Chair Williams asks IBO what Council should keep in mind for future cultural policy

And if the council were to pass legislation requiring another cultural plan or other cultural policies, what do you think would be most important for us to keep in mind from your testimony today?

Great question.

I think actually one thing that was coming to mind with the commissioner's testimony was it was very exciting to hear that EINs are going to be included in open data moving forward.

The laughter is because I really love EINs.

But I mentioned that because

For a couple of reasons.

One, it allows for sort of more targeted planning.

It allows us to connect information about the grantees to other public sources of information.

And to the point earlier about sort of intergovernmental collaboration, the biggest users of open data are actually other government employees.

So I have used the DCLA open data data sets before.

I would say data access and transparency is certainly something that IBO is always excited about.

The other

There are a couple of things I would mention are two things.

So one is the geographic distribution of grantees and programs.

So I mentioned that 43% of Manhattan-based organizations were planning programs outside of Manhattan.

That means that 57% of Manhattan grantees were not.

And because 60% of the grantees are based in Manhattan, that sort of inevitably skews programming toward Manhattan.

And there are a lot of cultural institutions in Manhattan.

There's a lot of cultural infrastructure in Manhattan, enough so that organizations in other boroughs are coming into Manhattan to produce their CDF programs.

The flip side of that is the organizations outside of Manhattan, so for example, the Bronx, 70% of CDF grantees in the Bronx are only planned CDF programs in the Bronx.

So there's an opportunity there if the council and the administration are interested in rethinking the geographic distribution of programs.

We do now have a little bit more information about how different grantees based in different places plan their CDF programs.

And then the other thing I would just say quickly is about grantee size.

A lot of these grantees are very small organizations.

Half of them have two or fewer full-time employees.

And many of the organizations that serve the underserved communities that the council and the administration are interested in expanding access to are also very small.

small organizations.

So any plan around improving those sort of questions of access will involve small organizations and therefore should

be mindful of the limited capacity and ability to navigate complex government processes that they have.

Thank you.