The Kenneth Rainin Foundation envisions a Bay Area where artists can thrive. Our ability to realize this collective vision is increasingly strained as the arts face a sustained crisis. In 2025, artists and their organizations navigated mounting financial challenges and hateful rhetoric that impacted the safety of our most vulnerable communities. Amidst this instability, artists drew on their instincts to care and serve and created spaces for joy and connection. In film and on Bay Area stages and streets, they imagined visionary works that affirmed our shared humanity and the extraordinary power of creative expression.

In August, the Foundation welcomed Liz O’Malley as Director, Arts Strategy & Ventures. Together with Sarah Williams, Arts Program Officer, they listened to those most affected, responded to urgent needs and collaborated to safeguard the region’s cultural vitality. The Arts Team remains focused on building a more durable and equitable ecosystem for artists to create and live in the Bay Area.

In January, the Rainin Foundation dedicated $4M to a Response Fund to meet urgent needs and safeguard nonprofits and communities. We distributed unrestricted grants to 83 current Arts grantees to mitigate financial shortfalls and sweeping federal actions.

We also led and contributed to collaborative efforts around acute challenges. With the Walter and Elise Haas Fund and Horizons Foundation, we designed a pooled fund for trans-led and trans-serving arts organizations that will launch in 2026. We reinvested in Bay Area Cultural Funders for Equity to sustain 22 BIPOC-led, under-resourced organizations. We joined nine other partners to provide emergency support for 24 organizations impacted by cuts to the City of Oakland’s Cultural Funding Grant Program. Finally, recognizing a shared vulnerability to climate related disasters, we contributed to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.

The sustained crisis in the arts underscores the urgent need to transform systems. Our grantmaking seeded emerging ideas that center equity, amplify artists’ civic voices and better serve their unique ways of working. California for the Arts will pilot a Regional Program Manager to scaffold and bridge Bay Area grassroots arts advocacy with statewide efforts. Artist Corporations will design a new legal structure (A-Corp) built for artists and creative work.

We renewed investments in community-rooted innovations that are radically reimagining new models to help artists and organizations stay adaptable and resilient. BLACspace Cooperative is connecting and cultivating an ecosystem of creative entities that promote Black arts and culture, while offering holistic coaching and consulting and advocating for the sustainability of cultural spaces. Artist Space Trust is scaling their community land trust model to secure housing and live/work spaces for low-income artists. And Cal Scenic is providing scenic fabrication and resource sharing to theaters while creating new jobs.

Artists continued to connect communities through boundary pushing performances and public art rooted in timely issues. Our 2025 New & Experimental Works (NEW) Program grantees reflect an array of theater and dance projects encompassing shamanic wisdom, turbulent histories, trans identity, ageism, survival, the female voice and collective resilience. Our 2025 Open Spaces Program grantees embraced a strong “for us, by us” throughline with meaningful collaborations among artists, communities and nonprofit partners. Their ambitious projects creatively activate public spaces while uplifting food sovereignty and tree care, communal wellness and healing, and Oakland’s varied immigrant histories.

In both programs, we engaged a panel to review grant applications and make funding recommendations. In response to the challenging financial climate, we shifted to unrestricted grants in the NEW Program and awarded $832,100 to 33 small and mid-sized arts organizations. In our Open Spaces Program we awarded $834,000 to eight projects.

Visionary storytellers continued to bring diverse perspectives and identities to the big screen. The 2025 SFFILM Rainin Grant supported 17 narrative projects, 85% of which were led by filmmakers of color. Vividly spanning heartbreak, hellraising and reconciliation, their works illuminate personal and reimagined histories and legacies that reshape how we understand the world.

In its fifth year, the SFFILM Rainin Filmmakers with Disabilities Grant awarded funding to three compelling documentary and narrative projects that address stories within the disability community. The filmmakers chronicle deeply personal investigations of trauma and disease, visibility and bodily autonomy. Grantees in both programs receive unrestricted funding for screenwriting, development or post-production, plus access to FilmHouse, SFFILM’s premier artist residency space.