Funder Spotlight: How the Fleishhacker Foundation Backs Bay Area Artists, No Strings Attached
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IP Funder Spotlights offer quick rundowns of the grantmakers that are on our radar, including a few key details on how they operate and what they’re up to right now. Today, we take a look at a San Francisco-based family foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting arts and childhood literacy in the Bay Area.
What this funder cares about
With a focus on the Bay Area, the Fleishhacker Foundation supports small and medium-sized arts organizations and artists, and funds literacy programs in grades K-5 for disadvantaged students.
Small Arts Grants are usually between $2,500 and $5,000 and flow to organizations with annual budgets between $100,000 and $750,000. Special Arts Grants are awarded to organizations with annual budgets between $750,000 and $2.5 million and are generally about $10,000. The foundation also offers the Eureka Fellowship Program, which provides unrestricted support for visual artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. (As you may have heard, it’s really difficult to be a working artist in San Francisco nowadays.)
Education grants are awarded to organizations focusing on providing direct literacy services to students from under-resourced public schools. The foundation prioritizes programs that address inequities in access to quality academic resources for students of color, immigrant students, and students from low-income families.
Why you should care
When the pandemic hit, few worried about the long-term solvency of endowed institutions like the San Francisco Opera or the San Francisco Museum of Art, which raised over $600 million for its pre-pandemic capital campaign and has multiple billionaires on its board. The same couldn’t be said for small and mid-sized organizations.
The Fleishhacker Foundation understood this and quickly pivoted to providing these types of organizations with general operating support. In fact, the foundation earmarked a resounding 85% of all arts grants for general support in 2021. (The remaining grants were awarded for post-production support for a film project.)
While not the biggest philanthropic player in the region, this is a foundation committed to providing critical unrestricted support to undercapitalized arts organizations trying to ride out a pandemic in one of the most expensive regions in the world.
Where the money comes from
Mortimer Fleishhacker (1866-1953) was a businessman, banker and venture capitalist involved in the electrification of California. A native San Franciscan, he founded the Mortimer Fleishhacker Foundation in 1947 with his daughter Eleanor Sloss and son Mortimer Fleishhacker Jr.
Fleishhacker’s initial contribution to the foundation was a building in San Francisco. For the next 30 years, the foundation supported local causes with rental income generated from the building. After Mortimer Fleishhacker died, his son Mortimer Fleishhacker Jr. assumed leadership of the foundation.
Fast-forward to 1970. The foundation’s building was sold for $1,250,000—about $9 million in today’s dollars when calculated for inflation—and the proceeds were handed off to an investment management firm. Mortimer Fleishhacker Jr. died six years later, and through his will, he created a separate foundation run by his wife, Janet. After she died, their children, Delia Ehrlich, Mortimer Fleishhacker III and David Fleishhacker, merged the two foundations in 1988.
Where the money goes
The foundation’s site lists all Small Arts, Special Arts Grants, and Education Grants made in 2019, 2020 and 2021. I crunched the numbers and calculated that the foundation awarded $545,000 across these three areas in 2021. Funding was almost equally distributed across the Small Arts (39%) and Special Arts (38%) areas, with Education coming in at 23%. The foundation awarded 98 grants in total that year—66 for Small Arts, followed by Special Arts (22) and Education (10). All education grants were project- or program-based.
The foundation’s board members occasionally make discretionary grants to programs of special interest. These grants are not open to application.
Open door or barbed wire?
Bay Area arts and educational organizations can casually walk through the foundation’s open door. For each of the program’s core priority areas—Small Grants, Special Arts Grants, and Education Grants—applicants must be incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (including fiscal sponsors applying on behalf of an organization) operating in the Bay Area.
Of course, there are a few caveats. For example, the small arts grant program does not fund organizations whose primary mission is youth training or youth ensembles. But the larger point still holds: The foundation welcomes applications from regional organizations, which, as we’ve often noted, can’t be said for many funders.
Latest big moves
In response to the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Bay Area arts community, the foundation’s Small Arts Grants program is accepting applications for general support for the spring 2022 review cycle from 501(c)(3) nonprofits and fiscally sponsored organizations. The application deadline is January 15, 2022.
Post-production support for film projects directed by Bay Area filmmakers with budgets under $750,000 will also be considered in the foundation’s Small Arts Grants program if applying with an eligible fiscal sponsor or nonprofit production company. All other project-specific support remains suspended for the grant program for the spring 2022 cycle.
One cool thing to know
The Fleishhacker Foundation has provided critical early support for some highly impactful organizations. For example, it was among the first supporters of the 826 Valencia, an innovative nonprofit dedicated to supporting under-resourced students that began in San Francisco and now has affiliates across the country. The foundation was also instrumental in bringing the American Conservatory Theater to San Francisco in the 1960s.
