Donor incentives to increase diversity in their funds has become a growing mindset in the grantmaking community. Is this way of thinking both sustainable and authentic? By diversifying staff, boards, audiences, and organizations there can be much left to implication; ethically, relatively and in other ways. This white paper explores the recent commitment to diversity and it reviews the unique operational challenges that funders and culturally-specific organizations face. 

Read the attached article PDF for the full report, below are some highlights from the research:

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Diversity in the arts has become a hot topic, as evidenced by initiatives such as Theatre Communications Group’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Initiative and the Cultural Data Project/Data. Arts’ development of staff and board demographics surveys.

Funder incentives to increase diversity come with both ethical and practical implications. They increase opportunities for participation while serving the organizations’ interest in growing audiences. As a recent New York Times article observes, “When a company is diverse, the audience becomes more diverse, too, and for those faced with the aging, dwindling audiences, that is priceless.”7 However, when the key motivator of diversity is externally driven rather than intrinsic and authentic to the organization’s mission, it raises questions of whether the commitment to diversity will remain beyond the funding that inspired it. In the course of diversifying the artistic voices, staff, boards, and audiences for mainstream organizations, what will be the consequences to existing organizations that have always primarily served African American, Asian American, or Hispanic/Latino audiences?

In this paper, we assess this argument in two ways. First, we examine the plausibility of the argument using the theoretical lens of organizational ecology. Organizational ecology explicitly addresses links between diversity (in the broadest sense of the term) and the viability of individual organizations and entire sectors of organizations. It emphasizes the process of selection (i.e., who survives), which is determined by the institutional environment and by interactions between organizations, especially under conditions of limited resources. We believe that organizational ecology provides an excellent framework for understanding the implications of a decision by funders to increase the concentration of funding on “successful” organizations and for understanding how the implications may vary across arts sectors that exhibit different characteristics.