New York City boasts about its diversity and reputation as the cultural capital of the world. What’s buried beneath that bragging is the persistent inequity in funding to cultural organizations.

Institutions with smaller budgets, especially those that are Latino, African American and Asian, often receive the short end of the stick in public money for the arts. That does not have to be the standard.

In San Francisco, a cultural equity endowment was established in the 1990s. A small slice of the city’s hotel room tax is directed to communities long marginalized and excluded from resource distribution. And there are other city funds available to them.

The measure helps address the unfair playing field, where older, larger and often Eurocentric institutions have more advantage in competing for public or private funds. Whether a share of a tax or another approach is employed, New York City needs to show the same commitment.

Last year, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the City Council established a base level of funding for cultural organizations, administered on merit. City officials hailed this and other “reforms” as responsive to the needs of cultural organizations.

Yet, smaller organizations of color, which receive 21 percent of the city's cultural development fund, have banded together. The Cultural Equity Group is lobbying for funding policies that reflect this city’s demographics and that truly respond to under-served communities.

This advocacy is not only a matter of fairness and representation. It is also about not simply investing in everything large. As the Center for an Urban Future has emphasized, nurturing the cultural sector means focusing on the thousands of smaller organizations that feed economic development at the neighborhood level. Losing sight of this would be a blow to New York's cultural engine.