And then finally, one last story. As you know, I'm a storyteller. It's last night. The reason why I'm a little tired. We, Cal Wellness, just finished a big Cal Wellness poll asking people what they thought about community. And we had it in a very unusual place in terms of sharing the findings. We had it in the Museum of Contemporary Art last night. And it was one of the most diverse groups I've ever seen in a large arts institution. Most of the people were there to hear about the findings. But as I was, because I'm also, I eavesdrop a lot on Bard and all of that. You can get some interesting pickup. And when I heard this Hispanic woman talking to this Asian man saying, you know, I've never been in this place before. I mean, I'm thinking, how could you be in LA and not go to the Museum of Contemporary Art? Because, you know, it just, it hadn't been outreach. They, and what I heard, which was really exciting is, you know, I think I'll come back. Because we couldn't get in to see the exhibits. We could only see them from afar. We were using the community room. I don't know who's in charge of community relations as Museum of Contemporary Art. But that was brilliant to offer that facility, that building to bring in folks who otherwise wouldn't. I have, as you can tell, lots to say on this topic, but I'll stop. Thank you. Thank you. And next, it's my pleasure to ask Cedric to join us. Well, thank you. Can you hear me okay? Okay. Great. So good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Thank you. So as the other Southerner on the panel, I come from a call and response tradition. So people, you know, I like for people to know. That's what I try to be about. So I want to thank everyone for inviting me to be on the panel today. And I'm certainly flattered and honored to be here with these folks that I just respect so much. I want to also make sure to thank Laurie and Deb and Suzanne for constructing this, putting this together. I want to start with just saying equity means that we're all in it together. And I don't want us to lose sight of that, that that's what it's ultimately about. So while conversations may get scary, it just means we're all in together. We're building a boat for everybody. So I want to keep that in mind. I also want to make another point and paint a meta picture. And I'm going to try to stick with my notes here so I don't become too loquacious. There's tremendous economic inequality in the United States. We know that. Where the top 25% of households own 85% of the wealth. Just let that sit. 20% rather, own 85% of the wealth. And if you overlay that with a race and ethnicity lens, the picture doesn't look brighter. It looks wider. And because that great wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few people, and because philanthropic institutions and traditional nonprofit funding, i.e. charitable donations and grant making, rely on the largesse, lack the better word, of those few people. There's a practical danger that some, if not many, of our nonprofits aren't going to get the kind of financing that they need to get up, to get running and to become stable because those NPOs are really on the periphery of those networks of wealth. We've all seen that with our grassroots community organizations particularly. So when organizations increasingly rely on boards as the fundraising apparatus, which seems necessary in this seemingly cash-strapped era, it's easy to become lulled into thinking that the most worthy board members are the ones who have the best or most connections to financial and social capital, money and networks. So my fear is that without a conscious and consistent effort to strike a balance between what I'll call the money and the subject matter expertise, organizations are going to fall into this trap of defaulting to those same circumscribed pools of potential board members with the financial and the social capital, the money and the networks. So I feel like the challenge is really to legitimately solicit and value the input of board members who are rooted in the mission work, those folks who may not have had the same kind of financial or social capital as wealthier members of the board, but whose information, whose perspectives advance the mission and the impact bottom line. So equity, again, begins with this finding and establishing that kind of equilibrium between resources, capital resources and subject matter expertise. And there's a lot of work to be done in that regard and trying to establish that equilibrium. Often, because too often, folks substitute money for expertise or money for knowledge, not the same thing, because I've met some dumb rich people. Just to put that out there, I mean. I think we all have. So on another note about boards, how do we think about boards? Do we think about boards as being dynamic like the staff or do we think of them as being these kind of rigid bodies that are kind of right on the edge of understanding what organizations are about, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, yes, yes. Oh, I look at the 990 when we really don't have a deep understanding of the daily workings of the board and sometimes are even regarded by staff folks as being the necessary interloper, right? Okay, we have to have a board meeting. Okay, what are we going to tell them this time? Oh, they don't really know what's happening on a day-to-day basis here. We need to change that kind of involvement and perception. Can boards shape shift and code switch and move back and forth between the formality of business and the informality of building trusting relationships? Because here, yet again, questions of the hierarchy of human value come into play. Hierarchy of human value is a concept that Gail Christopher at the Kellogg Foundation has talked about a lot and really advanced this notion of we ascribe the most value to people at the apex of that hierarchy based on appearance, based on class, based on these other things that really have little to do with actual value. And if we're moving toward equity, everybody in that... Well, there shouldn't be a pyramid. I'm going to say everybody in the pyramid should be equal and you could be able to turn the pyramid on any side and anybody would pop up. The hierarchy of human value. Whose voices are loudest on boards because of the perceptions of boards being all-powerful? And how do we work beyond the hierarchy of human value to indeed strike this equilibrium between folks who are bringing in necessary resources and we value them and the folks who are bringing in subject matter expertise and making arts organizations, making any kind of organization relevant in the community in which it exists? I'll stop there and wait for the questions. Excellent. Thank you very much. And it is my pleasure to invite Roberto Bedoya into the conversation as well. Thank you, everybody. Look out there. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Thank you, my fellow colleagues here. I have an odd mind and so I didn't do any... My notes feel really lost in the stars. So I will go there because those are my notes. So I've been thinking a lot about governance and I think about governance and I think about race but I also think about right now what I want to talk about stewardship. So these are some things I pulled together. The definition from Webster's dictionary is around stewardship, the office duties and obligations of a steward that conducting supervising or managing of something, especially the careful and responsible management is something entrusted to one's care. Stewardship is a responsibility of taking care, taking care of property, finances, the needs of others, something that one does not own. Legious orders often speak about stewardship in the context of service over self-interest. They also speak about stewardship in the context of being responsible for church finances. Stewardship in philanthropy refers to donor relationships and taking care of the intention and management of donor funds. In the organizational context it refers to the proper management of property, facilities, personnel, finances and stakeholders' relationships. Environmental stewardship refers to the management and conservation of natural resources consistent with the ecosystem management principles. It is often in this context you hear the word sustainability. And then there's cultural stewardship. That's kind of my home plate, my ground. So I think about stewardship and us in this room are being good stewards of imagination. And that means that we celebrate our cultural community's work, we support the management practices that are grounded in stewardship that enable our service to fully. That's a key