Kennedy Center lays off Social Impact employees

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Performing Arts
Kennedy Center lays off Social Impact employees

March 26, 20255:00 AM ET
Chloe Veltman

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., is dismantling its Social Impact initiative, which focused on providing outreach programs to local underserved communities.

Seven of the team's employees were notified on Tuesday that they were laid off, according to the artistic director of Social Impact, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who was also let go. Three additional employees whose work does not have an equity focus were retained.

According to a copy of a letter to a laid off staffer obtained by NPR and signed by LaTa'Sha Bowens, the Kennedy Center's vice president of human resources, "This decision was made after careful consideration and is based on the Kennedy Center's staffing needs." The staffer is not being identified because of fears of retaliation.

"How do you access the American promise if you don't have access to the impulse of creativity?" Joseph said in a statement. "As the nation's cultural center, the Kennedy Center has an obligation to ask itself that question every day…to respond to the call of its namesake who imagined an America that was 'unafraid of grace and beauty'. Our work in Social Impact was to widen our cultural radius and to imagine that inspiration itself was a constitutional right afforded to ALL of this nation's people."

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[IronLionZion]

1. The new chairman might use that money for stripper poles instead

[brush]

2. In other. words, the POCs are fired. No more DEI hires pls (I don't think the sarcasm gif is neccesary here).