San Francisco-based spoken-word and theater artist Javier Reyes was taking a nap when he got the call. It was Alie Jones, co-founder and director of Black Freighter Press, a collective of Black and brown literary artists in the Bay Area. “She said, ‘Hi, we want to pay you $1,000 a month for 18 months, and you don’t got to do anything back.’”
Reyes, who had been working as a creator, educator and bridge-builder/problem-solver for 20 years, was skeptical. Suddenly, someone wanted to pay him to make art? “I’m like, ‘What’s the catch? What’s the hook?’ My deficit mindset kicked in. But she was like, ‘No, this is a gift. It’s your time.’”
Reyes is one of 60 artists currently receiving $1,000/month in unrestricted funds as part of an 18-month guaranteed income project spearheaded by the San Francisco-based nonprofit Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). Called the Creative Communities Coalition for Guaranteed Income, the program has a $1.3 million budget, with funds from Jack Dorsey’s #StartSmall Initiative and MacKenzie Scott.
This is YBCA’s second direct-giving project, and the nonprofit learned from its first. “We wanted to work deeper in the community with this phase and be more equitable in our approach,” says Christian Medina Beltz, senior communications manager at YBCA. YBCA’s mission includes empowering artists to be change agents. This time, it partnered with six community arts organizations that chose grant recipients.
In addition to Black Freighter Press, partner organizations include the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCCSF), Compton’s Transgender District, the Mission District-based Dance Mission Theater, Galeria de la Raza, which focuses on Latinx artists and visual art, and the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company.
“We picked organizations that have a long history in San Francisco, are known for being bastions of the community, and have an artistic practice we respect,” says Medina Beltz. “We also wanted to make sure the program reflected the diversity of communities in San Francisco.”
Finding the money in any language
This community-led approach allowed the coalition to reach artists often excluded from the traditional grantmaking process due to language barriers and/or a lack of connection to the mainstream fine arts world. “Philanthropy has under-resourced BIPOC communities in arts and culture,” says Jenny Leung, executive director of the CCCSF. “Community-based art has been underseen and underserved.”
CCCSF staffers met with community artists in their homes and asked about their lives, their visions for Chinatown, and their art-making process. “It’s almost like a different form of a grant application. Instead of having them fill out a grant application, it was more about listening and having an empathetic approach to selection,” says Leung. “Identifying the barriers to funding they face has been an important part of the process for us.”
One CCCSF grantee is a woman named Xiaojie. She leads a troop of “Chinatown Aunties” in performances of traditional fan dances and sword dances. They practice in Portsmouth Square, a public park often referred to as the “living room” of Chinatown. “Xiaojie lives in an SRO with her husband and stores her umbrellas and swords near her bed,” says Vida Kuang, community arts program director of CCCSF. She doesn’t have a studio, but like any true artist, that does not stop her from working on her craft. “They are professionals; when you are talking about community-based artists, that’s people who have an art practice and craft and dedication, and reflect a unique form of community narrative.”
The life of the artist, 2.0
The old romantic dream of the artist’s life — living in a garret in Paris, sipping café au lait by day, creating masterpieces by night — was always less equitable than many readers of Ernest Hemmingway’s “A Moveable Feast” may have realized. Today, making art in high-rent cities like San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles is ever more the reserve of those with family money or lucrative sinecures.
In San Francisco, often ranked as the most expensive city in the nation, many would-be creators of color rely on government subsidies to pay the cost of a single room in an SRO. They still struggle to find time to create, says Leung. “Our communities have been deeply under-resourced, even though artists are the souls of our communities and contribute so much to them.”
Certainly, monthly income for community creators sounds like a valuable way to recognize that contribution. But how far can $1,000 a month really go in a place like San Francisco?
Pretty darn far, says Reyes. He has been seeing the sum appear in his bank account since this round of funding started in the fall of 2021. “You would be surprised how much you do with $1,000 a month. It’s helped ease a lot of stresses that come with being a creative in San Francisco and educator and a brotha,” he says. “That extra $1,000 a month gives me time to sit with other people and help them map out their vision and their lives. A lot of times I’m like, ‘Hey man, I know you have a budget you’re trying to meet. Lunch is on me.’ Or, ‘What do you need?’ As an educator, you gotta look out for the young people. Sometimes a gesture of love is more important than the amount of money. But let’s be real, a lot of times it comes with money.”
Guaranteed income programs, at their best, empower those who have long scraped by to become givers themselves. For Reyes, this is a huge benefit of the program. He says he uses about half of the money for his own needs, and about half to help others. “When you’re an artist and an educator, you’re around other people who are trying to put the puzzle together for themselves, trying to make their dream happen. If I’m the only successful artist in my community, I’ll never be truly successful. In my community, we live by a motto, ‘Everybody eats.’ If I have food, I’m going to share. We can’t lose that kind of generosity in society.”
Like many proponents of guaranteed income programs and of direct giving, Reyes praises the lack of tedious paperwork and rejection letters that are endemic in the typical grant application processes. “What’s great is that the vetting has already been taken care of. Other people have already said, ‘That person is doing great work.’”
One small step for San Francisco, one large step for guaranteed income?
The YBCA program is aligned with guaranteed income pilots across the U.S. As with these other initiatives, a larger goal here is to contribute to the growing research showing that guaranteed income can be a corrective to the punishing effects of wealth disparity.
“A lot of the folks in our coalition want to put pressure on lawmakers to make guaranteed income a reality, not just in this small sample size. We can use this as a case study of how universal basic income improves the lives of artists. It shows that the model works, and that people can live with dignity and practice their art and survive,” says Medina Beltz.
Leung wants to change how philanthropy funds the arts. “This represents a new model of how support can be done equitably. Community-based arts organizations are tied to the communities, and philanthropy hasn’t historically supported that. There hasn’t been a trickle-down to communities of color and the artists who bring vibrancy,” she says.
Reyes, too, hopes to see more projects like this one. “Man, you know, I want to be a testimony to advocate for the next group of artists to get this and to continue to find more dignified ways of funding artists than this rat race, this obstacle course people go through to get like $500.”