word, fully. Meet and advance the social, economic and aesthetic goals of our constituency. And we prompt and promote the ways we imagine our lives together through aesthetic experiences that animate our plurality. As a policymaker, stewardship is a guiding principle. It's a metaphor that we ploy in our practice. So to enliven the social imaginary which the philosopher Charles Tales describes as, quote the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underline these expectations, end quote. He goes on to say, I adopt the term imaginary because my focus is on the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings. And that is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but carried in images, stories, and legend. My charge and our charge, and it's a governance charge, is to introduce the language of stewardship into how we work. How do we prompt the social imaginary? How do we talk about the value of the organization and our community? And they're saying that the operator is being good stewards of imagination, coupled with being good stewards of how one manages their systems of operations. A fault line among art management analysis and rhetoric is the blind embrace of sustainability as a technocratic tool used in evaluation instead of stewardship, excuse me. I've seen how over the last 20 years the definition of stewardship, sustainability, excuse me, pause. I've seen how over the last 20 years the definition of sustainability has been used against organizations of color that fail in some measurement metric of it, and yet they're still around. I mean, the story is like, you know, we all know the nonprofit art center in the body that has failed some management tool assessment kit, and yet they're still alive. And I'm saying it's not that they failed, that the way that we're understanding their value is totally wrong. And so the deficiency associated with sustainability as a management tool is that it does not acknowledge risk or the politics and governance of structural racism in our sector. If we look at stewardship as a way to understand impact and value, what does it mean to be good stewards of a call? Being good stewards of imagination, how acknowledges aesthetics, experiences, the images, stories, and legends that advance humanity, that we can balance the management needs for the empirical, you all need data, but with the polemical knowledge, polemological knowledge at work that administrators, board members, and artists deal with. So I think about that in the context of, again, this my hypothetical, the nonprofit that's 30 years old and still hand them out. We're not counting their volunteers. We're not counting all the people that kind of keep the doors open. And somehow this notion of success is not tied to being good stewards. Stewardship is the key ingredient for creating a sense of community, for developing the ability for collective action and for building a healthy democracy. Stewardship illuminates how taking care, imagination, and policy condition each other. I love that line, I'll say it again. Stewardship illuminates how taking care, imagination, and policy condition each other. It emboldens the aesthetic contract between artists and audience by paying attention to the call and respond context of that contract. Our charge is to deliver an understanding of cultural stewardship that can be used for the benefit of our civic charge, whether as it is to ethics and aesthetics. And I'll end on sort of this note. Our biggest challenge today is structural racism and how it shapes our governance policy. Thank you. Thank you. That's exactly what I was saying. Thanks, Roberto. I'll take it from there. Sorry, I want to borrow your pen. So I want to follow that up that we have a question for you, Cedric, planned. I want to know kind of what your thoughts are to that question, that statement of one of the biggest issues for governing boards right now is structural racism. Rosette? I actually feel like it went hand in hand with... I think Roberto was more blunt about saying it than I was with the hierarchy of human value, but they're tied together, certainly, and the ways that, again, we view and value certain kinds of contributors, certain kinds of members of community as potentially bringing forward more work, more value, more whatever to conversations. That's part of... That is what structural racism is built on, so I'm glad you called it out. See, I was being a southern gentleman, so I wasn't... I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I'm glad that you named what it is. Well, it's interesting that you said that because I thought when I was taking my notes that there was that commonality around value and what is it that we're valuing. So there was something you brought up around the balance between money and subject matter and the value of the hierarchy, the pyramid. So I guess my question is, how would you actually disrupt that balance if it currently exists? So we know it exists. How do we break it? Is that a force from the outside? Is that governing board members have to do that work? You're asking all of us, right? I'm starting with you, but, yes, you guys can jump in, for sure. Well, I mean, of course, everything starts with awareness and intention and taking action based on the awareness and intention. So that's what this forum is supposed to be about. So if folks were to leave from here, and I don't know who's gathered here, so I'm not judging you personally, but if folks were to leave from here without taking further action on what we know is an issue for organizations, then it would be kind of a disappointment. So I feel like that's just the first and most accessible step with trying to disrupt what these systems have been. Do I have more finely tuned advice right now? No. It's okay. Thoughts? I'm trying to figure out, because I think that we could, and I think this is actually the afternoon conversation, where folks will be talking about systems, methods, tactics, goals, and those kinds of things. But I just was trying to square the conversation that you started about being the person who gets asked to be on the board because you're the diversity. You suddenly become the diversity. They like tall people. And thinking about sort of what needs to be done. And I'm sort of struggling with that in so many ways because I've been there. I know that kind of feeling, not nearly as much as you've been there, but I know that feeling. And I think that there's ways in which we could devise a whole bunch of systems and methods and tactics and goals that mechanistically maybe get us there. But it seems to me that there needs to be a cultural shift in terms of the ways that we think about the boards. And that's what I think both of you are alluding to in this particular instance. Yeah, because I'm not going to be with you this afternoon, I feel like I'm going to jump to tactics and I did it now because for me, first of all, I want to give a shout out to all of the board members here. All of you have day jobs and the idea that you would give up a day, I don't know if it's because Irvine told you you had to be here or you're just here. But you're here. And so I have a really, usually, I'm always disappointed sometimes when I come to meetings because I'm going to say, okay, that was great, now what do I do? And so only just because as I now have more years behind me than before, my deal is what can I do kind of where I am? Because race, especially, race, inequity and all of those sorts of things are really, really hard to do. So I'll just throw out a couple of things. One, you know, excellence. Kind of look at how you could do your job the best that you can. If you're thinking, well, I got to have money raised and all of this, just kind of look at some research that Scott Page from the University of Michigan has done where he basically says makes a business case for equity, inclusion and others. Basically he did a study. He took several groups, a really diverse, average intelligent group and a group of homogeneous geniuses. In every way that matters for your organizations and problem-solving, the average diverse group, you know, was just more productive in many ways. So if there's anything, you are, you know, the custodians of organizations, you should be looking at ways that you could do things the best that you can. And one, and you know, I could have 20, but I'll just, one is I just think in general, nonprofits give away their board seats too easily. You know, I've gone on a site visit for nonprofits and I really prepare and I do a good job when I'm out doing site visit. And at the end, I can three or four times, you know, the executive director said, boy, that