AAAE 2017

Moving Toward Cultural Equity and Inclusion in the Field
Laura Zucker

The LA County Arts Commission undertook an initiative to determine how best to increase cultural equity and inclusion for staffs, artists, boards, programming, audiences of arts organizations and presented a final report with actionable recommendations in April 2017. Using the process and findings of this initiative during the first 40 minutes, the session will provide a framework for participants to develop strategies to increase the diversity of their student bodies, or address another topic of interest regarding cultural equity, in the remaining 50 minutes. This session will set the stage by briefly reviewing the comprehensive series of strategies used to conduct the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative (CEII), which included: assembling an advisory committee, town hall meetings, working groups that honed ideas that emerged through the town hall process into recommendations, opportunities for the public to share their ideas anonymously, through an artist-led project, a literature review and data collection that showed the current state of knowledge and conditions in the field, and input from other LA County cultural institutions as well as arts funders. Through this process, 13 actionable recommendations to improve cultural equity and inclusion in the arts emerged. The session will unpack those recommendations, with particularly emphasis on those intended to improve the pipeline for arts administrators. In interactive segments, session participants will be asked to identify the barriers within their institutions to improving the diversity of their student body, or address another topic of interest regarding cultural equity, and develop ideas that will move them toward this vision.