Effort to Help Arts Groups Navigate Real-Estate Costs Wins Prize

Longtime San Francisco residents getting squeezed by skyrocketing real-estate costs have become increasingly vocal about concerns that the city’s cherished bohemian spirit is eroding.

Nonprofits in the city are feeling the financial hit as well.

“It’s ground zero for the income-inequality debate here,” says Shelley Trott, director of arts strategy and ventures at the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, in nearby Oakland.

Troubled by these developments, Ms. Trott helped create the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, which helps purchase and lease space for local arts nonprofits. Her work has won her the Council on Foundations’ Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking.

“These community arts organizations and social-service nonprofits are feeling the pressure of commercial real estate,” Ms. Trott says. “They cannot sustain their rent payments; the landlords are not offering long-term leases because they’re feeling the gold rush of the tech investment in San Francisco.”

Building a Partnership

Geri Mannion, a member of the selection committee for the Scrivner award and director for the U.S. Democracy Program and Special Opportunities Fund at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, says what is valuable about the Stabilization Trust and Ms. Trott’s work is that other nonprofits can draw inspiration from it.

“It’s a proven model, and it can be replicated, which we liked,” she says.

Founded in 2013, the Community Arts Stabilization Trust functions as a holding company. It receives financing to purchase properties in the Tenderloin and Central Market neighborhoods of the city and place them in trust for arts nonprofits to enter into leases, with the option to buy in seven to 10 years.

The Rainin foundation gave $5-million to seed the program, which is a partnership between the foundation, the Northern California Community Loan Fund, and the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. The program also drew $4.5-million from the mayor’s office to mitigate the displacement of charities from San Francisco.

Ms. Trott says the trust is now exploring the idea of providing housing for artists. Although she is optimistic about the future of the city’s arts scene, she worries about the level of resources available to arts groups.

“Government funding is dwindling,” she says. “There is foundation funding, but the new money that’s coming in is more directed globally rather than locally.”

Ms. Trott is well acquainted with the struggles that arts groups in the Bay Area face.

After moving to the city in 1996, she worked as a dancer and choreographer, eventually leading her own company. While helping to produce and direct a film on the history of dance in San Francisco, “Artists in Exile,” she says, she grew “very aware of the issues that arts organizations face and became a passionate advocate” for them.

As a result, she started her own charity, Bay Area Performing Arts, that provided support services to small dance groups.

Chance Encounter

A chance encounter eventually led to her current job. She met Jen Rainin, the daughter of the foundation’s founder, at Oakland’s Renaissance International School, where their children were students. In 2009 Ms. Rainin, by then the fund’s leader, hired Ms. Trott to consult for the foundation. That led to Ms. Trott’s becoming its first full-time employee, responsible for crafting its arts program.

Ms. Trott has since created two programs that help small and midsize arts groups: the Visibility Awards, which provide program support, and the Impact Grant Program, which awards grants for organizational development.

Rather than reducing its arts giving, as many grant makers have done in recent years, Rainin is doubling its arts budget over the next three years, from $3-million to $6-million.

“When we came onto the scene in 2009, it was just after the crash and the beginning of the Great Recession. All of the other foundations were cutting their giving by 20, 25 percent,” says Ms. Trott. “We were able to fill a gap at a time it was needed. We have been growing our giving every year since then.”