Did you know that the state of California has the highest level of employment in arts, design, entertainment, sports and media occupations?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 360,000 working people in California were employed in the sector in 2023. The federal agency also notes that from 2023 to 2033, overall employment in the entertainment field is projected to grow faster than the average for all occupations. So the numbers suggest: aspiring to a career in the creative economy is a promising professional goal for any young person itching to express themselves as a working creative.
However, not all youth receive the support they need to have a fair shot at a stable, satisfying, and successful career in the arts, media, and entertainment world. On a mission to ensure that underrepresented youth experience economic inclusivity and mobility in California’s robust creative ecosystem is the Entertainment Equity Alliance: an expansive coalition of mentorship, training, and employment pathway programs that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within the industry.
Founded in 2021, EEA comprises industry-connected workforce and labor partners committed to ensuring equity and access to careers in the creative sector: a field in which numerous historically underrepresented groups are still too often pushed to margins in regard to professional development opportunities.
In the past, such endeavors had always been easier said than done. While many organizations and government agencies have long been committed to creative workforce development, there had yet to exist a proper coalescence of institutional changemakers—a disjointedness across organizations both old and new that many industry advocates, such as EEA founder Allison Frenzel, felt held back the industry’s ability to empower young, creative hopefuls.
“When we began ideating [the EEA], we saw that there were a lot of emerging nonprofits in the arts, media and entertainment workforce space, in addition to organizations that had been doing this work for a long time,” says Frenzel, who is a career technical education program specialist at the California Department of Education (whose comments here do not reflect the views or positions of the CDE). “A lot of these organizations essentially had the same mission and vision—solving for equitable, inclusive, and diverse hiring across the entertainment industry—but they were pursuing those goals in silos. So we asked ourselves, how can we make a more collective impact without tripping over each other? And how do we work collaboratively instead of competitively in this space to maximize impact?”
Intimate early conversations between Frenzel, Arts2Work Founder Wendy Levy, and BRIC Foundation Co-Founder and Executive Director Nicole Hendrix laid the groundwork for broader outreach efforts inclusive of dozens of organizations working to ensure youth equity and access to creative careers.
The EEA founders also knew that in order to center cross-organization collaboration on a large scale, everyone would need a seat at the table, from government to educators to nonprofits—or, in Frenzel’s words, “all of these kinds of folks who are trying to do the same work but essentially rely on each other.”
Hendrix echoes a similar sentiment, explaining, “The origin story really came about from a need to unify everybody that was doing similar work so we could get on the same page and ask: ‘What is your lane, and how can we support each other in our lanes?’”
The result of that unity? Over two dozen organizations joined the Entertainment Equity Alliance—from industry labor unions and creative workforce development 501(c)(3)s to public agencies—as founding partners, driven by the shared belief that changemaking institutions are most powerful when everyone works toward a common goal.
Since its establishment only three years ago, the Entertainment Equity Alliance has been steadfast in its commitment to creating a more just, equitable creative ecosystem by building a stronger school-to-career pipeline, particularly.
“The EEA is about bridging K-12 education for technical education for arts, media, and entertainment jobs because there’s always been this gap between these two spaces,” notes Frenzel. “A student might think, ‘Okay, they say college is the only way—but I don’t really need college to pursue some of these occupations.’ Yet, oftentimes, there is no real door for these kids. So what EEA partners are doing is pushing to create those doors and windows for the folks who don’t have a connection to help them get on that path.”
The Entertainment Equity Alliance is paving such avenues for young creative learners by strengthening work-based learning opportunities, like apprenticeships, and improving career exposure opportunities and education for youth and historically excluded communities.
One of the core work-based learning opportunities has been the new Arts, Media, & Entertainment High Road Training Partnership: the first of its kind, AME-HRTP is a wide-scale, multi-year initiative to bridge training and education programs with employment and catalyze economic mobility for underrepresented arts, entertainment and media workers in California’s creative economy.
A historic program established in partnership with the California Workforce Development Board (a state agency dedicated to continuous improvement of California’s workforce system), the AME-HRTP program is led by EEA founding partner BRIC Foundation: a nonprofit that teams up with education, government, nonprofit, and industry partners to create equitable pathways for future generations of diverse storytellers in entertainment, gaming, media and tech (and a longtime partner of the Snap Foundation). And, notably, the AME-HRTP initiative—funded by a $3.5 million contract with the California Workforce Development Board—was born directly from the founding of the Entertainment Equity Alliance.
Talk about teamwork making the dream work; though, for BRIC Foundation, it’s just another day in breaking the mold to make an impact. “At BRIC, we generally just jump and trust that things will work out,” Hendrix explains of the process of being awarded the California Workforce Development Board grant. And though BRIC was the primary grantee of the state agency, they adopted an inclusive approach to establishing a network of registered apprenticeship programs and union training programs to support young marginalized creatives, opening up the AME-HRTP network application process to any organizations who wanted to apply—EEA partners or otherwise.
“We like to do everything very equitably,” Hendrix explained of the network’s formation, which comprises a cornucopia of registered apprenticeship program sponsors and community-based organizations, including five local IATSE organizations, the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, and a number of Snap Foundation partners, such as Handy Foundation, Music Forward Foundation, Women in Animation, Academy Gold, Creative Futures Collective, NewFilmmakers Manifest Works, Jail Guitar Doors, Better Youth, Venice Arts, Musicians at Play, and Hollywood CPR.
