A Fund Examines its Racial Equity Practices
Americans for the Arts announced Diving into Racial Equity: The MAP Fund’s Exploration, a case study that delves into the MAP Fund's racial equity in arts and culture grantmaking, its efforts to change practices toward this goal, and how it has activated the framework "Aesthetic Perspectives", to help mitigate bias in proposal review.
The article by Vanessa Whang takes the MAP Fund’s experiences to inform public and private funders who are addressing equity in their grantmaking. The description of the study reads:
In 2015, MAP undertook what started as a technology system upgrade to “better enact anti-racist and anti-oppression values in the application itself.” This step turned into a broader and layered inquiry into many processes of its arts grantmaking. The case study follows MAP’s evolution to examine biases in its: application platform, guidelines and requirements, applicant advisory supports and communications, and adjudication processes.
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