When San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced aguaranteed income pilot program for artiststhat would be administered by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, many in the city’s arts and culture industry were enthusiastic. Here was a new kind of support that recognized struggling professional artists as essential and sought to make it a little easier to live in the most expensive city in the country.

Others, though, had questions and concerns — not about the idea of guaranteed income itself, but about how it was being administered.

Curator, visual artist and organizer Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen chose not to apply for the pilot program, even though she qualified and could use the money. Among other complaints, she says an organization with expertise working with people of color should have been put in charge of the program, not YBCA.

“Of all the different places (the city) could have put that money that actually understand how to serve communities of color, they chose to hand it over to a wealthy, white-run institution,” said Evans MacFadyen, who also sits on the city Human Rights Commission’s Racial Equity in the Arts Working Group. “I don’t think it’s mal-intentioned. I think it’s just the typical white savior cluelessness.”

Bay Area theater company funds its own guaranteed income program

City leaders say YBCA was chosen because it was best equipped to take on the pilot program, which was funded with $870,000 from the city’s Arts Impact Endowment, money that comes from the hotel tax, along with $60,000 of YBCA’s budget. YBCA, a 28-year-old gallery and performing arts presenter, has recently taken on other health and civic initiatives, including theSan Francisco Creative Corps,which now has a proposal for astatewide versionbefore the state legislature. YBCA CEO Deborah Cullinan was the lone arts representative on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Jobs and Business Recovery Task Force.

City administrative code says the majority of the endowment’s funds each year must go to organizations serving historically marginalized groups, such as people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and women. Because the guaranteed income pilot program sought to aid those groups, Evans MacFadyen said a cultural center of community-based organization with expertise in equity ought to have been chosen to head the project instead of YBCA.

“It’s such a deeply, deeply flawed and inequitable program,” Evans MacFadyen said.

Other arts leaders of color echoed MacFadyen’s concerns, including T. Kebo Drew, managing director of Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project; Rachel Lastimosa, arts and culture administrator at SOMA Pilipinas; and Vinay Patel, executive director of Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center.

“这真是有社区in the most need of these resources at the table from the very beginning of the design process … so that the application process is informed by the people that are benefiting from these resources,” Lastimosa said.

YBCA consulted with SOMA Pilipinas, Lastimosa acknowledged, but only later in the program’s design process.

For Drew, the city’s decision reinforced longstanding patterns she’s seen about how arts funders regard organizations of color.

“There is a history of inequity in arts funding, where communities of color are not trusted with the funds to do the work we know how to do really well,” she said.

In a statement to The Chronicle, YBCA said it has “a track record of administering programs that provide payments to artists (including Artist Relief Now, YBCA Away, the YBCA Fellows), which contributed to the city of San Francisco’s decision to select YBCA to administer the guaranteed income pilot.” It added that of the 130 artists selected, 96% hail from historically marginalized groups, 100% make art that’s rooted in one of those historically marginalized groups, and all have very low incomes and have lost work because of the pandemic.

Jeff Cretan, spokesman for the mayor’s office, said the city chose YBCA to administer the pilot partly because of its existing infrastructure. “We chose to work with the nonprofit that was most ready to administer the program and had the most capacity in order to have the funds into artists’ hands as quickly as possible,” he said.

YBCA, though, had to add and refocus some staff to take on the UBI program. It hired one part-time employee to help with the program and contracted with consultants and outreach workers, in addition to reassigning four existing full-time employees to work on the program 25% to 75% of their time.

If YBCA had to grow to take on the program, Drew asked, why couldn’t another organization that’s explicitly run by and for people of color do the same?

“We’re the dolphins of equity,” Drew said of arts organizations of color. “We can dive, we can jump, we can fly. We definitely know what we’re doing.”

But because of historical and structural racism, she said, bigger but not necessarily better organizations are more trusted to administer programs dealing with racial equity.

Ralph Remington, the San Francisco Arts Commission’s director of cultural affairs, has seen similar tensions between large and small organizations play out repeatedly during his long career in the arts, which includes a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Small organizations believe that they can handle volume bigger than they’re accustomed to, but it is not smart philanthropic practice to give huge chunks of money to small organizations to administer,” he said, adding that governments have a responsibility to use taxpayer money in the most fiscally responsible way. In his time at the NEA, from 2010 to 2014, Remington said he saw small organizations fold after they got large grants whose management overwhelmed their already strained staffs.