Through the AME-HRTP initiative, these organizations will facilitate paid on-the-job training, ongoing mentorship, career coaching, essential workplace skills training, and ongoing support for program participants throughout the next three years. The programs cover plenty of ground, too: AME-HRTP pathways include everything from film/television, animation, visual effects, and games to music and audio, design, and live entertainment. By the end of the grant cycle, Hendrix says the vision is to have created 500 high-skill, high-wage jobs in media, arts, and entertainment.
Such a large number of gigs may sound like a lofty ambition, but no wishful thinking here. Instead, BRIC's target is driven by data—and the numbers detailing the impact of registered apprenticeship programs are extraordinary. For instance, the U.S. Department of Labor reports that about 90% of apprentices retain employment after completing an apprenticeship program, while the median estimate of the employer’s return on investment in a registered apprenticeship program is a massive 44%.
There’s more: workers who complete registered apprenticeships earn an average of $300,000 more than their peers outside of the program. It is no wonder the Department of Labor considers these initiatives to collectively be one of the most effective workforce training strategies for supporting historically underserved and marginalized individuals who are often left without a “map” to well-paying career pathways.
One organization in partnership with both the AME-HRTP initiative and the Entertainment Equity Initiative is the Handy Foundation—a nonprofit that connects below-the-line workers to job opportunities in Hollywood, fueling professional development and supporting industry players to make an impact through diversity and inclusion. In addition to offering a program that apprentices across multiple tradecrafts, Handy Foundation also creates pathways to diversity by offering pre-apprenticeship youth training, which takes place in public high schools, the organization’s founder, Ri-Karlo Handy, notes.
“With this high school component, we’re establishing this pathway—this connection that hasn’t existed previously,” Handy explained. “Before, high school programs were basically sending you to four-year college programs. And as we know, especially in our culture today, not all college programs are a path into the workforce. What we're able to do is really connect pre-apprenticeship to youth apprenticeship to apprenticeship opportunities to a sustainable career.”
Indeed, the pipeline from pre-apprenticeship to sustainable arts, media, and entertainment career is palpable: early evaluations from the Department of Labor are showing that pre-apprenticeship, supportive services, and other strategies are effective strategies to promote equity and inclusion in registered apprenticeship programs.
Beyond work-based learning opportunities like apprenticeships and trainings, the other component of EEA’s impact quotient is career exposure and education. For example, in May this year, the coalition gathered students from 38 high schools (across 11 school districts), community college students, California State University students, and early career professionals to experience the free, interactive Careers in Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.
The pioneering one-day event was an opportunity for attendees to see where their artistic ambitions could take them—from creative to production and the corporate space—by introducing youth to the entertainment workforce and training programs led by community-based organizations. A major success attended by over 1,500 learners, the expo reminded many EEA founding members of exactly why working alongside each other cooperatively is so powerful.
“When we started the EEA, we didn’t want to build a nonprofit,” explained creative career pathways specialist Meia Johnson—a program manager at EEA founding partner organization Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (and whose comments here do not reflect the views or positions of the LACDAC). “We didn't want to create an organization. We wanted it to break all the rules of what's there, and that's why it works. There's no ownership, there's just collaboration. And the biggest evidence of that synergy was the Careers in Entertainment Expo.”
Those who attended the inaugural Careers in Entertainment Expo not only had a chance to engage in interactive workshops, union demonstrations, and panel discussions but also had the invaluable (and, for many marginalized youth, rare) opportunity to glean resume and portfolio feedback directly from industry professionals. In addition to the experiential educational experiences of in-person events like 2024’s expo, there’s also the county’s Creative Careers Online: an online education platform acting as a one-stop for young people to discover workforce development programs they can participate in and explore the breadth of career pathways available to them as artistic dreamers, Johnson explains.
In the spirit of collaboration, Creative Careers Online is also the central hub for easy access to all things AME-HRTP, like resources, applications, training partners, and other opportunities. Right now, the website features over 50 programs from a variety of organizations (many that are EEA partners), with many more to be added in the future, according to Johnson.
And, of course, the EEA is also working to help educators, such as teachers and administrators, align classroom instruction to real-world industry skills and competencies. Built with insights provided by over 150 industry professionals, including a number of EEA partners, the annually released Arts, Media, and Entertainment Industry Skills Framework is an official document that supports educators in preparing students for occupations in the creative industry.
The secret sauce to the framework is its twofold universality: first, the document can be an insightful tool for a wide variety of educators. “This framework isn’t pigeonholed to only K-12,” says Frenzel. “I have community college programs using it. I have nonprofit workforce organizations using it to build curricula. I have community-based organizations. I have even CSU teachers using it. So it became this universal document—because, ultimately, it's the same skills. It doesn't matter what grade level you're in to benefit from learning these skills.”
Most importantly, the framework is setting students up for success as they embark on a career pathway in a promising yet sometimes temperamental and ever evolving industry. “The AME Industry Skills Framework absolutely places a large emphasis on entrepreneurial skills,” explains Frenzel. “Navigating contracts, having your own LLC, creating a space for yourself as an entrepreneur—these are all essential competencies in today’s landscape so that our youth have sustainable alternatives to the gig economy mindset. When it comes to the arts, media, and entertainment space, we believe those transferable skills are so integral to underrepresented young creatives finding a path that truly works for them—and allows them to thrive.”
Check out EntertainmentEquityAlliance.org to support or learn more about the Entertainment Equity Alliance.
