San Francisco Arts Community Petition Background Against Changes on Advanced Payment Policy and Reimbursement Documentation Policy

This is a community statement to strongly and resoundingly protest the Arts Commission’s instating the new advanced payment policy and the reimbursement documentation policy required of FY 2026/2027 grantees.

These are bad, regressive policies that do harm to Arts Commission organizational and individual grantees, and defy the Cultural Equity mandate detailed in the City’s Admin Code, as well as the Arts Commission’s mission statement.

Advanced Payment Policy

This policy was not designed with Arts Commission grantees in mind: organizations with budgets smaller than $3 million and individual artists who operate micro-businesses.

Historically, Arts Commission grantees received 90% of awarded funds up front. Once grant agreements were signed, awardees could submit an invoice for up to 90% of grant funds at the beginning of the funding cycle. This enabled grantees to manage their budgets and limited resources immediately and effectively.

With the new proposed policy, once the advanced payment of up to 50% of the grant award is received, the second half of the grant may only be requested on a reimbursement basis, meaning grantees must spend half the grant amount before being able to recoup those expenses.

Additionally, grantees must demonstrate spending beyond the grant amount before the final reimbursement will be paid. This is untenable for small organizations and individual artist grantees that do not have the cash flow this policy was intended for. Nor do they have cash reserves.

In September 2025, when the Arts Commission presented this policy as a “done deal,” without any forewarning or community input, they acknowledged that grantees would need to contact the Arts Loan Fund in order to subsidize their grant.

Please note: with the exception of seven City-owned Cultural Centers, every Arts Commission grantee must have an annual budget of under $3 million (SPX/addback grants may be an exception). All other grantees are small- and mid-sized organizations; they do not have reserve funds.

The City Controller policies that prompted this change focused on significantly larger-budget nonprofits; they absolutely did not have individual artists in mind when crafting the policy. In fact, their policy refers to grants over $500,000; Arts Commission grants only exceed $100,000 in the Special Grants category (SPX/addback grants) and for several City-owned Cultural Centers.

When the City Controller presented this new policy, departments were explicitly encouraged to develop or refine the template provided. SFAC staff advocated for more than a year for leadership to use the department’s legislative mandate and racial equity goals to accept the invitation from the City Controller to propose an amended policy, detailing how this policy was inappropriate for Arts Commission grantees. Leadership took no action. Then as now, the community pushed back.

Due to the push back and strong community advocacy with the City Controller, the policy was granted a one year reprieve. In that year, there was no community engagement about the impacts of the revised policy. Instead, it was rolled out again without community discussion; it offered an adjustment of 50% advance payment allowable in the current grant cycle.

But this did not solve the problem: small CBOs and individual artists cannot front grant money. They simply do not have the resources to do so. Nor was there any evidence collected about the Arts Commission funding high-risk CBOs where City grant funds were historically misspent.

The proposed policy only exacerbates the financial condition of an already struggling arts community overwhelmed by a well-documented affordability crisis, when the goal of the grants program is to stabilize and uplift it. The arts sector cannot help San Francisco’s economic recovery, as it is frequently touted as doing, if it is hamstrung by inequitable grant policies.

The source of this problem that actively harms the fiscal solvency of San Francisco’s arts community sits squarely at the feet of SFAC leadership. So again, the community is mobilizing to fight for itself, since the Arts Commission, charged with “championing the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts community, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy,” has failed to do so.

Furthermore, the “San Francisco Arts Commission is committed to creating a city where all artists and cultural workers have the freedom, resources and platform to share their stories, art and culture and where race does not predetermine one’s success in life.” This policy does not adhere to the department’s most foundational mission and goals.

Reimbursement Documentation Policy

The reimbursement documentation policy is overly burdensome and creates obstacles for small arts organizations and individual artist grantees to effectively execute the deliverables for which they are receiving funding.

Arts grantees operate with very lean administration, with staff performing multiple tasks, from producing to grant administration to tracking expenses. The quarterly reporting policy requiring every receipt for every expense, no matter how small, would require additional staff just to ensure compliance.

This policy boxes grantees into a corner, forcing them to choose between providing the community cultural services they are contracted to produce and meeting outsized documentation requirements.

This policy must be examined along with the Advance Payment policy by the Arts Commission to assess the harm it will cause arts organizations and individual artists.

What precisely is the problem the City is trying to solve? And where is the data that identifies how many SFAC grantees have been out of compliance or misspent grant funds?