United Arts (UA) believes that the arts are essential to a vibrant and equitable community and should be accessible across all of Wake County. Our commitment to diversity, inclusion, accessibility and stewardship is fundamental to all we do and is driven by who we serve and who we intend to serve. 

We work to make all organizational decisions through a lens of anti-discrimination, inclusion and accessibility, including but not limited to race, ability, age, socio-economic factors, religion, geographic location, gender identity and orientation. We understand that historically there have been structural systems that place limitations on access to cultural resources and we work to bring attention to and remove those barriers.  

United Arts commits to the following across all departments: 

• Diversifying support across Wake County for arts organizations, towns, schools, artists, and residents to create geographic accessibility  
• Offering multilingual translation of documents and communication  
• Maintaining a diverse pool of artists UA hires and promotes to schools and other partners 
• Prioritizing diversity of our own staff and board   
• Providing training to identify biases and mitigate potential discrimination of artists producing their work on UA’s behalf  
• Partnering with our artists to respond to acts of discrimination 
• Making a funding commitment to culturally diverse organizations and programs 
• Developing deeper relationships with Title I schools in the Wake County Public School System to identify their needs  

United Arts accepts the responsibility of being a steward of resources that should be used to create access to the arts across all identities and using these resources to amplify the voices of organizations and artists across Wake County.    

To bring active intentionality and accountability to our grantmaking, United Arts makes the following commitments:   

• All grant panels will be multi-cultural and multi-generational. UA will also work to include other diverse identity factors among panelists.   
• Each panel will be trained by United Arts staff to acknowledge personal biases and historical information that is being brought by them into the grant analysis process.  
• UA will actively work to identify a more diverse pool of artists and culturally specific organizations to support through strategic community outreach.  
• Organizational grantees will be asked to provide their own actions for serving diverse populations with intentionality to ensure that they are also being accountable stewards of United Arts funds.  

This work is never-ending and always evolving so United Arts makes a commitment to consistent review of this statement and accountability policies. United Arts also makes a commitment to provide training opportunities for both board and staff. 

(March 2025)