Balboa Park Institutions Awarded Parker Foundation Grant to Advance Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- In December 2019 the Parker Foundation, an independent, private foundation and California non-profit corporation, awarded the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, a collaborative body of 26 Balboa Park institutions, a grant of $38,000 in support of the organization's Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) initiative project - a first step in working to advance these practices across the park's non-profit organizations. Stemming from the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership's mission to unite, advance and preserve Balboa Park's cultural institutions for present and future generations, the IDEA initiative directly supports a cohort of participating organizations.

"We're aiming to support the park's non-profit organizations in advancing equity and diversity in the workplace from the inside out," said Kristen Mihalko, Director of Operations at the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership and the IDEA Initiative facilitator. "Balboa Park is often called San Diego's cultural center, and this effort will ensure that people from all cultures feel represented and welcomed at the organizations, both within their walls and through their visitor facing programs. We're so grateful for this opportunity from the Parker Foundation."

The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership has identified the first cohort of organizations who will benefit from the grant. In partnership with Culture Amp, a culture analytics agency, the Cultural Partnership will use the grant to facilitate assessments of the participating organizations' employee engagement and perception of inclusion and diversity in the workplace. Results of the survey will inform policy and procedure updates at organizations such as the Fleet Science Center, the San Diego History Center, the San Diego Museum of Man, Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Natural History Museum and Mingei International Museum. If more funding is made available, additional Balboa Park organizations will participate in the program, with a goal of all organizations completing assessments in the near future.

"As a county-wide organization connecting San Diegans to the power of Science, we at the Fleet Science Center believe IDEA as a necessary and integral aspect of our work," said Ashanti Davis, Fleet Exhibitions Manager. "We are excited as an organization to explore the changing values and norms of our internal team but also as a cultural institution in San Diego to take meaningful steps towards our collective future in Balboa Park."

The cultural assessments for the first cohort of organizations will be conducted through the first half of the year, with completion by August 31st of 2020.

About the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership
The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership serves as the collaborative body and collective voice for 26 arts, science, and cultural institutions in Balboa Park. The Cultural Partnership's programs, including the Balboa Park Explorer Pass, Balboa Park Sustainability Program, One Park - One Team Program and the Balboa Park Learning Institute, aim to achieve greater effectiveness, innovation, and excellence and contribute to the vitality and sustainability of Balboa Park. The collective of 7,000 volunteers, and 3,500 staff members, and 500 trustees serve more than 6.2 million visitors annually.
For more information about the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, visit bpcp.org.

About the Parker Foundation
The Parker Foundation was founded on October 5, 1971 for charitable purposes leading to the betterment of life for all people of San Diego County. With a net endowment of $42 million, the Foundation has granted over $54 million since inception.

An independent, private foundation and California non-profit corporation, the Parker Foundation is limited by its governing instruments to funding charitable organizations operating only within San Diego County.

About Culture Amp
Founded in 2011, Culture Amp is a software company dedicated to helping companies collect, understand, and act on the data required to make the best decisions about people and culture. Culture Amp has a history of being at the forefront of employee engagement technology having created the world's first real-time employee engagement platform which incorporates real-time driver analysis. We had observed that even though business leaders universally understood the importance of their people, the tools being used to understand them and make decisions had not kept pace with innovations on the customer side. Culture Amp was founded to address this issue starting with the employee survey. Culture Amp is now the employee feedback platform used globally for culture first organizations such as Adobe, Airbnb, Condé Nast, Mercy Health, Pixar, Salesforce, Slack, Virgin Hotels, Warby Parker, and more than 2,500 other world-class organizations.

SOURCE Balboa Park Cultural Partnership