Equity in Cultural Funding: Let Them Bake Pies

Arlene Goldbard: Grantmakers in the Arts has been sponsoring an Online Forum on Equity in Arts Funding, inspired by The National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy’s (NCRP) recent report, authored by Holly Sidford, Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy. Nearly two dozen contributors involved in arts funding as researchers, foundation officers, public agency leaders, service organization leaders, and consultants have weighed in on the report’s findings, which document disparities in cultural grantmaking that turn on race, ethnicity, scale, subject, and other factors. (Several of the bloggers were advisers to the study or directly involved in making it happen.) It provides a useful foundation for a discussion of equity, one I want to go much deeper. This essay suggests how.