Equity in Public Funding for Arts and Culture in Philadelphi

Is the distribution of public arts funding in Philadelphia equitable? Despite the ascendance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as a sector-wide goal and anecdotal evidence of equity issues in the distributive patterns of both foundation and government grantmaking, issues of distributive equity in US philanthropy have been little studied. What research does exist paints a picture of affluent, white, Eurocentric arts nonprofits dominating the funding landscape to the detriment of small, underrepresented, or otherwise marginalized arts nonprofits. By their mandate, government funders should be more accessible to these kinds of organizations, but are they? In Philadelphia a unique tool exists in CultureBlocks, a website that maps public arts grantees against Census-derived demographic data. Using this tool, the question of the distributive equity of public arts funding in Philadelphia was explored statistically via four different equity standards from the geography literature. While this study could not conclusively affirm or deny that public arts funding in Philadelphia from 2007--2015 was distributed equitably, the data showed no significant correlations between the demographics of a particular area (as a proxy for the demographics of the organizations in that area) and the average percentage of public arts funding received by the arts nonprofits in that area. This lends credence to claims that public arts funding is generally more accessible to small and underrepresented arts organizations, and so may be distributed more equitably, but more research needs to be conducted to fill the research gap. The hope is that this study creates more avenues to further that conversation.