was really great or whatever, would you be willing to join my board? And I'm saying, you don't even know me. You know, and so the sense is, what I get from that is, if you will just kind of grab anybody that's breathing off the street, you deserve whoever you get around your table. And so people make crazy decisions, just, you know, et cetera says, you pick someone because they have a lot of money. And then you're kind of crazy. This guy is a asshole. Oh, this is taped. And you, you know, you make a decision. Well, you know, she's black. And then, you know, and then you're disappointed why, you know, we still find ourselves kind of talking about it. The boards that I have joined and have been most impressed with are the ones that have really put me through the paces to even get in the room. Like, it's like, are you good enough to join this board that we care about so much? I mean, at least an interview, at least a job description. And that, so that begins, just who do you have in the room? Second, just on the other side of the board governance, what can you do, you know, tomorrow? I mean, you, you know, how are you evaluating your CEO? Does your CEO have within his or her goals something that deals with, you know, building an equitable, inclusive organization? And if you, when you're talking to your CEO and you, and you give the impression that building that type of organization is as important as raising the money, you know, maybe there will be a shift because guess what, you know, we do what we think is a bottom line kind of, of our board. You know, my board is really clear. You're not going to be successful, Judy. It's not how many, you know, grants you get out, but how, how are you, how are you furthering our commitment around equity inclusion or whatever? And then finally, one third issue is, let's say you're successful and you have a diverse board, look at your governance structure. Most large boards and arts organizations are really guilty of this. They actually have two boards in one. It's like the executive board, and that's where really all the decisions are made, and then it's all the rest of the peons. And look who, it just so happens in most boards. Why is it that most boards, you know, audit and finance committees are run by men? No matter how many women are on the boards. You might want to look at that around equity. What happens when your auditor comes in, the good old boy that's been your auditor for 25 years? Have you ever thought, as my board did just recently and the guy turned purple, could you tell us about your audit firm's commitment to equity, to diversity, to inclusion? Because guess what? If you want to do business with us, with this board, you need to know we're looking for partners that share our values. So those are just a few. I'll be quiet. There's something you said, and I want to bring it back to this question of the cultural change that needs to happen, because there's something you said about you like that you were being put through the ringer in terms of the questions that you were being asked and I think I can totally understand that and at the same time, I think there's a connection to the, what are we valuing and the cultural shift because there are folks out there who haven't stopped to think about what they're valuing who would never look to you as someone who could even be put through the ringer. Yeah, I think backing up even more is before you do all of this, maybe I'm making an assumption that isn't, is that you have to have a discussion on the board and with the CEO about what is it that you value in the organization and then, you know, if you don't value it, you're never going to ask the questions or you're never going to ask, because it's not important. If you are, if what you are really valuing and you need to be really clear is how much money can we get into this place that is going to determine who's going to be sitting around the table and what you value or is it because, hey, I know, you know, Cal Wellness and Irvine, they're going to ask how many, you know, folks of color we have on the board so we had better just get, you know, some folks of color on the board. So you're right, it really kind of starts with, you know, what, what do you, the board has to have that kind of discussion. Right. So, Jeff, I want to ask you like, so you said there's something that, a question that came up when you were speaking earlier, I thought, well, how do we shift the frame of who is in the seats, which is related to this? And I do have the pre-question that I think is appropriate right now. How do you, how do our current practices perpetuate governance that is not representative of communities of color or low income communities? How might we change those practices to not only bring excluded voices to the conversation, but it embeds some real power to make an authority to those voices. And again, it's connected to that value. Yeah, I'm actually going to say like a very few words and I want to kick it over to Cedric on this because I thought Cedric was outlining, beginning to outline a lot of ideas around this and also Roberto as well. But I think that in so many ways, let's see, to pick up on the idea that you were kind of putting out there about bringing people onto the board in order to raise kind of capital, right? So you have either capital capital, right? The check, or you kind of have social capital, right? The networks that you're coming from. And I think that actually that's the underthought part, the social capital piece, because a lot of folks who come onto the boards will already actually be in the networks that you're already in, right? That's partly how the validation kind of happens. And so what if we thought of the social capital piece as being an opportunity to be able to bring in networks that strengthen the institution's relationships within the community? I think that's sort of what you're getting at, yeah? Absolutely. So maybe I'll kick it over to you at this particular point so you can maybe go deeper on that. I don't know if there's much more to say. I mean, looking at who the constituencies are, both through the direct programming that arts institutions and organizations are offering, and through the aspirations that organizations have, whom do we want to serve in our broader community? How do we want our organization to thrive and to continue to grow and continue to reach new audiences and continue to actually be places where we can heal? One of the points that I jotted down is that arts and cultural institutions can provide the kind of necessary community building and healing that we really need in order to start moving toward this greater equity. I was amazed, Deb and I had the, well, I had the great pleasure of going to a gathering put on by the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences in Philadelphia. It was a town hall about catalyzing community. This was at the beginning of September. And I was just thrilled to hear, first of all, there was a rather diverse representation of folks in the room. And I was just thrilled to hear about the kinds of work that folks are doing through their libraries, through their museums, and really making them community centers in their respective locales. So thank you. Thank you. So again, I feel like there's a fantastic opportunity here for organizations to really be the catalysts around some healing and genuine community building. And in order to do that, we have to make sure that we're reaching all corners of the communities in which we exist and serve. And sometimes that means, well, it does mean expanding the definition of what social capital is. What is the knowledge that such folks are going to bring in and contribute? Certainly we have advisory boards that advise on specific pieces of information or on specific subject matters. Are we grooming any advisory board members to then become part of a governance body as well and to take on the duty of care, the duty of loyalty, the duty of obedience that is called for, the stewardship that is called for from board members. So I'm going on and on. I was going to ask the question of you. Well, so does it become a thing of, as you're putting it, sustainability versus stewardship? Because obviously organizations and institutions have to be able to fund the programs. I will say this. So I went here. That's how I go. And the pivot point for me, so we're talking about pivot points, I think we need new languages. So I'm certain stewardship is there. I'm not abandoning sustainability, but I've also seen it as a tool of whiteness. And I want to call that out. In its inefficiency, and that was my little story telling, it could be