What is Creative Work Fund

In 1994, four family foundations in San Francisco launched a grantmaking program to support Bay Area artists by providing them with project grants for the creation of new work through collaborations with nonprofit organizations. Creative Work Fund grantees may collaborate with any kind of nonprofit organization and many choose to work in community settings. This chapter explores five projects awarded grants between 2008 and 2013. Each focused on a distinctive goal: increasing cohesion among a community of recent immigrants from Africa, exploring a city's recovery from the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis, promoting literacy and reading in a inner city school district, incorporating public art into the development of an historic waterfront, and achieving better health and mental health outcomes for women infected with HIV. Project research is based on grant proposals, reports, media coverage, and interviews with artists and their principle nonprofit partners.