Our nonprofit parent, Green Communications Initiative (GCI) instituted our current Cultural Equity & Inclusion Policy to be implemented with all its programs.
CULTURAL EQUITY & INCLUSION IMPLEMENTATION POLICY
GCI recognizes that many issues of social justice are rooted in our environment. Our mission recognizes the power of the arts to inspire positive change for social and environmental justice. Since 2014, GCI has measured the success of its initiatives encouraging local Mar Vista residents to increase sustainability and social justice through art exhibitions, outdoor festivals like the Mar Vista Music and Art Walk and public music and art.
From the beginning GCI founder, African-American Lenore French, used her own experiences with systemic racism and sexism to create an organizational culture rich in diversity and inclusion. GCI’S staff of artists delight in sharing experiences across diverse cultures and identities, including racial, multicultural, socio-economic, age, abilities and sexual and gender non-binary identity in a family-style environment of mutual respect. GCI’s commitment to providing inspirational programming regarding equity, diversity and inclusion has been expressed in targeted and themed explorations of LGBTQIA+, the undocumented, Latinx, indigenous peoples, the African-diaspora and more in our exhibitions and events. In 2018, GCI established strategic partnerships with the Disability Community Resource Center (DCRC) where we currently share cowork space and Safe Place for Youth (S.P.Y.) with their Drop In Center Healing Arts program for unhoused teens, and now reach an even broader and more diverse cross section of our community including persons with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness.
Recent events -- the global pandemic and protests -- encourage us to further our efforts to address systemic racism and social and environmental injustice in the context of community health and wellbeing. We acknowledge that in our society there are two sides to all issues of systemic injustice. On one side there is the majority of hetero-normative whites who benefit from them (whether directly or indirectly) and on the other side there are the underrepresented and marginalized communities who are excluded from benefit. Attention must be paid to both sides of this imbalance in order to create true systemic change. Thus, not only must efforts be mounted to create greater cultural diversity and equitable distribution of community assets but also, through active anti-racism work and reeducation, to increase awareness among the majority demographic in a white segregated and economically advantaged community of the exact nature of their privilege, of its inequitable distribution and of actionable means for change. Our CEII Policy goals are therefore twofold: (1) Not only must we continue to create arts programs and events that measurably increase the self-determination of BIPOC and other marginalized artists, we must also (2) create arts programming and events that actively teach anti-racism to the majority white community.
To implement these twin goals we propose to do the following:
Our 5 year strategic plan includes the design and construction of a new community arts center, the Community Art + Coffee House (CACH). The proposed CACH will equitably engage all members of the community with the purpose of addressing anti-racism, social justice and cultural diversity and inclusion through the arts. The proposed CACH will be established in the footprint of new mixed-use multi-unit housing construction for the Disability Community Resource Center at 12901 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90066. The proposed new housing construction will be the first in the nation to exceed both ADA and Fair Housing Act accessibility requirements. It will also provide multiple new affordable housing units to a cross-section of persons with disabilities, artists, seniors and unhoused. The CACH will utilize the organic diversity within the new housing construction to co-create arts programming in a representative partnership with the Disability Community Resource Center, this diverse community of new residents and other members of the larger, predominantly white Mar Vista neighborhood.
GCI will continue to create opportunities for equity and inclusion for BIPOC, persons with disabilities, sexual and gender identities and other marginalized communities through its programs for the hundreds of culturally diverse artists it currently serves. We will continue to include artists from communities outside of Mar Vista to interact in group creative sessions in order to create a cultural balance that is always reflective of the greater racial, cultural, ability and gender diversity of Los Angeles.
In order to design anti-racism programming targeted to the local white segregated and economically advantaged community and to track the longitudinal effects of its anti-racism engagement GCI has formed a partnership with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice, & Health at its Fielding School of Public Health. This partnership will create means to document long term progress in overall community health and wellbeing, ways to improve anti-racism approaches for whites and generate data sets to report on measurable positive outcomes.
These data sets and surveys will extend to all our arts programming.
All research outcomes will be made available in reports to be shared publicly. It is hoped that this survey, data collection and reporting procedure will allow our Best Practices efforts to be fully scalable.