Galleria della Rossa, it could be La Peña, it could be any of these ethnic organizations of color in the Bay Area that have been stuck and penalized because they've not been sustainable. So I see that as a language of technology, a technocratic language that I think is a management assessment language that I don't want to buy. I want to unravel it. I want to be subversive. I want to put new criteria around stewardship and figure out what the hell that looks like for us that are in the mix. Because I think that that's where I get all my board president. And I'll tell you, Jeff, I told Jeff this story. One of my board presidents, he would, when I lived in Tucson, and I was running a local arts council there, so my boss was the elected officials, to a certain extent. So I'd be reading with the mayor about something, and he'd just sort of hold my hand. He said, control your inner chihuahua. You know? Because I get all hot and bothered. I said, what do you mean? I don't believe that. But I had a lovely board member that knew that that was my job, because I'm not about complicity. I'm actually about refraining constantly. And so in some ways, I'm not, I guess, where the dreamer part of me is, let's imagine new governance systems. Can we do that? Can we just go there and take this moment to honestly listen to the constituents we serve and look at them? I mean, I, in Arizona, I had three Native Americans on my board. They're not talkers. They communicate through eyebrows. You know? Like, you sit in a circle and they're like, I better learn how to read that? No, to me. You know what I mean? You know, a bad board experience, and they all have bad board experience. I was butting heads with, I was running an organization and I was butting heads. And I was announcing kind of the challenge that the board was facing. Financial challenge. All of a sudden, everybody going like this. And nobody heard me. And afterwards, the Japanese American board member said to me, nobody heard you because you do what we know when something is serious. You dropped an object. You dropped your voice. As to say this is serious. When I had a board where everybody talked over each other, they're always animated. So there was that cultural difference that I had to negotiate, listening at sort of the different world views and different communications, kind of patterns, behaviors among a diverse board, and a final thing. I worked at the GATI when I worked, and it was for a while at the research institute, the programmer. And kind of like the one Latino, well, there were two. Actually Josephine was the other one. There's no longer here. She's not here. So we were the two Latinos in... Why are you here? There's another story. I can tell you about that one. So we're sitting there, we're the Latinos in this institution that's Eurocentric to the max. And it was like, I felt like there was this notion of a really... I felt like two things, two song references came to my head. My older sisters love little Anthony's, I'm on the outside looking in, and then I'm Patty Smith. Outside is a certain thing. So it's like, there was like... There was a way in which I was not inside, because I was a brown man inside the White House. And out on the street, I was a brown man inside the White House. And there was no way I could ever be inside. So in some ways, I realized that my difference, racial difference became an interesting experience. I had two stories on that. Yeah, but let me kind of tell you how all of this is interconnected, going back to the tactical and the governance issue. And let's talk about fundraising, money on your side of the table. And later, I'm sure Cedric and I will also be telling you that on our side of the table, we don't have such a stellar record either in terms of the philanthropic sector. But fundraising, money. There is assumptions out there that are deadly to your sustainability. And a couple are that folks of color don't give. I mean, I've actually heard some diverse donors saying that I'm never asked by two sectors, the environmental sector and the art sectors, for dollars. It's like there's an assumption that if I do give, that I'm only going to give to communities of color or whatever. That's obviously, if you listen to the statistics of how our demographics changing that, I mean, for you to just write off a whole sector of potential donors. The other issue is who's asking for the money. I have sat before many development directors and I would say I could probably count the number of development directors that are in the position of doing the ass in the cultural setting that are folks of color. Now, maybe it's changed, but I would say that's one area that you might look for. And it was so frustrating for me that when I worked at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors where I worked with donors, we developed a huge program around diverse donor engagements because the connection just wasn't happening and a lot of it had to be doing who was asking for the money. And so why is that important at governance? One, part of your role is sustainability and fiscal management and you're just kind of not going after a group. The other is that donors is a fertile ground for who's sitting at the board table, too. If you give to an organization, you should be cultivating those relationships and they could be folks that you would put on committees and then they could be in a pipeline. So the fact that we start with assumptions that are not right and in fact, for example, the African American community per capita gives more than any other kind of demographic kind of sector. So the assumptions that folks have about race and about equity really are a direct line to your role and to sit at the table and how do you sustain your organization. If you don't fix that, I don't think you can be successful. I feel like there's a lesson to learn. You mentioned Galleria or some of the other of what I call grassroots organizations, some of the scrappiest organizations that we have around. What is the lesson around sustainability that you have brought up in your opening remarks? What can we learn from the organizations that despite all the odds have stayed in existence? What is their definition of sustainability? How do we learn from that and then apply it in the board conversations about fundraising, about how we're going to maintain resources, about how then that is linked to governance and the people that we bring on to the board and the way that we think about networking, et cetera. I think it's all part of that money versus subject matter expertise kind of framework, but I'm so intrigued by sustainability. But I think listening to that and trying to understand their success, this notion of stewardship starting to surge it up. And not to sideline the money part of running a shop. You need to balance it. So ultimately, I think governance is about creating a system of equivalences so that the values of stewardship and the values of sustainability and as a management sort of necessity coexist. They coexist as equivalences. What I see so often is that community call is like a little extra to get maybe a few more points from a philanthropic donor who will say, oh, you've got diversity on your board. Oh, you've got community voices on your board. But I don't feel that the overall governance of the board, I feel sometimes that the governance of the board, maybe I'm just saying, I've been too many damn times the one person of color on a board that needs to be the community. And I know exactly what role I'm being asked to play. Yeah, Judy, how do black folks feel and everybody looks towards you. I don't know every black person in the world yet. So in some ways, I just feel that. So we're gonna, if you guys are ready for questions, we're gonna take some questions from you guys, but I want to, the last question I'm going to ask is related to what you just mentioned in terms of, I'm wondering about there's something around the current structure has to shift to make space for this new idea, this new language, this new definition and perhaps my age is making me think that, so I don't know, I'll put that out there. But I think how does that shift happen? You're talking about a shift in having people who are comfortable in their space because of privilege and are complicit to the models that are happening, speaking from a place of where you're coming from who don't have your experience, who don't know to have, who have to have the inner two hour for survival. That's survival, that's just making your way through the world and that's the reality. But how do you shift that so that the folks who are in positions of power, who are comfortable