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It’s too soon, of course, to assess the full impact of “A Second Look: Racial Equity and Arts Funding in Greater Pittsburgh.” The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council report was issued just Monday, and local arts leaders are still absorbing it.
But the issue the study addresses is, sadly, a perennial one, previously highlighted by the 2018 GPAC report whose findings it builds upon.
In 2018, GPAC reported that during the 15-year period ending in 2017, local arts groups of color had received just 14% of the arts funding distributed by locally based sources. The new report covers the five-year period from 2018 through 2023. During that time, GPAC found, the share of funding to arts groups of color was 16%.
For any given pool of funds, an increase from a 14% share to a 16% share represents a 14% uptick in total dollars. But because most of those funds were distributed in Allegheny County, where 23% of the population consists of people of color, the study’s authors say current funding levels remain unsatisfactory.
“It was sobering to see that we haven’t made any gain in the equity of arts funding in the Pittsburgh region,” said Divya Rao Heffley, a member of the 12-member Learning & Leadership Committee GPAC convened for the report.
Nonprofit arts groups in general rely heavily on philanthropy, and groups led by people of color, which tend to be smaller, are no exception. Taken together, GPAC’s two reports document that nearly every year for the past two decades, funding to arts groups led by or primarily serving people of color — GPAC uses the term “Global Majority organizations” — has been disproportionately low compared to funding for white groups.
That “nearly,” though, is notable.
In 2021, the proportion of local and national funding that benefited Pittsburgh arts groups of color spiked to 23.6% — enough to meet a minimal standard for racial equity.
This figure dropped in 2022, and again in 2023, to 18%. That’s about where it had been in 2020. But the one-year spike encouraged Mia Hooper, GPAC’s chief operating officer, who also served on the Learning & Leadership Committee.
To Hooper, it demonstrates, “Hey, we can reach equity, but it needs to be proactive.”
Reached for comment on “A Second Look,” a few local funders weighed in.
Nicole Henninger, program officer for arts and culture at The Pittsburgh Foundation, praised the report as “critically important.”
“The findings show that there is a lot of work still to do,” Henninger said in a statement. “The report tells us that achieving funding equity is doable — and that it is essential to the future health of the entire arts ecosystem.”
Rich Hudic, executive director of the taxpayer-funded Allegheny Regional Asset District, the area’s key public funder of the arts, said the group plans to meet with GPAC to discuss the report’s findings.
Jake Goodman, executive director of the Opportunity Fund, emphasizes that philanthropy has long upheld white and Western European culture, to the neglect and detriment of other cultures — even while many of Pittsburgh’s greatest artists, from August Wilson to Billy Porter and LaToya Ruby Frazier, have been Black.
“It’s so important to imagine how much richer American culture would be” if arts funding were racially equitable, Goodman says.
So what’s to be done?
Heffley, associate director of arts nonprofit Shiftworks, notes that funders whose efforts the report evaluated routinely require applicants to document their own diversity efforts. But while groups founded, led by or serving people of color are already doing that work by definition, it’s the funders themselves who need to try harder.
“Philanthropy can support us by being the model it wants to see in its grantees,” says Heffley.
The report doesn’t name individual funders. But it did ask the foundations whether their chief executive and a majority of their senior leadership, staff, board, and funding-review panels consisted of people of color, or whether the foundations offered racial-equity training for board members. The findings: Funders who had “significant or improving” records of racially equitable funding were nearly twice as likely to meet those criteria.
GPAC’s Learning and Leadership Committee consisted entirely of people of color, Heffley notes.
The benefits of diversifying leadership teams and other decision makers might seem obvious. But some note that other changes are also critically important.
Goodman says at the Opportunity Fund, a small family foundation, one of its three staffers is Black, and fewer than half the board members are people of color. But equity, he says, is built into its values and mission.
“Every conversation we have is a racial-equity conversation,” he says. And of the community panels the Fund convenes to play a key role in funding decisions, “almost all” are majority-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or People of Color).
The results are striking. In 2023, about 53% of the Opportunity Fund’s arts grants went to BIPOC-led organizations, Goodman says. That’s up from the period of 2015 to 2022, when the figure was 41.2%, he says. And it’s three times the local average reported by GPAC.
Joseph Hall is executive director of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, which focuses on BIPOC and LGBTQ artists. Hall too agrees that training, values and mission are as important within an organization as diverse representation.
He calls the new GPAC report “a real big opportunity for Pittsburgh to step up and invest in its future.”
Demographic trends, Hall says, indicate that the future will be more diverse. And if Pittsburgh is to attract a wider range of people to the city, he says, “They need to see themselves here,” whether in business or in arts and culture.
But even putting more people of color in philanthropic leadership positions doesn’t guarantee change if their thought processes aren’t new, too.
“We have to be talking about something a little more systemic,” Hall says.
