Chair Williams asks which communities remain least served by cultural funding

Okay.

Which communities remain least served by city cultural funding?

How does DCLA identify them?

And how much have those disparities narrowed since 2017?

Yeah, I mean, part of the racial equity plan we just released, we have committed to establishing baseline metrics so that we can start really analyzing that information ourselves moving forward.

I would say for sure the disability community was such a priority when we were making this plan and will be again, but that is definitely an area that needs more attention from us.

And then I think as you heard from Social Impact of the Arts, there are definitely some great neighborhood trends that can be pulled from the past 10 years around those civic clusters in particular and how more neighborhoods have

become civic clusters, so like more resilient, more dense in cultural life, but there has also been a widening of disparities.

So that is absolutely something that needs to be addressed.

Okay, yeah, it would be helpful if, like, the agency itself, like, had a cadre of communities that you can point to, you know, because I think that would demonstrate that you're actually making assessments.

And I'm not saying that you aren't, but you didn't really list, like, specific communities that I'm sure, like, anecdotally we could say.

You know where you're funding.

You know where the organizations are doing their work.

I know that I just looked at the list of all the organizations receiving CDF funding.

I feel like even from the data that you currently collect, I would hope that there is an assessment on what communities are underserved, even boroughs.

You know, I know Queens loves to say oftentimes that we don't get our fair share of cultural funding.

So and that's just a whole borough.

But I feel like.

A whole borough is as large as a city as we just described.

So like really getting more granular into like neighborhood communities, it would be interesting to kind of have a better sense from DCLA, like your focus.

Yeah.

Cause that I think would make me feel more comfortable that you're actually like looking at what communities are truly underserved by cultural funding versus this sort of,

macro approach.

Unless you have more information, I'm willing to hear it.

It doesn't sound like you do.

We are, I mean, I said already, like, we are spending this year, as we committed in our racial equity plan, to really do that deep dive and establish those

metrics for ourselves to be able to provide to you that more granular information to hold ourselves accountable to moving forward.

And we know where we fund, but I do kind of think that's the tip of the iceberg, right?

There's so much more we need to understand in order to know the depth of funding, the consistency of that investment, and what the impacts of that are beyond just organization to organization.

So we are very much looking into this and understanding what baseline data we should build to...

Track over time, which I do think is probably something that the original cultural plan could have done a little bit better, is put those in from the beginning so that we're able to track ourselves internally and understand the impact of our work more clearly.

Do you have a timeline for that work?

End of 2027.