in those positions of power and they're comforted by privilege to actually shift and want to push what you're saying forward? Can I go ahead? I was just gonna say, I think it goes back to what you're saying at the beginning which is equity is all of us, right? Diversity is all of us. I was actually tripping on the fact you're talking about diverse board member or diverse donors because the original definition of diversity was all of us and now it's like the diverse folks are the folks of color and the white folks are not diverse. Right, right. Which is really weird, it's just strange. I mean even the Academy of, whatever, the Academy Awards, when they did their whole sort of announcement of how they're gonna diversify the ranks, they were gonna bring in diverse members. Right. I thought, okay, does that mean more white folks? But they meant folks of color. But we can't lose that, right? The idea that equity is all of us and so people, the shift has to be that, yes, there has to be room made but that everybody needs to be engaged and bought in to this notion that equity is not just about the survival of the institution. It's not just about looking towards new donors. It's not just about putting asses in seats, butts in seats, excuse me. It's not just about all of these things. It's an ethical, moral type of thing that we're investing in the future of what we want our communities to be about and look like. And I think that that's where the rubber really meets the road, that we're all in this together. And I think that that's the stakes of this all. Yes. That we're all in it together. And you mentioned 2042 as a turning point for the nation. I'd actually written some notes about how in 2042 if we don't anticipate these trends and deal with equity and inclusion in real ways, we could end up with an economic apartheid situation here in the United States. Now, some of that is already happening but it isn't as visible to us yet. But when we get to a point where this country is my majority people of color, if the wealth and power remains in the hands of the few, apartheid is a word that I use very deliberately. And the optics of that won't be cute nor will the lived reality because it could be really destabilizing to this nation if you have wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few folks who look alike. So we have to deal with this issue of equity. We have to deal with the issues of thinking about deconstructing this hierarchy of human value and really getting to what the founding for people, forefathers and mothers, we're trying to lay out as a vision for this nation but never would they be able to anticipate where we have come. So I want us to take both, that's both a warning and something that's aspirational for us to move toward because we can do it if we survive global warming. We can. We're going to be all right. We're going to be all right. We're going to be all right. I just want to sort of push that a little bit further. I think the equity charge is a racial equity charge. And I'm very dis... I was on the grad... I was on the board of grad makers in the arts. We've done lots and lots of work at studying how racial equity operates in arts philanthropy. Diane Sanchez was on that board as well and understood what this... Where do we begin to unpack structural racism? You have to study it. You have to do anti-racism work. You have to send your board to do that. You have to find the right people to do it. And it's not like I take a pill and all of a sudden I'm no longer racism. And we have this... Let me just also... John Powell, if you haven't read him, he's brilliant, Berkeley. He's just one of the most brilliant thinkers around understanding structural racism and how it gets embedded in systems of governance. And understanding that you need to sort of step out of it a little bit and study it. Because structural racism, as he says, is a silent opportunity killer. It just slams you down. So the fact that you need to sort of take a pause and study it, and also did the fact that... I said this in our phone conversation, I'm being very deliberate about racial equity because cultural equity is a whole other... disability, feminism, queerness, all those equity kind of... emancipatory kind of desires are there. But that could... I've witnessed how cultural equity still maintains whiteness as a dominant ideology. And I would say we kind of have a little disagreement on the phone and maybe it's just because I don't think anything is going to change until we all play a role in changing it. I mean, when my daughter was young, I remember her coming to me and saying, do you think you've been discriminated more as a woman or as a black mom? And I got my act together and said, well, you shouldn't... discrimination in any form is wrong, but it was really interesting because I am now an African-American woman in this real position of privilege. I think we're all in position of privilege and then I think we need allies to kind of shift and things don't shift right away. And so I'm still... I'm struggling with saying the whole focus should be around race. I don't want to say we need to all get along, but a couple of things and I just feel like I can't end without just having you knowing how things look on this side of the table because if you talk about power dynamics, the biggest power dynamic I think is in organized philanthropy. I've written about the fact that since taking this job, people have come up to me and said, I've always thought you were brilliant and boy, haven't you lost weight, Judy? And I realized... I haven't gotten brilliant. I haven't lost any weight either, but I'm standing between folks who care deeply about the community and how hard it is to get resources and 35 million. And so one of the things I always tell nonprofits that I think you guys don't always use the power you have to help us be more accountable. In order to do that, you might have to take a little risk and be a little unselfish. And the risk is... I wish a non-profit would call me up and say, Judy, where the hell is my money? We're taking forever. And we take forever because we can take forever. I mean, we're trying to change it, but there isn't... And this is being recorded, so they might now. Right. But there isn't, isn't. So I'm saying, and then what would happen? Because there's also... And I want to talk about the fact of many small, amazing cultural organizations that we want to keep, and that doesn't mean we don't want, you know, the San Francisco Symphony, but how powerful it would be for me if, you know, a group of, you know, large arts organizations, you know, would say, you, the philanthropic sector, you need to be doing more. You need to be... You say that you're all for equity. You're asking us for, you know, information about our boards. First of all, how do your boards look? But you need to be doing even more. Because guess what? Our organization cares about the greater common good, and we can't be as successful in promoting the arts and appreciation for the culture if these organizations aren't successful. So... And there is enough resources, folks. There are a lot of philanthropic resources, but we... And then on the other side, the philanthropic sector, where a report just came out after five years, saying, you know, our boardrooms and our executive suites don't really look good, and we are not doing what we say we're supposed to be doing and giving more money out to underserved areas. And we need folks... You don't have to yell and scream, but when you're talking, would it not be powerful if the site visits saying, well, okay, this is our thing? Can you tell us a little bit more, Mr. or Mrs. Foundation person, about what you're doing broadly about promoting a more diverse cultural environment? It's just one another sense of the power that you might have because it's a little secret I want to tell you. We cannot do our jobs if we do not have thriving, vibrant cultural arts organizations or nonprofit sector. It's like having a lot of money and nothing to do with it. We need the sector so you can be a partner. Thank you. And on that golden nugget, we're going to move to questions. Just want to remind, we have 40-plus people watching live. We definitely welcome your questions and comments via Twitter. Use the hashtag New Cal Arts or the email address scrolling at the bottom of your screen. So we'll move to the room. Apologies that I got enthralled like the rest of you in the conversation. So we're a little behind. We're in the Q&A. On the board of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. You're talking about the small community organizations and then you're talking