We are lucky as a creative industry to have champions and visionaries like Fanshen Cox. She co-created the Inclusion Rider and has been an advocate for opening up Hollywood to actually hire people that look like the American and global audiences actually look.
She sounded the alarm this week about a critical federal regulations change that would have the EEOC stop collecting data on who Hollywood hires. When they make a rules change of this magnitude, they have to open up for public comment for short periods of time, and as you can imagine the federal government doesn’t, like advertise it. We have to rely on folks like Fanshen who stay close to the problem in order to get more of us involved in the solutions.
She sent out an email and awesome explainer video today which I am sharing with you, and below that I am sharing the public comment I included that is my own organization’s perspective on this. It will take you 10 minutes. And I’ll just speak for myself on the payoff: the last three times I have submitted public commentary on scary rules changes, the rules have not changed and it felt like I got to be a part of saving the day. So if you like that kind of Hollywood ending, this is for you!
First, watch her short video:
Here are the links you need for her three-step instructions:
1. Comment by Aug 24 at regulations.gov — in your own words, why this data matters. Share your experience: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/EEOC-2026-0034-0001
2. If you want to go further, there’s a public hearing Aug 11 and you can request to testify — requests are due Aug 7, so that one’s soon.
3. Share the video and pass this along to anyone who should weigh in.
Here is the public comment I submitted:
I’m writing as the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, an independent film crowdfunding and distribution platform that has helped raise over $90 million for creators over the past 13+ years. Eighty percent of the creators in our community identify as LGBTQ, BIPOC, immigrant, or otherwise part of groups historically locked out of the entertainment industry’s hiring pipelines.
Our community’s composition is not an anomaly. It reflects the actual demographics of the American audience. Yet Hollywood continues to massively overinvest in work by a narrowly defined group of storytellers, which is part of why platforms like ours exist in the first place: we are plugging a hole that shouldn’t need plugging, given who is actually watching, buying tickets, and subscribing.
The jobs at stake here are not abstract. They represent sustainable careers, in some cases generational wealth, and the ability to shape how our culture imagines itself and its future. An industry with this much cultural reach and influence should be accountable for who gets to do that shaping.
The EEO-1 through EEO-6 reports, and the recordkeeping requirements behind them, are how we know whether that accountability is happening at all. What gets measured gets managed. Without this data, there is no way to know how wide the gap is between who tells America’s stories and who America actually is. Eliminating the requirement to collect this information doesn’t erase the disparity, it just makes it invisible and therefore unaccountable.
I urge the EEOC to withdraw this proposed rule and preserve the EEO-1 through EEO-6 reporting and recordkeeping requirements.
Sincerely,
Emily Best
Founder & CEO, Seed&Spark
LET’S CITIZEN Y’ALL!
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