Filipino BC Calls for a More Equitable Arts and Culture Funding System
Submitted to the BC Arts Council Strategy and Action Plan Engagement
July 31, 2026
Dear Members of the BC Arts Council,
Thank you for the opportunity to provide input as part of the development of the BC Arts Council’s next Strategy and Action Plan.
This submission is informed by Filipino BC’s work with Filipino artists, cultural organizations, community groups, festival producers, and cultural-centre partners throughout British Columbia. It also reflects our direct experience producing major cultural events, supporting grassroots cultural programming, and advancing the development of a Filipino Community and Cultural Centre.
Overall, we believe the five proposed priority areas reflect many of the current realities facing British Columbia’s arts and culture sector. Reconciliation and Indigenous leadership; equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility; regional and community arts engagement; sustainability, resilience, and innovation; and collaboration and sector capacity are all necessary components of a strong provincial arts strategy.
At the same time, priorities alone will not address the structural barriers that continue to determine which organizations can access public funding. The success of the next Strategy and Action Plan shouldbe measured not only by the values it expresses, but also by whether it changes funding eligibility, application processes, decision-making, award amounts, access to multi-year operating support, and accountability to communities.
This is particularly important for Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled, immigrant, refugee, rural, and other historically underfunded artists and organizations. Many have sustained cultural programming for years through volunteer labour and community contributions while remaining excluded from the stable operating funding available to larger and more established institutions.
Current realities facing the sector
The arts and culture sector is operating in an increasingly difficult financial environment. Costs for venues, production, insurance, security, policing, accessibility, equipment, staffing, and artist fees continue to rise, while grants, sponsorships, and other funding sources have not kept pace. Organizations are being asked to deliver more programming, meet higher safety and administrative standards, and respond to growing community needs with fewer resources.
This pressure is particularly severe for festivals and community cultural events. In producing the Day of Remembrance following the April 26, 2025, tragedy at the Lapu Lapu Day Block Party, Filipino BC faced substantially increased policing, security, and production costs. Despite the exceptional circumstances and the importance of providing a safe and culturally informed space for remembrance, we were advised that the Province could not provide material support. Other festival producers have similarly reported significant funding shortfalls while facing higher event-safety costs.
The Commission of Inquiry into Community Events Safety was established in response to the deaths and injuries on April 26. The release of its report must be followed by a coordinated and adequately funded response. Provincial expectations for stronger event safety cannot be downloaded onto non-profit organizations and municipalities without the resources required to implement them. Otherwise, major cultural events may become impossible for smaller and community-led organizations to produce.
The Province’s 2026/27 service plan also projects reductions in arts and culture operating expenditures in subsequent years. At a time of rising costs and continued instability, reduced public investment will weaken the sector and disproportionately affect organizations that entered the funding system more recently.
Reconciliation and Indigenous leadership
We support a priority that takes its lead from Indigenous Peoples and advances self-determination in arts funding. This work should recognize the distinct rights, cultures, governance, and priorities of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples. Indigenous leadership must not be treated simply as one component of a general diversity strategy.
The BC Arts Council should protect and expand distinctions-based, Indigenous-led funding and ensure Indigenous artists, governments, communities, and cultural organizations have meaningful authority in program design and evaluation. Multi-year support should be available for cultural revitalization, language, land-based practices, cultural spaces, and intergenerational knowledge transmission.
Indigenous participants should be compensated for their time and expertise, and the Council should establish clear public measures for tracking implementation. Funding should also support cultural-safety education and appropriate relationship-building by non-Indigenous organizations without encouraging tokenism or placing an unreasonable burden on Indigenous artists and advisors.
Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility
This priority reflects current realities, but it requires more specific commitments. Equity cannot be achieved only by encouraging more applications from underrepresented communities. The Council must examine who applies, who is deemed eligible, who receives funding, how much they receive, who makes decisions, and which organizations have the administrative capacity to participate.
Newer organizations—many of which serve Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled, immigrant, refugee, and other marginalized communities—often require greater investment in organizational capacity.
Legacy institutions may have grant writers, development teams, administrative staff, established relationships with funders, and diversified revenue. Grassroots organizations may have delivered cultural programming for years through unpaid labour without the formal records, staffing, or funding history required by conventional programs.
New and emerging Indigenous, Black, and racialized organizations must have access to multi-year funding. Restricting these organizations to short-term project grants creates a cycle in which they must continually prove their value while established organizations benefit from predictable operating support.
