EQUITY & OUTREACH

Arts community strives to reach everyone

THE TREND TOWARD AN increasingly diverse metropolitan region has accelerated over the last few years, and the local arts community is responding by speeding up its efforts to ensure that all citizens have access to meaningful participation in arts and culture. With the publication of a comprehensive new Outreach & Equity Plan in November, 2012, RACC has demonstrated its intention to lead the way.

“Diversity isn’t just about the color of your skin, your sexuality or your heritage,” says RACC outreach specialist Tonisha Toler. “It’s about recognizing the unique value that everyone brings to the table. When you honor different perspectives, experiences and values, possibilities are expanded and new solutions are found.”

Reaffirming its goal to cultivate and support the broadest array of arts and culture experiences possible, RACC has ramped up its partnerships with other nonprofit organizations to connect new communities to RACC’s programs and services. In 2011 RACC partnered with Colored Pencils to expand both organizations’ outreach and services for local immigrant artist communities. RACC expanded these types of partnerships in 2012 with an RFP process that resulted in $26,000 in funding for eight new community partners that will reach African immigrants and Latino day laborers, among other groups. One proposal from the Laotian American Foundation to stage a singing contest could have been dismissed as too American Idol, but genuine interest in other people and cultures won out: instead of chalking it up to a cultural disconnect, the funding panel learned that contests like these are important cultural customs in the local Laotian artist community.

Expanded outreach efforts such as these have succeeded in attracting more artists from all corners of the community to RACC workshops and networking events, which ultimately results in more grant applications and awards to pockets of the community that RACC hadn’t served before.

In Portland, these opportunities will only grow thanks to the passage of the new Arts Education & Access Fund. With new resources come new incentives for RACC-funded organizations to meet the goal of ensuring that all Portland residents have equal access to the arts and arts education.

“In doing this important work sometimes people can take the easy path of counting noses and reaching quotas, but we’ve been very clear that that’s not our approach,” says executive director Eloise Damrosch. “Really the goal is to think about how our organizations reflect and represent the community we live in, and that means different things to different groups. We don’t expect everyone to get there overnight through some magic formula, but if we work together and take advantage of our different strengths and different approaches, together we can achieve the task at hand.”

Damrosch says that RACC’s challenge “is to be as much of a resource as possible. We have posted a web page focused on equity statistics and strategies, and links to other resources, and we’ve convened conversations with people who are actually doing this work in the field – not just talking about it. Some of them have been very effective.”

The principles set forth in RACC’s Outreach & Equity Plan apply to every aspect of doing business, from recruiting Right Brain teaching artists who can mirror the diversity of student populations to proactively encouraging entries from artists not yet represented in the city’s public art collection. “Once you get in the habit of asking if there’s another step you can take to make a new connection that could improve the outcome, the results start to speak for themselves,” says Toler. “Overall, this has infused the entire organization with a new way of thinking and acting.”