about boards and maybe bringing on people for their expertise. And I'm like, are the larger organizations really ready to actively engage those board members the way that community organization can have them involved in the day-to-day? And don't we need that along with the governance? Because otherwise, you bring on really active, engaged people and there's nothing for them to do. So it's directed at a particular person or? Just halfway. Cool. I'm on that side. Yeah, okay. We're on this. We'll respond to the question this way. I gave some remarks at the National Opera America Conference a year and a half ago, two years ago about engagement work. And it was more about curatorial sort of strategies and as the opera field tries to figure out their relationship to communities, diverse communities, everyday people type communities. That was my editorial comment. And so I was just sort of rambling like I do and I just said, you know, I learned this from colleagues who, in alternate routes, which is a network of community arts groups in the South. I said that in, I said I don't know what the secret sauce is in relationship. You just need to know that you always start as a guest and you're never the host. You say that to the opera field, who are all about the red carpets and the VIP, they all, they only know how to be a host. They do not know how to be a guest. They're the guests in the city that they live in. And once they can understand guest as a value, then you can bring board members to your team that knows like you're not, that maybe is a shift that needs to happen, that your board understands, oh, the value of guests and behaviors and how your relationship to communities. Man, they're just like, they were stunned. And then I was really sad, I said, because if you're not a good guest, watch out, the bird down your house. I think that both things need to happen, of course, and that we should always, we should try to default to the thoughtfulness of the proactive and not the rush of the reactive. So if someone is saying, oh, we need to get these additional folks in, that's reactive. It's not thinking out the real engagement, strategies around really engaging folks, balancing out power dynamics that exist on the board, trying to strike that equilibrium again. We have to map, I think we have to map things out. And not that it can't be done quickly. One of the things that I love, coming from the tech sector work that the K-Port Center does, one of the things that I love about the lean startup principles that the many startups adhere to, is that you test, you test, you iterate, you test, you iterate and it happens quickly. And I think that there are lessons certainly in that for the non-profit sector as well. And I'm not at all trying to say that businesses do everything better than non-profits. I'm not at all saying that. But this is one thing that I feel like non-profits can do really well. So when thinking about board governance, when thinking about engagement of community members, what are we going to test, how are we going to iterate, how are we always going to be in a quick learning loop around how to make sure everybody's voices are heard and that we level power dynamics on our board so that we can engage people in real ways. I'm Mark Nielsen, Pacific Symphony. There's a lot of discussion, obviously, about equality, diversity, which seems to focus on race, ethnicity, or sex at some point. But socioeconomic seems to be a piece that's often missing, particularly as Cedric is talking about the money and the issue, we seem to have the, I think it was referred to as the elite, particularly within this group, majority of the organizations are fairly large. Typically the boards have a requirement of a certain minimum giving level and that you have a certain level. So is there really diversity, even if we have a board of color, of whites, of all of us, but all of us are, quote, the elites, is that really providing the diversity and the quality and isn't it an interesting commentary on the organizations that most of our audience or desired audience are more of the middle class and yet we have no representation because of how we structure the boards to that whole middle class, which is the majority of our audience. Yes. I mean, I guess I would have, you said a lot and a lot of it is kind of what, I'm not saying your organization, but organization's value. And so I would test that. I mean, for example, in most of the organizations, you know, that I have served on boards sort of in that middle career, I knew I just had to, I knew I was the poorest person on board and I wasn't like dirt poor, but I mean just in terms of equity. But the boards that I was on, because remember I got a little smarter, really valued, and I felt valued for other expertise. Now they were really clear, and this is what I like, you got to either give or get and help in some way with the fundraising. And I said, well, I can get because I really believe in this mission and they had the tools. And, you know, the one organization that I was on, the way they even had a little bit of competition, that I had, you know, I had 10 donors who made contributions every year to the annual fund. And my goal was to connect with these donors every quarter and then make sure that they contributed on the annual, that was perfect for me. And I surpassed what that expectation or goal was, but it was an opportunity for me to kind of show my worth in other areas. And then there were other ways that I was contributing. And it was really the culture of this organization. It was a large organization. So I am saying that if you say, you know, you're not going to be on this board, unless you give, write a check for $20,000, they would have missed, I think, me, because I gave $20,000, in a different sort of way, and I added a lot more. The other thing, too, is to really think about other ways to, you know, to get various socioeconomics, like having advisory groups or whatever folks that can play a role and then can help in other ways and eventually kind of get to the board. But it really, and I really, really encourage you to really, and I'm trying not to make a value judgment, but if you feel you cannot have a board unless everybody on the board can write a check for $20,000 or whatever, you know, I'd be really clear about that and you're going to have to find the diversity of experience in a different way. And I'm trying not to make a judgment because I know how hard it is and I know it's a possibility, but there are some creative ways of board members participating. Another board I was on, you know, would you, you know, be willing to host or whatever, you know, breakfasts or whatever. I mean, there's other ways of contributing. It's like what you value. Let me piggyback on that just for a moment. I work as a public funder. So, you know, and my whole experience is as a public funder. And if I, my funder review panel will be looking at those applications for diversity and they may say, oh, this person is really a great community organizer. They're not of wealth, but I value their input and their expertise on this board of this organization. And that may result in a check of $20,000. So, I'm sort of just to go back to the composition of your board. There are many different sort of expertise that can come. And some, some may be an individual that's a trusted, really understand public service. And that's kind of what I'm, my charge is to look at public impact. I'd really struggle with, with give or get. I mean, I'm glad that there's, there's a give or get provision that will allow folks who can't write the check to be clinical equals. But again, I think that buys into or that kind of promotes the system where you have to either be networked or you have to have it yourself in order to, to represent on a board and it overlooks other kinds of assets and knowledge. So I wonder about the reexamining the basic premise of how the board selects its members. Is it for mission or money? And, and y'all make the decision and then go with that. Be real about who you are. If it's all about the money, then okay. If it's about the mission, then what does the board need to do to restructure and reassert itself so it is including all the folks that get affected by or are included in its programs and or its mission. And just the last, the last small point to make is that if we're, if we're talking about diversity that yes, socioeconomic class absolutely matters I think for all of us. I think in California it's the intersections of all these things at once. It's race because obviously there's racial underrepresentation. It's gender because obviously there's gender