SF ARTS COMMISSION UPDATES: NEW GRANT DISBURSEMENT POLICY
Oct. 5, 2026
PROPEL staff joined a 30min online community presentation in late July on the merged SFAC/GFTA’s new granting policy. A week later, the SF Arts Commission heard and approved the proposal. Given that the limited community outreach produced more questions than answers, we did follow up with new SFAC Executive Director, Matthew Goudeau, Kristen Jacobson, Director of Grants for the Arts, and the SFAC Budget Director with some clarifying questions on their revised grant disbursement policy (below). Public comment at the SFAC hearing also yielded more questions and confusion from the artists and arts advocates of the city. While a few of the questions below have been resolved, questions about the equity of the granting policy requirements remain, as well as the intersection of this policy with the new Arts Commission merger. There have also been disturbing delays in the timely payment of grantees and artists.
In addition, SFAC leadership are beginning outreach on their 5-Year Strategic Plan, which will have significant impacts on the future of the Department and its relationship with grantees and the public. All of these moving pieces require public participation and advocacy, especially at SF Arts Commission hearings. (We get it, these are widly felt to be insular echo chambers, where details are slim and no one seems to be in accountable for answering community questions – all the more reason to come and make your voice heard!)
SF PROPEL and other arts advocacy organizations like ABBA will be in attendance at the general meeting of the SFAC on October 5, 2026, seeking clarity around the shifting structure of the arts, and all the items mentioned above. The new mayoral appointee, Randi Fisher, will also be in attendance as she begins her four-year term.
Cribbing from Arts for a Better Bay Area’s latest newsletter: “SFAC will be presenting a (Five Year Strategic Plan) draft to its commission for final approval in spring 2027, so we do not have a ton of time to weigh in on the future of the agency. While we trust there will be other opportunities to voice our priorities for the newly expanded department, likely beginning in January, it’s important to have a strong showing at these meetings so the Arts Commissioners and staff know the community is watching, and is expecting to be fully engaged in a transparent process. Since there are no accompanying documents with this (Oct 5) agenda item, there is already room for improvement.
There will also be general public comment on the excessive delays in getting grantee contracts finalized. Although the grant reimbursement policy improvements need time to be incorporated into new contracts, there are reports from grantees that this is the longest they’ve ever had to wait to enter into SFAC agreements. Check out this campaign and survey for grantees to document the impact of these delays.” – ABBA
We have generally been optimistic about the hiring of new SFAC Executive Director, Matthew Goudeau, and recognize that after years of dysfunctional mismanagement, grace and time are warranted for any new leadership to re-center the public in its present and future operations. That being said, the Department clearly still has a ways to go with respect to rebuilding public trust and must do a much better job at communications and outreach.
Watch online at https://sfgovtv.org/sfgovtv-live-events starting at 2PM or attend in person at Room 416. Your voice matters!
(Below are some questions from late July based on the grant program community presentation:)
#1 - Staff mentioned it would it take 5-10 business days for the zoom recording to get uploaded and distributed to the public. Given that there will be a vote on these new policies next Monday, we’d like to request that the zoom recording be released asap, so that members of the public have enough time to review and respond with questions, if possible. Thank you! [*Note: Staff did indeed release the meeting much faster, which we appreciated, and you can watch the entire presentation here.]
#2 - Director Jacobson opened the session with comments celebrating recent policy changes that will create a grant funding increase and expand the pool of eligible arts non-profits who would have access to that grant funding — but did not cite any qualifying information to back up these claims. By way of background, at recent SFAC budget hearings, staff were unable to answer basic questions about the Mayor’s directive to cut department budgets and how that showed up in the budget. And the decision to present the budget through the lens of the SFAC/GFTA merger made it very difficult to track where funding levels were being decreased or where money was being reallocated. Please provide citations for how the new granting policies are increasing grants by $15M and how they have added approx. 300 new organizations to the eligibility pool.
#3 - We appreciate incoming leadership’s desire to streamline unnecessarily cumbersome reporting requirements and overly burdensome admin work, specifically for small and mid-size organizations. It’s our understanding from the presentation that the amount of admin documentation work would not change, though. (Despite the fact that only a randomized 10% of applicants would be audited, every grantee would still have to operate under the assumption that they would be included in that 10% random sampling.) Did the presenters mean there is a different policy change that reduces admin work? Can you please cite the policy change that reduces admin work and how it would do that?
#4 - Director Jacobson quickly ran through some examples of how the granting process may hypothetically work for the three categories discussed, but we did not catch them unfortunately. Could you please provide the hypothetical scenarios she modeled? We are particularly interested in scenarios where the maximum amount of advanced grant funding is not provided, especially now that organizations are planning for 2-year cycles.
#5 - There has been confusion in the community with respect to how the new mega-agency merger will impact decision making. Apologies in advance if this was covered in the presentation and we missed it, but given that SFAC and GFTA have historically had different granting review and approval processes with different levels of transparency, can you please confirm how grants will be reviewed and how the ultimate maximum advance amount is now decided, given that there is no minimum requirement but just a maximum? (For example, if I have applied for a grant that could potentially net “up to” a 50% up-front advance grant disbursement, but ultimately only qualify for a 20% up-front advancement: how is that decision arrived at? Is there a standardized set of criteria that dictates this universally across all applicants? Is there a point system that I need to meet? Is it contingent on my ability to defend the rationale for the advancement maximum at a commission hearing? Etc…)
#6 - We didn’t understand the significance of the “risk profile” category— is this an existing term used by the combined arts agencies? Is there a standardized definition or criteria for the "risk profile” designation? Who decides on designating an organization “at-risk” (ie, Commissioners, grant officers, a peer review panel, SFAC Director, etc) and are there specific ramifications that come with this designation, (ie funding loss, a probationary moratorium on city collaborations, etc)?
#7 - Will there be a granting advisory panel that decides both grant awards and advanced payments in the same action, or are these two distinct and separate actions/decisions?
#8 - There has been confusion in the community around the status of cost savings with staff reductions versus grant funding availability. Can you clarify whether there is more grant funding as a direct result of staff reduction? (Because there would appear to be less grant funding available, but an increase in granting officers at the SFAC for a total of 9 staff… can you please explain this discrepancy?)
#9 - The combined agencies have made a point of stating that reducing bureaucracy for artists is a priority. Can you clarify if this policy position will be applied to the agencies themselves? Ie, are there are cost savings planned as a result of reducing the admin overhead, which has skyrocketed under the most recently departed SFAC leadership? At the most recent publicly documented numbers, the SFAC has seen approximately 22% of its budget eat up by admin costs, which we know has been a point of contention for the public at previous SFAC commission meetings. What is the new mega-agency's plan for reining in these overhead costs, particularly as less grant funding is made available (despite an increase in hotel tax, as compared to the pandemic)?