A Growing Bay Area Funder of Arts and More Is Ready to "Open Up the Gates"

The Inaugural winners of the Rainin Fellowship, providing unrestricted support for Bay area artists. Clockwise from top left: Rodrigo Reyes, photo by Jennifer Duran; Amara Tabor-Smith, photo by Jean Melasaine; Margo Hall, photo by Lisa Keating; People’s Kitchen Collective, photo by Molly DeCoudreaux. Courtesy Rainin Foundation.

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation has come a long way since its grantmaking formally began in 2009. In its first few years, the Bay Area funder was moving in the ballpark of a million or two annually.

Just over 10 years later, the foundation is now giving more than $20 million annually, Rainin Chief Program Officer Shelley Trott told Inside Philanthropy. Grants are made across three focus areas: early childhood education, the arts, and research into cures and treatments for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a group of illnesses that can significantly shorten lifespan. Kenneth Rainin, who financed the creation of the foundation, died of complications from ulcerative colitis in 2007.

Over the years, we’ve watched this family foundation ramp up its support for causes like public art projects, working artists, early childhood literacy and more. It’s become an important player in Northern California—Rainin makes medical research grants worldwide, but funding for early education is focused in Oakland, and arts grants are focused in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Most recently, the funder announced the first four artists who will each receive $100,000 in unrestricted support through the new Rainin Fellowships, in concert with United States Artists, which will administer the grants. 

Starting small and building

During its first years as an organization, Rainin was “sort of testing out what works” and what its specific niche might be, said Trott, who joined Rainin as the director of arts strategy and ventures and has been with the organization since 2009. Trott told me this process included trying out different types of funding, including capacity building and project grants.

In addition, Kenneth Rainin, who bequeathed the money to begin the foundation, intentionally set it up so that in its initial years, the fledgling organization wouldn’t have a large amount of money to spend.

The donor set up the foundation with “training wheels” so his daughter, CEO Jennifer Rainin, “wasn’t tasked with giving away very large sums of money immediately, which can sometimes actually be challenging to do well,” Trott said.

In its first year of formal giving, tax filings show the funder disbursed around $919,000 in grants. Over the following 10 years, Rainin received increasing sums of money to build up the endowment, which was almost $620 million at the end of 2019.

Not that starting small has kept the mid-sized funder from making big impacts. If you’ve seen 2012’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the 2013 film “Fruitvale Station” or 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You,” you’ve sampled a few of the multiple award-winning (and in some cases, hit) films that Rainin helped to get off the ground through its partnership with SFFILM. An announcement of  SFFILM’s 2019 grantees says the partnership is “the largest granting body for independent feature films in the United States,” having awarded more than $5 million to over 100 projects since its inception. 

Other accomplishments include partnering with the city of San Francisco, a community development financial institution (CDFI) and others to create a program that helps small arts organizations purchase their own facilities so they aren’t priced out of the area. Since dedicating an initial $5 million to the real estate program during the last recession, that initiative has grown to “upwards of $40 million, 35,000 square feet in real estate, and another hundred thousand [square feet of real estate] in the development pipeline,” Trott said.

The foundation also created an annual Innovations Symposium that brings together researchers, trainees and clinicians in the field of IBD to network and learn from each other. In education, Rainin’s SEEDS of Learning project has helped Oakland’s school children make gains in important basics like vocabulary, rhyming and alliteration.

As you can see, partnerships are a big part of how Rainin does business. Working with organizations like SFFILM, the local San Francisco CDFI, and the Oakland Unified School District is Rainin’s preferred mode of doing business.

“We do administer a couple of grant programs ourselves, but we look for strategic partners who have roots in the community and who are on the ground” in order to benefit from their expertise and deep relationships with the local community, Trott said.

An early focus on diversity, equity and inclusion  

In 2017, the staff of Rainin’s arts program decided it was time to create a strategic plan for the future—a process that was quickly adopted foundation-wide.

As part of that plan—and years before the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed prompted many foundations to examine their own operations—Rainin staffers decided it was time to learn more about diversity, equity and inclusion, and to formally make those values a part of its day-to-day operations.  

“It was clear we were serving communities that had been underserved in arts and education,” Trott said. “However, we hadn’t been very explicit about doing that. It became clear that we needed to really integrate equity into our strategic planning and our thinking.” 

The result of the education and training Rainin undertook foundation-wide, beginning in 2017, Trott said, meant that the organization was “already pretty far along in that journey” when “everything that was going on in our country just sort of came to this horrible head.”

Planning, and planning to learn 

Trott said that Rainin’s overall strategic planning process has also served the organization well during the COVID-19 crisis. Having already determined the need to fund equitable support systems for artists, and particularly artists who are part of underserved groups, Rainin made unrestricted, no-application-required funds available to previous grantees whose projects were canceled or postponed during the pandemic.

The organization also partnered with the City of Oakland and others to create a $625,000 fund to make $2,000 unrestricted grants to “artists, teaching artists, culture bearers and nonprofit arts workers from historically underserved communities,” and signed on to an open letter to philanthropy decrying anti-AAPI racism. 

Trott said another factor in Rainin’s strategic plan is being explicit about the fact that the funder is “a learning organization.”

“Everything we do is an opportunity to learn,” she said, including failures, which “are never something to be shy about because, in fact, there’s a tremendous amount of learning from them, especially when you consider things like biomedical research.” Trott also said that Rainin is thinking about how to “reframe” itself by incorporating participatory grantmaking and trust-based philanthropy in its work.

Opening the gates

When asked if there was anything else Inside Philanthropy readers should know about Rainin’s priorities, Trott stressed the need to “really, really collaborate.” 

As a sector, she said, foundations “can be very sort of siloed.” The question becomes, “how can we let go of any of the systems that have been born out of a white-dominant culture that are not inclusive, that are not about collaboration, that are not about accessibility and not about inclusion.”

“You know, I think [philanthropy] is just historically known as gatekeepers, and I think we have to open up those gates.”