Philanthropy and media - time for more creativity

In 2022, we were proud to join a distinguished group of foundations and media organizations in supporting the launch of creative accelerator Rideback RISE. Founded by Netflix Chairman of Film Dan Lin and led by veteran media executive Diana Mogollon , Rideback RISE seeks to ensure the people making popular entertainment reflect the diversity of our country.

They do their work by supporting and nurturing new, vital voices who need help connecting their stories and creative visions to a complex, byzantine industry where success still has a lot to do with who you know and who you are. 

Last week, Rideback RISE announced a call for their second cohort of creators, which is a great occasion to reflect on why we at Doris Duke Foundation support Rideback RISE’s work—and how philanthropy can evolve in our relationship with commercial media.

Some of the reasons to pursue Rideback RISE’s goal are obvious.

A major industry that does not reflect the diverse cultures, races, ethnicities and identities that make up our society is by definition exclusionary and unjust—irrespective of whether the cause of that exclusion is intentional, structural or both.

Some of the reasons are crass.

As McKinsey has documented in a series of recent studies (on Latinos and on Asians and Pacific Islanders), commercial entertainment is giving a up a lot of value by failing to diversity its workforce. Emerging audiences from these communities want to see themselves on screen. Too often, however, they are either absent or presented in reductive, sometimes offensive ways.

Yet McKinsey found a clear and consistent link between “above the line” talent—the cast, directors, and producers drive the creative aspects of a project—and whether diverse ideas, perspectives, stories and voices actually show up in media.

In other words, if the people in front of and behind the camera look like all of us, the story will be about all of us, and it will be a story in which we all see ourselves. And we’ll pay to see it.

At Doris Duke Foundation, our focus on media has been elevating the voices and perspectives of U.S. Muslims.

During her life, Doris Duke was a devoted patron of the performing arts and of the artistic traditions of Muslim cultures from around the world. Today, we honor that legacy by exploring how art from Muslim cultures and the U.S. Muslim experience can teach us to celebrate diversity and, in so doing, bring people from different cultures and identities closer together.

We pursue this work through our global center Shangri La in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and through our Building Bridges Program, which invests in creative voices and stories that contribute to mutual understanding through the prism of the U.S. Muslim experience. Through these programs, we’ve been proud to support documentaries, comedy specials, feature films and even operas.

This work has also shown us yet another reason that efforts like Rideback RISE are so important. Properly wielded, commercial media has almost unparalleled power to reach the most elusive part of what makes for a just society: our hearts and minds.

As I wrote earlier this year in the Hollywood Reporter, the reality is that most people just don’t have much contact with those who are different from them. Yet social science tells us that it’s very hard to change our minds without the aid of powerful personal experiences.

This is where Hollywood comes in.

Not only does American commercial media have incomprehensibly broad and deep reach into homes and communities, but it has also perfected the art of helping us to feel that which we haven’t directly experienced.

In essence, the definition of a commercial entertainment system is “catharsis + distribution.”

The arsenal of justice is incomplete without popular media.

Yet too often, we in philanthropy can be guilty of trying to pursue “narrative change” or other efforts to shape the cultural conditions for a more just society in ways that favor just one part of the equation.

We’re incredibly good at finding and supporting the act of creation—money to produce the film, write the book, put on the play. We’re less reliable in manipulating the levers of industry to ensure those powerful works actually reach and move audiences.

We also have a predilection to support independent and especially public media. We don’t have the same familiarity with the commercial media environment.

The problem is not that we’re doing the wrong thing.

It’s often the “first-mile” of creation that our creative industries have the most trouble reaching. So many vital stories and perspectives would be lost without philanthropy stepping in to take a chance on a new voice.

And, by definition, our independent and public systems—vital bedrocks of a democratic society and a culturally vibrant society—could not sustain themselves without the philanthropy’s ability to finance efforts that do not produce an economic return.

We should continue and even increase this work.

But we can also do more to harness the engine of commercial media to better serve our highest and noblest ideals.

In the U.S., commerce may seek profit, but only if it delivers social goods that we believe are more efficiently and innovatively allocated by the market. One of those social goods is a society that revels in its plurality, rather than being riven by its divisions.

Philanthropy can get in the act by getting smarter about commercial and getting more inventive about how to intervene.

We need more projects like the partnership between Ford Foundation, Melinda French Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs and Anne Wojcicki to finance Ava Duvernay’s film Origin. We need more efforts like Rideback RISE.

Especially at a time when the media industry itself is in turmoil, we have the opportunity and obligation to realign the quest for profit with the social potential of entertainment. Let’s not fail for lack of creativity.