City Unveils Culture Plan to Increase Inclusion, Diversity

The de Blasio administration unveiled a broad, citywide cultural plan on Wednesday aimed at expanding diversity and inclusion.

CreateNYC is a blueprint to achieve several of the administration's goals, like investing in cultural groups in under-represented communities, improving affordability for individual artists, and increasing the diversity of both the audience and the workforce at cultural institutions.

Mayor de Blasio said all of the city's cultural institutions should be accessible to everyone. 

"Arts and culture, the freedom and strength of the cultural community, aligns directly to the strength of our democracy," he said. "And this is an important moment in history to remember that. 

CreateNYC is the result of months of focus groups and gathering input from nearly 200,000 New Yorkers. 

The city's Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Tom Finkelpearl, has this metric to assess whether the plan is a success:

"In five years, if the cultural life of New York City is still as exciting and resilient and fantastic as it is where it's currently existing, and those parts of the city and those communities in the city that don't have as much cultural offering — if they have more and we've kind of filled in the gaps, that's a success," he said.

Finkelpearl spoke with WNYC host Jami Floyd about CreateNYC and how it will be implemented.