The LxNY Consortium Supports the Cultural Plan for Recovery

The Cultural Plan for Recovery (CPR) is a request to the City of New York to increase cultural funding by $70 million for fiscal year 2022 in order to help the cultural sector—and the city as a whole—recover from the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shutdown of arts and culture. This request includes $30 million toward restoration and a slight funding increase from the prior year to support all the cultural organizations in the city. But more importantly, it includes a request for an additional $35 million aimed at addressing equity in cultural funding by:

  • Increasing support to underfunded organizations that serve Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other communities of color ($15M)

  • Increasing support to the performing arts—the sector hardest hit by COVID-19 ($10M), and

  • Increasing support to the neighborhoods and communities hardest hit by COVID-19 ($10M).

It also includes a crucial request to increase the administrative budget of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) by $5 million.

We, the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York (LxNY), support the CPR request—and emphatically recommend adoption of three key safeguards we deem crucial to ensuring true equity results from all funding increases.

LxNY is a collaborative peer network dedicated to knowledge exchange, resource-sharing, and collective action towards systemic change. Formed in 2020 by a group of eight organizations serving Latinx communities and artists across New York City, LxNY aims to transform the historical underfunding of Latinx arts by advocating for the equity-driven missions of its cultural institutions, nurturing their deep relationships with community, and stewarding their hard-fought legacies into the future. Advancing cultural work as essential work, LxNY honors the expertise of its multigenerational arts leaders and culture bearers, harnessing their collective experience to better serve the city’s diverse cultural landscape.

 

We believe the following safeguards should be put in place for the CPR to achieve its desired results:

◉ First: While we wholeheartedly support the request for an increase to DCLA's budget—the agency has been chronically understaffed and any increases to its funding budget will require greater oversight and administration—we feel that this much-needed budget increase should include the following mandate to bring about true equity:

  • DCLA must begin to report annually on the distribution of its funding by borough, zip code, and organization size. Previous reports by outside organizations have shown that DCLA’s per capita distribution of funding by borough is hugely inequitable, with Manhattan receiving 10 times the per capita funding of Queens, and 5 times the per capita funding of Brooklyn. But DCLA itself does not report on its progress toward correcting these inequities, and its reporting to the city's Open Data Project does not include ZIP code or borough information. We must have greater transparency from the agency on where public dollars go, so that we can hold it accountable to its stated goals of increasing equity.

◉ Second: While we wholeheartedly support the request for $35 million to increase equity in arts and culture and to help the sectors and communities hardest hit by COVID-19, we believe equity must be defined as directing significantly greater new resources to the communities and organizations that currently receive less funding from the rest of DCLA's allocations. In the past several budget cycles, DCLA has made an effort to make its funding increases more equitable by giving a larger percentage increase to organizations that receive less funding—but this strategy unintentionally increases inequity by continuing to give larger increases to larger organizations, even if those increases reflect a smaller percentage of their original allocation. Increasing $100,000 by 20% is still significantly less than increasing $10,000,000 by 1%. This requested $35 million increase must instead be distributed with true equity in mind, and DCLA must report on it transparently, as highlighted in our first point.

◉ Third: We must see a change in an often-overlooked aspect of funding inequity: the way funds are distributed. The vast majority of organizations funded by DCLA receive programmatic funds, not general operating support, which is especially crucial in our recovery. DCLA must take a holistic approach with these additional funds and support organizational recovery, not just programmatic recovery, in order to ensure that the entire sector is able to bounce back robustly. This funding model already exists within DCLA, as the 34 members of the CIG are fortunate to receive most of their funding in the form of general operating support, which can be used to support staff, administrative and building costs, and other expenses that are typically not covered by programmatic grants. Removing unnecessary funding restrictions is particularly urgent for smaller organizations and organizations serving communities of color. We would also like to see the CDF allocations as a whole move toward an operating support model in the future.

With these three clarifications, we believe that the CPR can help ensure that we have a more just recovery of the arts and culture sector in New York City. We applaud the cultural sector for rallying behind this request; and we're enormously grateful to the de Blasio administration and the New York City Council for considering such a significant addition to DCLA's budget, which would be the largest increase the agency has seen in decades.

Signed, LxNY Consortium Partners:

Co-signatories: