Comment from Seed&Spark EEOC-2026-0034

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