underrepresentation and it's class all at the same time and that's what makes it so difficult. And again I think also checking assumptions. I mean, you know, my daughter you know, went to private school and it just, everyone just assumed that the African American and Hispanic kids were on financial aid. And that, again, you know, put people in a class but made some assumptions, you know, to the one, let's start with what's wrong with getting financial aid anyway. But made a huge assumptions and guess what? Made assumptions about how some of those schools approached those families for fundraising support because of assumptions that some folks had. And so it's, you know, it's complicated because it is about it's about money but it's I think the underlining is the values and being a little creative. We have a couple people or we have several people who want to comment. Good morning. My name's Charlie Zam. I'm a board member of the Pacific Synphony. I think I'm not much questioning. I'm really impressed with what you guys do today. It's very touching. I want to share a very small piece, my story, how we I see this whole thing got it together. About three years ago, I was a poor musician student 35 years ago from Shanghai. I'm failed because I don't have the money. I went to a different sector and I make some success. About three years ago Jim's Urban Foundation grant to give the PSO Pacific Synphony Orchestra. They're able to reach out to me. I'm very touched. So it's today I'm a board member. I'm not only feel this is the right things to do. I bring my time, energy, focus, and my wallet. All in together. All in. So I am, you know, we are on board member of course, volunteer serve, but I feel very value. I teach my kids, you know, they're San Francisco base, but I say, hey, guy, this is great country. You need to keep, catch the put on people around the race. Daddy 20 any more. But you are 30 years old. Keep going like that. So we had a dinner, you know, very, very touched last night. So my whole story feel this is so great, you know, I have a lot of work to do. I live in the urban area. Whether when I move in at the 48,000 people today over a quarter million people. 68,000 is Chinese cities. A lot of immigrants, a lot of work needed to do and form Chinese leader council. You know, I want to be put this together. The only power of the music and the arts will bring the culture, community through East to Midwest that the only way we'll meet to put it together. And I want to say thank you for the foundation. We're with you. Thank you. Hello. My name is Lonelle Lynch and I'm the immediate past chair of the La Jolla Playhouse. So a female. Most importantly, I'm nominating chair. So all of your comments really were very powerful and we have embraced diversity, inclusion, equity for many, many years at the Playhouse. And I'm not going to go into some strides, but I can tell you we're not where we want to be. Due to your comments as your childhood are the basis of my question. As we are going into the three communities that we're going into, we really do believe that this is going to kind of lift up the lid of some civic leaders within that community of other philanthropers and companies that are involved and engaged in the same communities that we're in. The practices or ideas you have as we are utilizing the wonderful opportunity we have with Irvine to be in these diverse communities. How can we identify culture, cultivate board members from that because as Judy you said there was a magical moment in your life. I'm sure there's magical moments that we will have with leaders within those communities and we think that's an opportunity, but I would love to hear your ideas on how to help the community. I guess the only thing I would say is that I think that in many ways arts organizations you have a competitive edge in that your product is basically a key to your brand. I know enough about that you have a brand that really reflects I think your commitment to diversity or whatever, but it's really working hard and that's why I'm saying you need allies across the sectors in order to do it and it's really finding being creative about taking the art to diverse communities as well as how can you bring folks to it. As I said last night was brilliant. I really think the Museum of Contemporary Art is going to get huge benefits by just saying this is an asset, we're a community organization, this is our building after hours come and use it, we want to be a part of the community and it's so nuts because when I think of especially the African American community Latino community, communities that link so much by the arts, I was just telling Lori that there's a buzz that I'm hearing even in Los Angeles about the exhibit at the Museum on the Black Panther party and the fact again it was brilliant in terms of what's happening in the country painful now but folks saying I've got several invitations from folks who are saying we need to see this exhibit because the art really responds and as a son, the mother of a six foot six African American male who loves classical music and getting surprised by the most surprising folks that he would want to do that as well as liking rap I know that there are opportunities out there, it's really getting past assumptions I have three strategies that aren't new but I like them so I'm going to share them one is a general call to I don't know if you'll have a membership body or if you kind of collect the names of folks who come through general call, this is what we're looking for so there's a kind of crowd sourced feeling about the nominations that come through, of course it requires much more legwork and sifting through but that's a way to discover undiscovered talent, people, contributors etc. I love partnerships with other community based organizations that may be working directly with those constituencies but not in your particular subject matter area what's a partnership that would then yield potential nominations based on folks that they know and would advance to the organization and I knew I was going to forget the third one I'll see you afterwards for the third one I think that the wonderful thing about it's a very difficult thing to have a cultural shift within an organization but the wonderful thing about it is that if it's working on all cylinders it can create this virtual cycle so talking about the Panther event that brings in that was a product of a lot of work that the Oakland Museum was doing with a lot of folks in the community very deeply such that everybody that needed to be brought into that practically was brought into that and then it becomes a thing where the staff are interacting with folks in a much deeper kind of a way and so the staff are empowered to be able to start being almost talent scouts for the board and if you're figuring out how to open up the lines of communication between the community the staff and the board then it becomes this virtual cycle that keeps on going moving up you know eventually people start appearing that oh of course this makes perfect sense so it's almost mystical but it's beautiful two thoughts ultimately it's about relationships and relationship building and be comfortable that the advances are going to happen obliquely it's going to happen I learned this from the dance community when I was talking to them about new work development the experimentations over here and it just sort of advances obliquely so the change of your governance is going to be oblique but it will be perfect you just need to invest in those relationships and look at sort of like oh I have this good relationship with Cedric and his organization and maybe he trusts me maybe he don't but let's have a conversation and before you know it he might be in your shop so that advance so I'm really comfortable and then you need to be comfortable with time I mean they don't like you don't call up a lawyer and say hey give me your breast the brightest color person I need oh the people do that I know the people do that I mean I remember I mean it's not unusual for me to get a call from a headhunter because some large organizations use headhunter saying Judy do you know a person of color in California who has fiscal management experience and I'm saying well yeah but I mean it's like it's so it's as if it's some you know scare somebody and you know a lot so it's really it's really the relationship I mean you know I was on before I moved to LA I was on the Berkeley rep board they tapped into my love for the theater but I have to say I got intrigued with them too when I went to one of their productions and saw that they had taken some interesting risk around colorblind casting which