*see tables below this article

In FY 2002-03, Grants for the Arts (GFTA), San Francisco's largest arts funding agency, had an annual budget of $15,500,000. The attached charts track the agency's allocations to non-profit arts organizations over the past fourteen years. GFTA’s funding patterns reflect culturally inequitable results, year after year.

Despite the dramatic population shifts the City has experienced over the past twenty years--and the vast demographic changes anticipated during the coming two decades--little or nothing seems to change at Grants for the Arts. Fourteen years ago, arts organizations rooted in communities of color received 11.1% of the agency's allocations. Today, although these communities comprise the majority of San Francisco's residents, they receive only 14.6 % of GFTA funding. At the agency's current rate of change (3.5 % every fourteen years), it will take GFTA more than 140 years to achieve the City's stated goal of cultural equity.

To compile the information reflected in the statistical charts, I employed the same classification system used by the NEA's former Expansion Arts Program, the California Arts Council's Multicultural Programs and the San Francisco Arts Commission's Cultural Equity Grants Program. To qualify for these three arts agencies' funds, an organization must meet the standard of being "firmly rooted in a community:" i.e., the organization's board members, staff and artistic programs must reflect a community's experience and traditions. To be considered a Latino arts organization, for example, the majority of the Board and staff must be comprised of Latinos and present programs with Latino content.

The charts' three columns reflect three distinct historical moments. The first column (FY 88-89) reflects Grants for the Arts' funding patterns at the beginning of the period following Diane Feinstein's nine years as Mayor. The middle column reflects the state of the agency at the end of former Mayor Frank Jordan's term. The differences between the second and third columns track the agency's allocations during the Willie Brown era, when GFTA's funding patterns have remained virtually unchanged.

The charts reveal that arts organizations rooted in San Francisco's African American, Asian/Pacific, Latino, Native American, Queer and women's communities currently receive approximately 20% of GFTA funds, even though these population groups comprise the vast numerical majority of the City's residents and taxpayers. According to the 2000 Census, 44% of San Francisco's residents are white, 31% are Asian/Pacific Islanders, 14% are Latinos, 8% are African Americans and the remaining are "mixed race" or Native American.

In 2002-03, GFTA awarded $300,000 more to the San Francisco Symphony than the agency allocated to all Asian/Pacific non-profit arts organizations combined. Even though Asian/Pacific Islanders comprise well over 30% of the City's population, the community's arts organizations received only 5% of GFTA's funds. Over the years, the agency's consistently minimal levels of support has inhibited the growth of an Asian/Pacific non-profit organizational infrastructure with the capacity to provide space, financial and technical resources to the large and extraordinarily talented Asian American segment of the City's cultural landscape.

In FY2002-03, GFTA awarded the Exploratorium more dollars than it did to the entire Latino non-profit arts community. Latino arts groups currently receive an even smaller percentage of GFTA funding (less than 4%) than they did in 1988, despite the fact that almost a million Latinos reside in the Bay Area who represent potential visitors to San Francisco.

Last year, GFTA provided $52,000 to two different music ensembles that only perform the music of Bach; the agency awarded a grand total of $36,700 to the entire Lesbian arts community, currently the most innovative and vibrant segment of the City's contemporary arts scene. GFTA gave more dollars to the San Francisco Ballet than to the LGBT arts community combined and awarded approximately the same amounts to the Museum of Modern Art and to the African American arts community. The San Francisco Opera alone received more than 8% of GFTA's grant monies ($930,000).

GFTA's approach produces at least two problematic outcomes. First, it contributes to public perceptions of the arts as expensive social activities reserved for the well-bred and the well-fed instead of as a force for building a creative, financially healthy and culturally diverse San Francisco. Second, GFTA's statistics reflect the absence of any demographic-based long-term strategy to promote the City's future economic development as a tourist and visitor destination.

By operating on outdated demographic assumptions, GFTA perpetuates the patently absurd notion that 80% of the City's current and future visitors are--and will continue to be--white and straight. GFTA's allocations fail to recognize the obvious: that the City's diverse cultures and its different lifestyles are what attract tourists here--both from near and afar.

The Hotel Tax was originally imposed in 1961 to generate revenues that would be re-invested in activities that develop the City's tourism industry. This strategy has worked; over the past 40 years tourism has indeed evolved into San Francisco's number one industry and its largest employment sector. Tourism supports over 200,000 jobs in San Francisco's hotel, restaurant, entertainment and arts fields.

But the demographics of the tourists and visitors the City is trying to attract have changed substantially over the past fifteen years and will continue changing over the next two decades. GFTA's failure to invest in San Francisco's economic future is clearly demonstrated by its lack of support for the City's lesbian arts community. Although lesbian artists are currently generating a vast quantity of innovative and totally original work in every arts discipline, in 2002-03, GFTA awarded only three grants to lesbian arts groups (Luna/Sea, Sister Spit and Purple Moon) totaling $36,400--or 0.03% of its annual awards. Surely, lesbian tourists and visitors contribute more than 0.03% to San Francisco's hotel tax revenues on the night of the Dyke March alone!

The centrality of tourism to the City's economic health has been clearly demonstrated by the current recession. The City needs to creatively rethink how it can more effectively utilize municipal funds to culturally diversify its regional, statewide, national and international tourist bases. After all, well over 75% of the visitors who attend San Francisco arts events reside in the Bay Area's nine counties, where people of color will soon become the majority of the population. People of color are already the majority of California's residents. Since approximately three-quarters of the world's population is not white, people of color also represent San Francisco's international tourist base of tomorrow.

The hardest weekend to find a San Francisco hotel room is the weekend of San Francisco's annual Pride Parade and the Dyke March. The millions of Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders who live everywhere in the world are already a significant component of the City's tourist base: many of them are people of color too.

Jeff Jones
June 10, 2003