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 From the President 
Watchwords change as frequently as they do because words eventually get hijacked and muddled, and those who care about their meaning have to dump them and find new ones. Indeed, watchwords are usually passwords first. Watchword as Webster defines it means “a principle...a vision that can be a rallying cry.” Certainly diversity qualifies as both, but it deserves so much more. It deserves commitment, study, innovation, common sense, goals, accountability — in other words, after we cry and rally, we need planning and execution. Over the last year, ITVS has been thinking a lot about what diversity means to the organization for our staff, our board, for the producers we serve, public television colleagues and for the underrepresented audiences we are trying to develop and reach. For 12 years, ITVS’s mandate and mission has been to bring diversity to public television, along with our colleagues the Minority Consortia. Over the decade, our combined contribution to public television has grown even more vital as changing demographics alone require us to think differently about our missions. Today, we have 28 million immigrants and that number is growing. By 2050, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates, all people other than non-Hispanic whites will account for nearly 90 percent of the overall population increase in the United States. This increase reflects not only ethnic but also religious diversity. The 1965 Immigration Act is, of course, partly responsible for greater religious diversity because for the first time many of the restrictions limiting immigration from traditional non-Christian countries were lifted. Immigration from India, Pakistan and the Middle East has brought Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims to the United States. Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants have increased the number of Buddhists, Jains and Zorastrians. Corporations responding to a global economy now do business in dozens of countries simultaneously and have also dramatically influenced these trends. This last year, ITVS recommitted to its diversity mandate as the board and staff worked tirelessly on our strategic plan. Diversity is one of the plan’s three major pillars, but more important, we focused on ensuring that diversity is a throughline of all of our work. We reviewed our accomplishments with pride and, moreover, as stepping stones to stronger future performance. In brief, ITVS has a remarkable record in funding diverse content, exhibited in over 81 percent of its programming. Over the past 10 years, roughly 30 percent of ITVS’s funding has gone to producers of color, which mirrors the overall proportion of the same groups in the larger population. We hope to grow that number because relative to our job — which is providing diverse programming for the system — we want more programs about underrepresented communities made with voices from those communities. This is not to say that storytellers, no matter their background, shouldn’t make programs about communities other than their own or that filmmakers should only make stories about their own communities. Just that balance and common sense must prevail — it can’t be all one way or the other. After vexatious attempts at definition, it became clear to us that diversity would never sit still long enough for us to absolutely define it, that any definition must adapt itself to larger cultural, societal and global changes. It also has become clear to us that if we aren’t diverse, we can’t work for diversity, which is why our board is ethnically diverse with Asian, African American, Native American and Latino representation and why our staff is also composed of an ethnically diverse majority. When we account for such factors as sexual orientation and geographic diversity among our board and staff, we can see that ITVS is working to reflect America itself as best we can. Diversity has been the ideal in our country, as reflected in our founding documents and in its recent status as a watchword. If we are to be sure that it resides not just in the census, in the text in our Constitution or in the common vernacular, but actually in the institutions that we live with every day — be they media or educational or governing — then we had better know how to make diversity work. It is easy enough to have an ideal, easy enough to assess the dismal realities; it is the gulf in-between where the tough work lies. And that is where ITVS intends to be. —Sally Jo Fifer |
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