Last week, the Kennedy Center’s new leadership, recently appointed by President Donald Trump, laid off at least five employees working on its social impact team, including its artistic director: poet, playwright and actor, Marc Bamuthi Joseph. References to the team’s work, which included attracting young, new and diverse audiences to the center, have been scrubbed from the center’s website.

The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment from The Times, but in an interview with the Washington Reporter, the center’s president, Ric Grenell, said, “What the heck is the Kennedy Center doing funding a group called ‘Social Impact’ when we have $0 in the bank and $0 in reserve?” (Trump originally made Grenell interim executive director, but now the website lists him as president.)

I’d argue that the reason might have gone beyond a commitment to equity, diversity and social justice. It might have been an investment in the future of art forms championed by the center — such as classical music and opera— that have long seen a decline in new audiences and were becoming known for attracting older white crowds.

Leaders of arts organizations across the country have watched this trend with concern for decades and have been making concerted efforts to attract young, diverse audiences. The goal is not to make the older white crowds feel unwelcome but to ensure a robust future for art forms that will need new audiences to remain viable in the future.

After all, dwindling audiences mean more empty seats and less revenue. This is happening at a time when the cost of operating an orchestra, including paying staff, management and musicians, is only increasing. Without fresh faces, cutbacks in staff and programming could become inevitable.

By enlarging the tent and making traditionally refined and staid art forms fresher and more experimental, leading arts organizations, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with its Green Umbrella new music series, and L.A.’s avant-garde opera company, the Industry, have raised the profile of classical music and created a landscape where some of the most daring and exciting new work is being done.

And the effort is paying off. According to a 2022 study by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, people under 35 are more likely to listen to classical music as part of their daily lives than their parents. A follow-up study showed interest in attending orchestral concerts also peaking.

The Washington Post reported that the Kennedy Center’s social impact team also spearheaded an effort to commission new works by Black composers and librettists. This work touches on another reason why encouraging young, diverse audiences to commit to classical music has been so urgent. A depletion in audiences has also been blamed on a lack of diversity within orchestras themselves.

A 2023 report by the League of American Orchestras found that Black, Latino and Indigenous American representation is “significantly lower among orchestra musicians than in the U.S. population overall.” It also found that “fewer than one in four conductors, including assistant conductors and music directors, are women.”

The Kennedy Center’s social impact team was seeking to address these issues with its work, and through the programming of the center’s Millennium Stage, which features free shows including plenty of world music, diverse dance troupes and orchestral performances by the National Symphony Orchestra’s youth fellows.

Grenell told the Washington Reporter that eliminating “DEI-aligned programs” at the center will save $2.5 million every year. I would counter that the work those programs sought to do when it came to cultivating new music and culture lovers — the kind that buy tickets, become subscribers and bring their families to shows — was priceless.

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