Where are arts and culture in CSR?

It feels like society today is demanding more from corporations than in any time in recent history. Grassroots movements are demanding that businesses align their strategic goals with socially responsible outcomes – at least on the surface. This is not necessarily new, but there are signs that we have reached a tipping point in some industries where social responsibility and shareholder returns are aligning. The global market for electric vehicles (EVs) has grown at about 60% per year from 2014 to 2018 and some companies like Volvo have made public goals to have 50% of sales be EVs by 2025. In a 2015 Nielsen study, they found that 66% of global consumers say they are willing to pay more for sustainable brands — up 55% from 2014 and that the premium for Millennials is even higher. And in 2018, a Harvard Business Review article estimated that Fortune 500 companies spent approximately USD $20 billion a year on corporate social responsibility (CSR) related activities. Business is paying attention to its image around social responsibility and putting money where its mouth is.

Let me back up and also acknowledge the literature and conversations around CSR and whether or not it is actually good for society at all. The Economist has referred to CSR initiatives as “little more than a cosmetic treatment.” and Anand Giridharadas, former fellow of the Aspen Institute, has described these efforts as “an elite charade that allows plutocrats to feel better about themselves while dodging any real challenge to the system that made them rich”. There is also an argument that says the role of the firm is solely to create profit and the individuals receiving that profit carry the responsibility of distributing those resources in ways that benefit society. I’m not here to debate the merits of CSR as an idea, there is plenty of literature on that by many of the top thinkers in the world. What I hear less about is, how are we defining what is socially responsible?

I did a search for the word “arts” in the corporate social responsibility reports of Fortune magazine’s top 5 companies of 2019. The word showed up exactly 3 times. The words “community”, “health”, “safety”, and “environment” appeared hundreds of times. And only one of the top five corporations specifically identified the amount invested in arts and culture. In case you were wondering, the amount was less than 1% of their global investment in community. Arts and culture is quite often lumped into an ambiguous category of "community". Highlighting all of this is not meant to disparage the good work that goes into environmental sustainability, health and housing security, or any of the other incredibly important initiatives being addressed by these companies. My point here is to emphasize the deemphasis of supporting arts and culture in our framing of what is socially responsible.

The arts and cultural leaders that I am fortunate enough to work beside spend a significant portion of their time advocating for their sector and the ways in which it builds community, accelerates educational initiatives, and provides space for differing viewpoints to come together in what is becoming an increasingly more dangerously polarized world. This is also socially responsible. Our relationship with arts and culture, as a society, needs to be present in the conversations around social responsibility, corporate or otherwise. I am not one to judge whether or not public and private businesses have a role beyond making profit, but CSR has forced these entities to take stances. Significant resources give corporations an amplified voice in the conversations about how we define what is socially responsible.

Arts and culture needs to be included in that definition.