3 Questions with Dr. Mieko Hatano, Executive Director of the Oakland Symphony
We recently had the opportunity to ask Dr. Mieko Hatano, Executive Director of the Oakland Symphony, three questions about how she is centralizing diversity, equity, & inclusion into the organization’s agenda, including substantial progress in diversifying the symphony’s audience base and implementing innovative community engagement tactics. Below you can find a summary of our conversation with Mieko.
The statements “performing to diverse audiences” and “making classical music accessible” are directly in your mission & vision statements. It seems that Oakland Symphony has made a lot of progress in developing an audience more reflective of your community, specifically with Black and African American community members — how did you approach and measure audience diversity?
When I first came onto the team in 2018, we hired a data consultant who built a comprehensive model of our audience. The consultancy compared our 2018 audience composition, showcasing the ethnicity of the primary decision maker in a household in which someone was a subscriber or a single ticket buyer, against the ethnic composition of the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area (52.7% European, 6.4% African American, 21.8% Asian, 17.5% Latinx, and 1.6% Other). In general, the results showed that our total European and African American buyers exceed the community segmentations by 30% or more. However, our total Asian, Latinx, and other buyers underrepresent the community segments by 30% or more. Thus, from this deep dive on our data, we learned that we needed to focus on improving our levels of Asian and Latinx audience members.
To boost your audience diversity goals, are their certain initiatives or strategies that you are finding most impactful?
The Oakland Symphony has benefited tremendously from having Michael Morgan as our music director, the second consecutive African-American conductor the symphony appointed thirty years ago. Since his appointment 30 years ago, Morgan has placed huge emphasis on community engagement when planning for upcoming seasons as well as music education and outreach. He is naturally a collaborative person and does best with many perspectives in the room. Our artistic planning committee is large and reaching, including representatives from jazz groups from the area, a multi-genre producer, and community representatives from the Interfaith Gospel Chorus, Gay Men’s Chorus, etc.
This makes designing diverse seasons extremely organic as Morgan has spokespeople from community arts & culture organizations ingrained in the very process. Additionally, Morgan gives local community artists the opportunity to arrange their own music for orchestra — a low-cost investment in exchange for great talent! The audience directly participates in artist curation as well, nominating who and what they want to see for future performances. Importantly, what has also driven the diverse numbers in our audience is the fact that Morgan partners closely with the Oakland School District. He has personally visited all of the schools in order to create a welcoming environment around classical music in an effort to negate any ‘rite of passage’ or obstacles from a young age. We quickly learned that there is a necessary process of transferring ownership of diversity from the organization to the community so that it is building diversity alongside you, rather than just by yourself.
In terms of initiatives, on the programming side, Morgan began two series aimed at bringing in more diverse talent and music: Notes from… and Playlist. The former builds a concert around music from a certain country or ethnicity: for example, Mexico, Persia, Native American, Vietnam, Korea, and the African Diaspora. The latter was founded with the Wallace Foundation in which the symphony brings in a notable celebrity and Morgan works with him/her to curate a personalized playlist. That celebrity then narrates the story of the playlist during the performance with the appearance of a local community artists to supplement the orchestra. Guests have included Kamau Bell, Dolores Huerta, and Bernard Tyson. Lastly, at the beginning of December 2018, we implemented a ticketing initiative called Hall Pass. In partnership with social service programs, we made member cards with ID numbers and anyone who gets any type of support from the State or is active military could receive these cards through the partners. All you had to do was call into the box office, create an account, and receive four free tickets to any Oakland Symphony performance, something we could afford with our large hall capacity of 3,000. This gave us a unique way of capturing audience data even though we were essentially giving comps. As a cherry on top, if demand increased for a certain performance because people were taking advantage of the hall pass tickets, dynamic pricing could be triggered which helps us financially.
“We quickly learned that there is a necessary process of transferring ownership of diversity from the organization to the community so that it is building diversity alongside you, rather than just by yourself.”
Is there anything you wish you had right now to accelerate your DE&I progress?
When you recruit the right board, anything is possible. Since I started, I have taken on a couple new members who have diverse backgrounds and various relationships to businesses and corporations in the Bay Area — and they are changing everything. However still, one of the biggest challenges in having a board of directors is being able to reach a consensus. Institutional knowledge of DE&I is important and must be written in planning — not open for interpretation for the board/staff — and currently the board is working through coming to agreement on this topic.
I believe we must lean into it and find a way to systematize DE&I into the core of our existence. To help kickstart a successful infusion, I have created a task force with our governance committee filled with attorneys, a diversity officer from Morgan Stanley, leaders from the Asian community, a Latinx Young Arts Manager, an OF/BY/FOR ALL alumni member, an OUSD music teacher, the Israeli-American youth orchestra conductor, the African-American choral director, and many more. I and my development director have direct access to the task force, acting as a conduit between them and the board of directors. The idea is for the task force to develop and recommend DE&I policies and goals before the board of directors creates its strategic plan. This framework will help to ensure that the strategic plan is not only intentional but that DE&I and agenda-making are co-created together throughout the entire process.