Fantastic news both for revitalizing downtown and for lifting up artists and other creative people. The Svane Family Foundation’s Culture Forward initiative is providing grants for creative projects in downtown San Francisco, totaling $5 million over three years. Grant applications go live today, so if you’ve always had an idea for a project that brings community together and can be completed in one year, go for it.
According to the foundation, the terms are fairly loose, “without rigid criteria or boundaries,” to encourage outside-the-box thinking about how the funds could be used. The grants will be awarded in amounts ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 and must be for projects based in one of San Francisco’s downtown neighborhoods. The idea is to attract people to the area with enriching activities.
Individual artists can apply if they have a confirmed fiscal sponsor (a nonprofit organization that can accept the money on your behalf, so talk to your local nonprofit art gallery), as well as tax-exempt arts and culture organizations. The grant applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and awarded quarterly. For those who have faced onerous grant applications in the past, this application is streamlined to boost diverse project formats and “unconventional proposals.” In fact, the part of the application where you describe the project is limited to 600 words. The neighborhoods covered in the grant’s reach are Chinatown, Civic Center, Financial District, Mid-Market, Mission Bay, SoMa, the Tenderloin and Union Square.
The Svane Family Foundation was established in 2019 by Mikkel Svane, founder of Zendesk, a “software as a service” company.