Multi-year funding would allow newer organizations to retain staff, compensate artists fairly, strengthen governance, develop financial and administrative systems, plan responsibly, and establish sustainable relationships with their communities. Eligibility should recognize demonstrated community impact and cultural leadership rather than relying primarily on an organization’s age, previous government funding, or ability to meet standards developed around larger legacy institutions.
Complex application processes can also be prohibitive. When an organization must devote substantial unpaid time to an application with an uncertain outcome, the application process becomes a barrier.
We recommend that the BC Arts Council:
Conduct an independent equity audit of application, eligibility, success, award-value, and funding-distribution data.
Publish disaggregated results while protecting applicant privacy.
Establish dedicated multi-year funding for new and emerging Indigenous, Black, and racialized organizations.
Create a clear pathway from project funding to multi-year operating assistance.
Reserve a meaningful portion of new operating funding for organizations historically excluded from sustained public investment.
Ensure Indigenous multi-year funding remains distinctions-based, Indigenous-led, and grounded in self-determination.
Permit capacity-building funds to support staffing, governance, financial systems, community engagement, and organizational development.
Provide grant-writing assistance, translation, accessibility support, financial preparation, and direct access to program advisors.
Simplify applications and make requirements proportional to the amount requested and the size of the organization.
Recognize volunteer labour, donated space, community participation, and years of unfunded programming as evidence of experience and capacity.
Diversify staff, assessors, management, policy teams, and leadership, while providing meaningful cultural-competency, anti-racism, accessibility, and reconciliation training.
Provincial research into equity in the BC Public Service has identified continuing differences in representation and career progression for Indigenous and racialized employees, particularly at senior levels. These findings reinforce the need to consider who designs and administers public programs, not simply who is invited to apply. Where internal knowledge or relationships are insufficient, external community experts should be retained and appropriately compensated.
Filipino BC has also repeatedly encountered the expectation that the Filipino community must demonstrate complete “unity” before cultural projects can advance. No large community is without different perspectives. Requiring unanimity creates an unrealistic threshold that is not consistently applied to established institutions or non-racialized projects, which are more often assessed on governance, feasibility, public benefit, and merit. Racialized cultural projects should be assessed against the same fair and transparent standards.
Regional and community arts engagement
We support recognition of arts practices shaped by place, community, and region. This priority should extend beyond geography to include different cultural understandings of art and culture.
Government programs often separate arts and culture from social and community programming. In many Indigenous, immigrant, diasporic, and racialized communities, these activities are interconnected. Cultural practice may include food, oral history, language, collective care, seniors’ activities, youth mentorship, community celebration, mutual aid, and intergenerational learning. Organizations should not become ineligible because their cultural work also strengthens health, education, belonging, or social connection.
The Council should establish funding streams that bridge arts and culture, heritage, and community services. Eligibility should focus on the cultural value, quality, integrity, and community benefit of the work rather than requiring organizations to fit within narrow institutional categories.
Engagement must also be intentional. Broad surveys are helpful but insufficient. The Council should identify communities with substantial cultural activity but low participation in BC Arts Council programs and conduct targeted engagement to understand the barriers.
Filipino BC was not directly invited to participate in this engagement, despite our province-wide reach and significant role in Filipino cultural programming. We estimate that more than 300 Filipino cultural and community groups operate across British Columbia, yet most receive no provincial or BC Arts Council funding. Low participation should not be interpreted as a lack of cultural activity or need. It may indicate that programs are inaccessible, poorly communicated, or misaligned with how cultural work is organized.
Engagement should be ongoing and include targeted community sessions, rural and regional participation, interpretation, accessibility, childcare, travel support, participant compensation, and public reporting on what was heard and what will change. Terms such as “Indigenous” and “racialized” must not be used to homogenize communities with distinct histories, identities, barriers, and priorities.
Sustainability, resilience, and strategic innovation
Sustainability cannot be achieved through short-term project grants alone. Organizations need predictable operating support to retain workers, maintain spaces, pay artists fairly, obtain insurance, develop safety plans, and build long-term relationships.
The Filipino Cultural Centre was identified as a provincial priority through the 2022 mandate-letter process. The Province provided $250,000 for preliminary planning and public engagement, but there has been no comparable ongoing investment in the community programming or operational capacity required to prepare the project for long-term success.
Existing operating-assistance eligibility requirements can exclude newer non-profits, museums, and cultural centres, including organizations connected to provincially identified priority projects. Where a priority project does not qualify for an existing program, the Province and BC Arts Council should provide an alternative pathway rather than requiring communities to move between ministries and repeatedly revise proposals without a defined decision process.
