As funding for in-school arts education decreases, many young people turn to out-of-school educational theatre programs run by professional theatres or community-based organizations. Due to ingrained habits of white supremacy and colonial/settler thinking in these settings, educational theatre opportunities for Black and Latine youth are well below that of white students, despite countless studies demonstrating the positive impact of comprehensive arts education on all aspects of life for young people. This paper utilizes a theory devised by Dr. Amelia Kraehe at the University of Arizona who posits that equity in arts education contains six Dimensions: resources, access, participation, recognition, transformation, and effects. Equity is only achieved when equilibrium between the Dimensions is reached. Knowing we, as a society, are far from achieving equilibrium, this research paper focuses on how Education Directors at non-profit arts organizations achieve the profound effects noted in prior research despite living in a society designed to make this difficult and often designed to make equity impossible. Through semi-structured interviews with four Education Directors in out-of-school educational theatre programs, two at off-Broadway cultural institutions and two at community-based organizations, serving New York City public school students, we learn how and why they prioritize recognition over other Dimensions. Education Directors in this comparative case study have a commitment to undoing harmful Euro-centric theatre traditions and to center the lived experiences of youth participants who are predominantly racialized as Black and Latine. Education Directors are unwilling to sacrifice comprehensive and intentional classroom experiences for youth participants and put their limited financial resources towards building authentic relationships with participants, teaching artists, and the communities they serve. Due to these priorities, which are intentional and take time to enact, Education Directors are only able provide programming to a limited number of young people, pointing to a significant need for more expansive funding for arts education that decenters neo-liberal paradigms. Future research on this topic could include a quantitative study on how arts are funded in New York City public schools, and a wider study of equity practices amongst Education Directors in both community-based organizations and cultural institutions.