In Pursuit of Cultural Equity: DEI Grantmaking Practices of U.S. Local Arts Agencies in Community Context

Abstract

As grantmaking intermediary organizations, local arts agencies (LAAs) play an important but under-researched role in realizing cultural equity—the incorporation of underrepresented groups and counternarratives into democratic discourse—in thousands of local communities throughout the United States. In deploying their diversity, equity, and inclusion grantmaking practices, LAAs vary in the degree to which they proactively encourage the artistic expression of underrepresented groups, such as immigrants and racial-ethnic minorities. Little research has been directed at the relationship between the relative population size of underrepresented groups in an LAA service area and an LAA’s likelihood of having a formal “race-ethnic targeting” policy, the proactive channeling of arts economic resources toward underrepresented community groups. Framing our analysis in sociological race relations theories, we examine patterns of association between an LAA’s likelihood of having a formal race-ethnic targeting policy and the percentage foreign-born of the residential population in an LAA service area based on 462 LAAs of the 2018 Local Arts Agency Profile collected by Americans for the Arts, a national dataset of LAAs that we augmented with U.S. Census demographic data on LAA service-area populations. We conclude by deriving from the curvilinear pattern of findings a “representation thesis” on the community social contexts in which proactive LAAs tend to target race-ethnic minorities for distributing arts economic resources.