65B - ARTS AND CULTURE MASTER PLAN

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Santa Ana Arts Future Community Arts and Cultural Master Plan 1. Cultural Equity, Access and Inclusion Goal. toaster equity, inclusion, and access In the city's carts and cultural development, Cultural equity, access, and inclusion in the arts are national as well as local concerns. These issues played a significant and sometimes dominant role in the planning process's community conversations and survey results. Participants want this Community Arts and Cultural Master Plan to encourage the City to commit its support to the larger communitywide challenge of promoting cultural equity for all residents, referring to equity as the accessibility to and affordability of opportunities for cultural participation and artistic expression regardless of socioeconomic status, background, disabilities, or age. Residents -Latino and non -Latino alike -are concerned about the impact of cultural bias in the city and in the cultural sector. For cultural equity to be systemic, the City, its Arts Commission and future Office of Arts and Culture must take a leadership role in implementing model programs. They must also create avenues for community conversation by leading discussions about how to ensure that arts organizations appropriately reflect the diversity of the community throughout the organization, on their boards and in their staff, as well as in audience members, performances, exhibits, and educational programming. Americans for the Arts' new cultural equity policy is based in part on an acknowledgement that 1. In the United States, there are systems of power that grant privilege and access unequally such that inequity and injustice result, and that must be continuously addressed and changed. 2. Cultural equity is critical to the long-term viability of the arts sector. 3. Everyone deserves equal access to a full, vibrant creative life, which is essential to a healthy and democratic society.' Thus the case can be made that a well -represented, diverse and inclusive society creates a stronger nation and that achieving this begins "at home." How this is reflected in the arts and cultural community includes ensuring: 1. A representation of leadership on boards of directors, advisory councils, and commissions that is reflective of the city's population; 2. Efforts to broaden and diversify a cultural institution's audience so that it becomes more inclusive of the community at large; and 3. That there is similar diversity of organizational personnel at all levels; and that there is a commitment to presenting and exhibiting work that reflects the community an organization serves. 6 Americans for the Arts (2016). Statement on Cultural Equity, available at _htgp://www.americansforthearts.org/about- ame rica ns-for-the-arts/statement_on-cultu ral-equity. 22 65B-26