Still, “the community should have probably had a bigger say in the design of the process,” he said.“I think YBCA understands that; YBCA has never said that this has been perfect. That being said, there’s something there that wasn’t there before, and that’s a guaranteed income program. That’s better than zero, and that’s a win.”

Another factor in the city’s decision, Cretan said, was that YBCA has had a longstanding interest in guaranteed income.

“They have been working in the guaranteed income space for a very long time,” he said, “and they are engaged in national conversations about this, and are considered one of the city’s subject experts in this area, specifically for the arts.”

YBCA’s plan to seek private funds to supplement the program was also appealing to city officials. On May 21, the organization delivered on that promise, announcing thepilot would expandthanks to a $3.46 million gift from #StartSmall, a philanthropic LLC created by Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey.

Since receiving #StartSmall’s gift, YBCA has revised the pilot program in response to feedback from the arts community. It plans to partner with five smaller organizations to choose a second round of recipients.

But Drew said that change isn’t enough. “It’s a case of might makes right,” she said. “A large, white-led organization that doesn’t understand and outsources equity is rewarded for their sheer lack of expertise in equity and then leverages it to benefit their organization.”

Even before Dorsey’s gift, those critical of the program said they saw myriad ways in which YBCA’s handling of the program demonstrated a lack of understanding in working with communities of color. One alleged problem was YBCA’s use of what Cullinan called a “randomizing tool” to choose recipients, which meant that some less needy artists might win by luck of the draw.

“Random selection is a false intention and a weak solution,” said theater artist and poet Paul S. Flores, whose 2019 show,“We Have Iré,”was produced by YBCA. He applied but didn’t get into the guaranteed income pilot.

“Equity is targeted application of resources to those communities who have historically been neglected, such as Latinx artists, Asian artists, Black artists,” he said.

Still, Flores acknowledged, “there would be no UBI without YBCA. Deborah Cullinan pushed hard, advocated and organized support from her political and artistic colleagues.”

“Based on input from both experts around guaranteed income models as well as San Francisco community arts leaders, it was determined that a process by which YBCA handpicked those with the ‘highest need’ might put applicants in perceived competition with one another based on their circumstances,” YBCA said in a statement to The Chronicle.

Evans MacFadyen was also worried that YBCA hadn’t shown awareness of how guaranteed income might jeopardize recipients’ other benefits. She doubted the organization’s ability to reach the most vulnerable, either because of language barriers, technology barriers or more structural ones.

“It usually takes longer for folks (of color) to get on board because there’s so much wariness of these big projects,because people have historically been treated so poorly,” she said, “so there has to be some trust built.”

The pilot program developed quickly this year. The first community meeting about it was held Jan. 13, and it was officiallyannounceda little more than two months later.

Stockton’s guaranteed income program, Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, offers a contrasting approach. It announced the program in October 2017, followed by months of town halls and one-on-one meetings, before making first payments in February 2019. That time allowed the program to preserve recipients’ benefits, such as disability insurance, Medi-Cal, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, public housing vouchers, and to hire benefits counselors.

“Especially with communities of color and cities that have been disinvested in, there’s a trend to do research on, not with. We didn’t want our folks to feel like guinea pigs,” said SEED Executive Director Sukhi Samra.

In San Francisco, conflicting takes on the guaranteed income pilot for artists come in part from a longstanding disinvestment in the arts at all levels of government. Californians for the Arts frequently cites the statistic that the country’s richest state spends only 73 cents per person on the arts each year.

But the conflict is also about whether and how, during a pandemic, a city can aid the hardest hit both as quickly and as equitably as possible.

“San Franciscans, we as a total, should approach times of change with more grace towards people who are trying to move in the right direction,” Remington said.“We’re going to make mistakes, and we’re going to mess up along the way. We should be held accountable for those things. However, don’t create villains where people are merely flawed.”

But for Patel of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center,“there’s never an excuse or reason to sidestep equity,” even if a city wants to make a guaranteed income program happen as quickly as possible during a pandemic.

“That’s how you end up having what could be considered racist outcomes, under the guise of, ‘We’re under this duress,’ ” Patel said. “True leadership around equity happens at the toughest times. It doesn’t happen when it’s easiest for everybody.”

编者按:前一个版本的这个故事misstated the age of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts andthe amount of the city’s grant to YBCA. The organization is 28 years old and received $870,000 in grant funding.