What does a pivot toward equity look like for a board? How do you find diverse board members? I recently attended a convening organized by our New California Arts Fund grantee-partners from the California Shakespeare Theater, Oakland Museum of California, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, to continue a conversation we’ve been having about board diversity and a board’s relationship to community, with more than 40 board members in the room. The morning was moderated by Diedra Barber, CEO at Filament Consulting Group, and featured four leaders and activists:

• Roberto Bedoya, Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, innovator, thought leader, and champion of art-based civic engagement projects and creative placemaking.
• Judy Belk, President and CEO of The California Wellness Foundation, and a frequent writer and speaker on organizational ethics, race, and social change.
• Cedric Brown, Chief of Community Engagement at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, working to increase diverse representation in the high-tech sector.
• Jeff Chang, Director of the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts and author of numerous works on culture and race in the U.S., including the new We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation.

I’m happy to share their insights on these complex questions in our new Medium piece:

This is the fourth in a series of stories we’re hosting on Medium to share what the arts field is learning from experimenting with new forms of engagement with new audiences. The previous pieces—“Tough Questions We Get Asked About Engagement Practices and Programming in the Arts; “Moving Board Diversity from a ‘Problem to Solve’ to ‘Something to Practice’; and most recent piece, “If You Want to Become A Polling Place, Press One,” are all on Medium at New Faces | New Spaces.