Over the last year, Filipino BC has been asked to submit and resubmit proposals to the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport and other ministries, at times without a clear response or next step. This consumes limited organizational capacity and makes long-term planning difficult.
We recommend stable increases to the BC Arts Council’s base budget; multi-year operating funding indexed to inflation; transitional funding for emerging cultural centres and priority projects; clear response timelines; designated program advisors; and emergency stabilization funding.
Dedicated support is also required for the policing, security, insurance, production, and accessibility costs of community events. The Province should work with municipalities and the sector to establish a coordinated funding mechanism to implement community-event safety recommendations.
Innovation should not become a substitute for adequate core funding. Organizations cannot continually innovate their way out of structural underfunding.
Collaboration, partnerships, and sector capacity
Collaboration can amplify public investment, but it should not transfer government responsibility to under-resourced communities. Effective partnerships require clear responsibilities, decision-making authority, timelines, and financial commitments.
The experiences of the Filipino Cultural Centre and the South Asian Canadian museum initiative demonstrate the importance of culturally competent and transparent public engagement. Large cultural projects naturally involve different perspectives. Government must have the capacity to work through that complexity without treating community diversity as evidence that a project should be delayed.
For Filipino BC, the relationship with government has too often felt unequal: communities are asked to organize, consult, demonstrate support, develop proposals, and repeatedly revise plans without corresponding certainty, investment, or timely feedback. This can be experienced as dismissive even when that is not the intention.
Programs should be designed with the communities they are intended to serve. Community organizations should be compensated for consultation and partnership work. The Council should fund service organizations that can provide shared grant-writing, governance, financial, production, and evaluation support. It should also establish partnerships across ministries where cultural work advances health, education, anti-racism, tourism, accessibility, public safety, or social connection.
Accountability and future direction
The proposed priorities should be accompanied by a public implementation framework identifying actions, timelines, budgets, responsible bodies, and measurable outcomes.
The Council should report annually on who applies and receives funding; eligibility and success rates; average award amounts; regional and demographic distribution; first-time recipients; access to operating and multi-year funding; processing times; and participation by communities with historically low access.
Reporting should specifically identify the proportion of multi-year funding received by new and emerging Indigenous, Black, racialized, and other equity-deserving organizations. The Council should also report on what it heard through engagement, what changes were made, and its progress in implementing equity and accessibility audits.
Final observations
British Columbia’s arts and culture sector is changing. Rising costs, reduced funding, increased eventsafety requirements, and pressure on organizational capacity affect the entire sector, but they are not experienced equally. Newer, grassroots, Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled, immigrant, refugee, and rural organizations are more likely to operate without dedicated grant writers, administrative staff, stable facilities, or diversified revenue.
As with any significant public strategy, implementation and ongoing evaluation will be essential. This engagement provides an opportunity to consider not only whether the proposed priorities reflect the Council’s values, but also whether its funding systems produce equitable outcomes. Equity should be measured by who applies, who qualifies, who receives funding, how much they receive, and whether historically underfunded organizations can move from short-term grants into stable, multi-year support.
Through our work with Filipino artists, cultural groups, festival producers, and community organizations, we have observed that many barriers are not caused by a lack of cultural activity, participation, or organizational commitment. They arise from how programs define arts and culture, structure eligibility, assess capacity, communicate opportunities, and recognize grassroots experience.
Many improvements identified in this submission are achievable within the BC Arts Council’s existing role. Others will require coordination with the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport, municipalities, other ministries, and community partners.
We support the five proposed priorities and encourage the Council to establish clear actions, timelines, budgets, and measures of success for each one. Ultimately, the next Strategy and Action Plan should be evaluated not only by the priorities it identifies, but by whether it gives artists and organizations throughout British Columbia equitable access to the resources, infrastructure, and sustained support they need to thrive.
For the Filipino community, this means moving beyond consultation and public recognition alone. It means investing in Filipino artists, cultural programs, festivals, organizations, operational capacity, and the infrastructure required for Filipino arts and culture to flourish for generations.
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the development of the BC Arts Council’s next Strategy and Action Plan. We appreciate the Council’s consideration of these recommendations and would welcome the opportunity to provide additional information or participate in future discussions should that be of assistance.
Respectfully submitted,
Kristina Corpin-Moser
Executive Director, Filipino BC
