‘Black Panther' Threw a Spotlight on Diversity and the Twin Cities is Taking Note

Since 1990, the Detroit Symphony's African American Orchestra Fellowship has offered two-year stints to Black musicians in an effort to diversify the group's membership. Fellows have gone on to join top-25 orchestras, win jobs around the world, and work as teachers, freelancers, and arts administrators, but racial disparities still persist in orchestras across the country.

Founded in the Bronx in 2000, the Ghetto Film School’s mission is to train a diverse student body in the skills of making narrative film. Eighteen years later, the school teaches classes in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and has become a pipeline for graduates to find work not only as directors or writers but also in film crews and production companies.

Atlanta’s High Museum has taken a multi-faceted approach to diversifying the demographics of museum visitors as well as museum staff. These include internal and external focus groups, curatorial fellowships, a simple price structure, and inclusion and diversity advisement.

Police reform in Camden, New Jersey has centered on de-escalation and increased surveillance. With these reforms, the city has seen a decrease in violent and nonviolent crime and a decrease in the use of and complaints of excessive force by police. While not without concerns of the increased surveillance, the department says the shift of role from warrior to guardian is showing impact.

By leveraging technology, artists living above the 60th parallel are increasing indigenous representation in filmmaking. In Yellowknife, Canada, aRTLess Collective’s Dead North Film Festival uses live streaming to reach thousands of residents across remote—and otherwise largely inaccessible—northern areas. The film festival connects and empowers indigenous northerners to represent themselves and their culture through film.

The Spanish-Language Community Advisory Network works with a performing arts center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to bring in Latino audiences by showing culturally-relevant films, reducing language barriers, and even inviting the films’ cast and crew to the screenings.

Women of Winter helps train women of color to become professional ski instructors and make the sport more accessible and diversified. Women from across the country come to join the program, receiving a sense of community and access to scholarships to attend events to further their education and experience.

The Soomaal House of Art is giving Somali artists in Minnesota’s Twin Cities a community to join and easy access to a place to show their work.

To encourage more Black people to explore outdoors, individuals and organizations in Colorado are working to address underlying barriers such as access to transportation and gear, as well as fear and concerns of safety. Despite the groups still encountering "frustrating" incidents with other outdoor recreationalists, the movement has spread to other states and steadily attracted a growing community of members.

Violations of the Voting Rights Act during primary and local elections led the city of Malden, where 23% of its 60,000 residents are of Asian descent, to provide voting materials and information - including mail-in ballots, voting instructions, official election websites, and precinct signs - in English and Chinese. The city also hired a trilingual city employee fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin and collaborated with community advocacy groups on voter outreach and recruiting more bilingual poll workers. Advocates see Malden as a role model for other jurisdictions to remedy voter access issues.