Communications/Marketing

This fall the DeVos Institute, which has a long history of working with organizations of color on capacity building, published a study on diversity in the arts.

There were two aspects of the report that caught our attention and prompted deeper investigation. First, one of the DeVos Institute’s key findings is that “Arts organizations of color are, in general, much less secure and far smaller than their mainstream counterparts (p. 4).”

Arts organizations of every ilk vary in size and all struggle and experience moments of crises, at times individually and at times collectively. Whether culturally specific arts organizations are disproportionately small and experience a disproportionate share of insecurity are questions worthy of further exploration through data-driven inquiry. So, we examine the extent to which culturally specific arts organizations look and act differently than mainstream organizations. To accomplish this, we focus on two questions: (1) Do culturally specific organizations have different operating characteristics than mainstream organizations and, if so, what are those differences? (2) All else being equal, do culturally specific organizations tend to perform differently than their mainstream counterparts and, if so, how? To address these questions, we examine the operating characteristics of arts organizations that primarily serve African Americans, Asian Americans, or Hispanics/Latinos and compare these organizations with their more mainstream counterparts. Next, we examine whether culturally specific organizations perform significantly differently from their mainstream counterparts on a variety of metrics. The data come from a large sample of organizations from 12 different arts and culture sectors. The analyses control for a variety of relevant community and organizational characteristics