Council Member Stevens questions DEI accountability and CIG equity plans

Would you like me to continue?

Okay.

What evidence shows that diversity initiative changes permanent hiring or promotional or retention for institute practices?

So do you have any evidence to show that diversity is actually happening in these institutions, like other than anecdotal knowledge?

We have what has been submitted to us in the CIG reports that come every year and the CDF reports.

So we do understand the kind of practices and new initiatives that have been put in place in organizations across the city.

And we rely on their hiring surveys to tell us.

How many SIGs have required to submit an equity plan, and how many submitted them, and how many providers provided the required progress reports?

All 34.

Now there's 39, but when the reports were required, there were 34 SIGs.

All of them submitted, reported annually, and just submitted final reports, either in writing or with meetings directly with me.

Among the institutions, how many met the measurable goals due in the last reporting period, and how many missed them, and how many could not have their assessments done?

They each had, you know, they created their own goals that they measured against, and I think we saw a lot of patterns, again, around, like, the pipeline in.

People felt very confident that they were meeting those goals.

They felt much less confident.

I'm sorry, you just said they created their own goals?

Yes, because the cultural organizations are very different, organizations to organizations.

So you guys don't help with like having general goals to guide that or?

We did.

Yeah, we put out a list and we had many, many meetings and convenings to talk through like what does this look like?

But if you're an organization that has seven employees versus, I don't know, 2,000, it's different, right?

And we do rely on them to be the experts of their own organizations to come up with that plan.

But we had a lot of things that were requirements around workforce development, around board development, around access to New Yorkers for their...

work and they created their own goals based on that around disability around racial equity so

we learned a lot in the final reports a lot what did you learn we learned that like board governance is still something that a lot of the organization struggle with and board development in terms of a racial equity and that's all nonprofits across the board

but what are you guys doing specifically to help with that

Yeah, I mean, I'm six months in, so really looking forward to working on that kind of pipeline once again.

So we're not losing those mid-career workers.

We lose so many right now.

And in board governance, we're thinking about what kind of resources can we do to support organizations that are working on board development more thoroughly.

Yeah, I think that's a great place for DCLA to help.

I think, again, that's a problem across all sectors where folks are not understanding that the importance of having a diverse board is important.

And then when you look at boards, even when they are led by minorities, their board is typically not reflected of the folks that are doing the work.

And so I think that there's definitely work that needs to be done there.

Are there any other trends that you saw from this information that they gave?

I think, I mean, in a positive trend, and I was around at Cultural Affairs when we launched this initiative, and I will say it was not easy, right?

It took a lot of work to convince everybody that this was like a good thing to do to get a board-adopted plan, and these all had to be board-adopted.

And because of the length of time and the kind of consistency that...

that was required of them.

They now all, many of them have like board committees on DEI.

There's a report out in every board meeting.

There's like some of the dance companies, it takes that long to kind of build your next generation of dancers.

And now you're seeing the result of it.

So I think what's been,

A pattern that's been good to see is that long-term and dedicated focus actually leads to that generational change that we're only really seeing now, I would argue.