I said hey this makes sense I felt you know I felt comfortable and then I don't want to underestimate feeling comfortable with the board I mean I felt comfortable with the culture they obviously had done some work around this issue even before I came on the board and it just you know continued but it started with that passion that I felt about theater and you know I was able to bring everything including the fact you know my race, my gender and my networks and being able to bring other folks into kind of that experience also Do we have time for one more? So question I'm Dana King I'm just with the Oakland Museum of California I'm the chair of the community engagement task force Judy your history being asked because of your size I'd like to put a different spin on that so my first big job I got because I was black I asked why he told me that's why I said that's great you won't keep me because I'm black so my question is why as since it's 2016 and communities of color still self segregate why can't we be intentional with our selection of our board members or not why can't we want is it wrong to say look we need around the Oakland Museum we have a huge Vietnamese community we have a huge Chinese community we have a large Hispanic community we need to be intentional in going into the communities but the best people who know the people in the communities are people from those communities so so I guess my question is why is it wrong? I have a great story because I think it's about the culture of the organization I think I mentioned earlier I'm on the CERDNA Board the CERDNA Board is one of the country's largest family foundations it's the Andrus family CERDNA Spell Backwards gives you a sense how they feel about visibility and they made a decision the family they're celebrating their 100th anniversary next year been around a long time John Andrus was a contemporary of John Rockefeller the family you know it's going to change but right now it's predominantly white they decided that they wanted to open up the family table because it's a family foundation to get more diversity of experience I'm sure ethnic diversity and all of that and I was interviewed and as we're going through it and I'm thinking okay am I just going to be a vote or whatever and one of the family members saying Judy if you haven't noticed we're white let's talk about race and I mean we had I mean it was you know and after you know they had really grilled me really grilled me also on all of the other expertise or whatever we then had a real interesting conversation that usually does not happen and it just opened up the kind of discussion the other thing they did which I think you guys probably know research is that there are three non family members on the board and the staff which is very much part of the culture they're in the room and they're more diverse too so they were thinking about of course my issue is okay but I'm a non family member well I ever be and I raised that issue because I came in on with non family members not having as long of a term as family members and then they just said you know what we don't want to do that you're gonna we're gonna make all the board members all the trustees have the same term so it takes it's not perfect but you're right they were intentional it's really probably when folks handle it you know it's a you feel like it's a token you come into an organization you know you're not on the executive committee where all the decisions you'll never get on the executive committee and then because there's not enough diversity in the organization there's an issue that comes up about blacks or whatever everybody's saying well what do you think but never also saying hey would you also like to serve on the finance committee because I could be a good member of a finance committee too so it's the culture thing that it's not it's imperfect but you're exactly right in many ways nothing is going to change until we're intentional about it it's really how how you go about changing all of those practices that come within it is it burning can we get one more question it is burning so Dana it's a great question Judy thank you it's a great question and it does it is built on intentionality because you don't want to just get anybody who feels like a token who's coming into a situation that might be hostile where they won't be heard where they're sitting there just as a representative from a community but they can't speak for the myriad voices of that community if people are really active and thoughtful about the folks that they're trying to bring on board to represent certain communities they will build partnerships they will build relationships they'll be able to ask in a way and say we want to make sure that this board is representative of the broader community that is here and in order to do that we're addressing these kinds of dynamics on our board so the person isn't going to feel alone so there will be a critical mass of voices like what the person is coming from the kind of background and institution the person might be representing so I think that there's a lot of thoughtfulness that has to happen we were kind of short-handing I think we were short-handing the don't just ask because you want somebody from XYZ on your board be thoughtful about it and make sure that the person is set up to succeed that was burning yes yes it was the livestream may have ended I'm not sure but we do have one more question I may not be part of the show but that's okay and I think it may be a short question I'm Nancy Olson I'm from California Shakespeare Theater and I'm on the board I also for my day job and the governance officer for another organization so I'm loving this conversation you're talking about exactly what I think about and what I try to work with our boards on my question was you talked about non-sustainable nonprofits that actually survived do you have any information about how they survive is it through volunteers is there more you want to say about that or can say about that well my analysis and this is just me just talking to folks it's not I'm not a like a social science egghead who's going to do a deep study on this but like this is where what I am a wordsmith so I came up with this notion of stewardship and I just look at volunteers I look at volunteers and how crucial they are to a community based organization how undervalued they are and how we don't clock that information you don't ask for that data and that and those people that want data you know you can get it here's okay so the best volunteer I ever met was a volunteer at the Japanese American National Museum our mutual dear friend past Karen Higa was I we worked there and we chatted to the clerk that sold me the ticket and then later on she was she gave us a million dollars so there's a notion of like how your contribution is not necessary to check it was more important for this elderly woman to still and sell tickets at the same time as give a check so it's and in some ways it's still volunteer work and maybe a donor still sees that as volunteer work and so in some ways maybe we're not measuring or understanding the broad frame of a volunteer board members are volunteers and so let's just sort of I guess I can go to arts management school and figure it out well there's I've also worked with an organization over the years that was founded I mean we're working with the founder she's extremely charismatic she doesn't have any staff support that's one of the things we've been trying to work with her around but she gets it done because she mobilizes her parent volunteers particularly and I mean they turn out when she says let's do this this be here then they turn out and make sure that they're ready to do the work that the organization is about she also has found an alternative what I call an alternative funding source i.e. charging for some of the services that she offers a nominal fee but it's enough to generate some income for her and it's supplemented by small grants she hasn't gotten a big grant from anybody she's never gotten a multi-year grant from anybody but she's been able to sustain this work through the sheer will of her desire to see her vision continue to come to fruition and from all of these folks who don't want to see the organization because they understand the powerful effects that it has on young people I'm not being told we don't have we have no more time for questions on behalf of the New California Arts Fund I want to say thank you Judy, thank you Jeff, thank you Cedric thank you Roberto very much this was an amazing one and Roberto love your socks love your socks and so now we're lunch, lunch is ready in there I believe