Dear Bay Area artists, culture bearers, arts administrators, arts advocates, and allies,

As we launch headfirst into this new year, Arts for a Better Bay Area is rebooting its efforts to advance arts advocacy in 2026. The year ahead presents significant challenges for the Bay Area arts community; with those challenges we see an abundance of opportunity to promote the strength and resilience of our collective arts advocacy.

In San Francisco, the region’s largest public arts funder, we are witnessing a reconfiguration of municipal arts structures that will reverberate throughout the community.

As stewards of our arts ecosystem, ABBA plays a vital role raising questions that inform and ideally influence policy and the path our elected officials and public agencies appear to be taking—one that is not as transparent or arts-friendly as it has been in the past. Without our community’s voice in the mix, many of these policy shifts will happen to us rather than with us.

ABBA plans to help chart this path through education, engagement, and mobilization, organizing around a vision for the arts and a cultural economy that we believe can be better actualized for our city, and ultimately the region.

We are pleased to announce Rachelle Axel, with her decades of knowledge of the San Francisco arts community, will be leading this revival. She will begin by renewing ABBA’s infrastructure, creating a strategy to move us forward, and ensuring we are in dialogue with decision makers on cultural policy.
 
To begin, there are three major focus areas here in San Francisco:

1. The City’s proposed merger of the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and the Film Commission—a tectonic recalibration of the City’s primary (but not only) arts resources and programs.

In spite of three community engagement forums on the merger, hundreds of attendees left with little information, and a sense of uncertainty about the future of these entities. The two questions inviting community input—‘what concerns you about the merger’ and ‘what opportunity does the merger offer’—yielded hundreds of responses, but there was no indication of how (or if) these suggestions will be addressed.
ABBA can help organize the community’s feedback to provide direction and vision for this “uber arts agency.”

2. It was announced that a new director of this trifecta agency will be hired. The last of those three community engagement meetings was on November 5, 2025. No job announcement has been issued to date.
ABBA can help articulate the essential skill sets required of this new director, and how they may take a citywide, multisector approach to a cultural strategy.

3. Meanwhile, there is significant energy and time being dedicated to reforming the City and County Charter, San Francisco’s Constitution, with the intention of changing the way City officials govern, budget, and make policy decisions. First, the Commission Streamlining Task Force (a November 2024 voter-mandated initiative that has been meeting for a year) aims to reduce the size of City commissions, eliminate some altogether, and moreover, neutralize their authorities (by moving them out of the Charter and into San Francisco’s Administrative Code—a much more malleable document), thereby consolidating decision-making powers with the Mayor and Board of Supervisors.

On the face of it, there are advantages to streamlining or eliminating some City commissions. However, the Task Force is planning to strip the San Francisco Arts Commission’s authorities, diluting the arts and design expertise of its commission, and diminishing its ability to uphold the best design and art standards for the public commons, and with less citizen input and transparency.
ABBA can offer context, information, and insight to those considering the Task Force recommendations to clarify the impact of the proposed changes--in advance of the ballot initiative seeking voter approval of these Charter amendments. 

In tandem with the Commission Streamlining Task Force, the 30+-member Charter Reform Working Group, co-founded a month ago by Mayor Daniel Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, is meeting in private to discuss how to eliminate City set-asides—the voter-approved mandates that restrict funding for specific community priorities, including arts, libraries, children’s services, parks, transportation, and so much more. Without those funds remaining dedicated year over year, the public will need to lobby for those voter-approved priorities with each budget cycle.

There is more to share about these three efforts, as well as the good work that is happening throughout our Greater Bay Area region—an arts parcel tax ballot initiative in Berkeley; the City of Oakland’s reinstated cultural affairs leadership; San Jose’s goal of expanding its public art program—along with State level advocacy to increase the California Arts Council budget; ensure Prop 28’s historic arts education funding is properly allocated and managed; and champion SB 456, a muralists contractor license exemption. And much more.

There are exceptional advocates—emerging and established—doing work across the City, the Bay Area, and the State, and ABBA will re-engage our allies to ensure we are working in sync, and ultimately to develop a cultural strategy that serves the region. We also want to extend our sincere gratitude for the years of service Susie McKinnon dedicated to ABBA in support of our arts community. Thank you, Susie!
 
We thank each of you for all you do every day to champion arts and culture in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
Please stay tuned and have a peaceful new year.

In solidarity,
 
Rachelle Axel     Maria Jenson       Vinay Patel     Sunny Angulo
Joen Madonna   Susie McKinnon  Ernesto Sopprani