Kenneth Rainin Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Kenneth Rainin Foundation makes grants for education, health, and the arts. Its arts funding supports organizations in the Bay Area, while education funding is limited to Oakland. Health giving is national in scope and supports research on inflammatory bowel disease.
IP TAKE: According to grantee reviews, this funder offers “a lot of support for small and mid-sized performing arts organizations” in the Bay Area. Working in the arts, literacy education and research on inflammatory bowel diseases, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s grantmaking programs are transparent and specific in both aim and geographic scope. Rainin also prioritizes equity and strives to improve its philanthropic practice through a variety foundation-run symposia, conferences and work groups.
The Rainin Foundation accepts applications for its arts funding and welcomes LOIs for its work in health. Education grants are by invitation only. Rainin recently joined with two other Bay Area foundations in an effort to simplify and streamline its application process. An approachable funder, Rainin can be reached through its contact page, and you can find brief bios of its board and staff on its website.
PROFILE: San Francisco businessman Kenneth Rainin founded the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (KRF) to serve as a vehicle for his passions for the arts, education and medical research. When he passed away in 2007 at the age of 68, Mr. Rainin named the foundation the primary beneficiary of his estate. Kenneth Rainin was an entrepreneur who made his fortune founding scientific and medical product companies. At the age of twenty-five, he founded the Rainin Instrument Company, which distributed laboratory instruments and later sold a line of laboratory pipettes used for liquid sample testing. During his lifetime, Rainin channeled his wealth toward charitable, civic and cultural activities, including the San Francisco Ballet and medical research at the University of California, San Francisco. Before his death, he gave over $8 million to fund the Kenneth Rainin Foundation for Crohn’s disease, colitis, and intestinal disorder research at UCSF and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In 2007, he suffered from heart failure and passed away at the age of 68.
The Kenneth Rainin Foundation is on a mission to “enhance quality of life by championing the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease.” Many of its grants prioritize California; however, its health grants have a broader reach. Its three main focus areas are arts, education, and health.
Grants for Arts and Culture
KRF’s grantmaking for the Arts supports “visionary artists” and arts organizations in the Bay Area that “push the boundaries of creative expression.” The program seeks to “identify ways to support artists to unleash creativity and reduce administrative burdens that constrain the creative process.” The foundation runs four grantmaking programs that intersect with theater, dance, the visual arts, and music, among other artistic endeavors.
The New and Experimental Works (NEW) Program focuses on support for “new and experimental works by small and mid-size dance, theater and multidisciplinary arts organizations that enable Bay Area artists to produce timely, visionary projects relevant to the communities they serve.” Grants prioritize organizations with budgets ranging from $10,000 to $2 million, as well as collaborative projects, “projects that compensate artists at a significant level,” and productions set in “outdoor, site-specific or alternative venues.”
The foundation’s Open Spaces Program “supports partnerships between nonprofits and artists to create temporary, place-based public art projects that are responsive to issues relevant to communities in San Francisco and Oakland.” This program prioritizes collaborative, multidisciplinary projects that are “relevant to the community” and “expand the boundaries of public art.”
Administered by United States Artists, the Rainin Fellowship is awarded annually to four Bay Area artists working in dance, film, “public space” or theater who “push the boundaries of creative expression, anchor local communities and advance the field.” The award aims to “support artists holistically to build a more equitable arts ecosystem.” The fellowship consists of an unrestricted grant of $100,000 and “supplemental support” in the areas of finance, communications and/or legal services.
Since 2009, the foundation has partnered with SFFILM to coordinate the SFFILM Rainin Film Grants & Programs initiative. According to the foundation’s website, the program has become “the largest granting body for independent narrative feature films in the United States.”
Narrative Film Grants support the production of films “that address social justice issues and benefit and uplift the Bay Area filmmaking community in a professional and economic capacity.” Grants support between 15 and 20 projects each year and are awarded in amounts of up to $50,000, which may support “screenwriting, development, or post-production.” Detailed eligibility, application information and due dates are provided at SFFILM’s grant page.
Filmmakers with Disabilities Grants are a subset of SFFILM Rainin Grants that go to “Bay Area-based filmmakers whose films specifically address stories from the disability community.”
The SFFILM FilmHouse Residency supports “Bay Area-based documentary and narrative filmmakers with artistic guidance, office space, a vibrant creative community, and support from established film industry professionals.”
In addition to the above grantmaking programs, the foundation supports Bay Area arts through the following initiatives:
The Community Arts Stabilization Trust is a partnership between the Rainin Foundation and Community Vision. The Trust addresses “real estate challenges for arts and cultural organizations.” It works to “secure and steward affordable spaces, ensuring artists and cultural workers can stay anchored where they create.”
In similar vein, the Rainin Arts Real Estate Strategy aims to connect “resources in the community to the real estate needs of arts and cultural organizations.”
Let’s Talk: What Artists Need to Thrive brings Bay Area artists and art funders together in Zoom conversations to discuss equity in arts philanthropy. Recordings of these conversations are available at the program’s web page. The foundation “will apply what we learn in these sessions to improve our approaches and advance equity.”
The Exploring Public Art Practices Symposium “brings together artists to discuss the opportunities and challenges of working in public space in the Bay Area.” This one-day conference is held biennially in cooperation with the Oakland Museum of Art.
The New Models Cohort, which last ran in 2018, brought the foundation and its grantees together to explore “organizational sustainability” in the arts.
Grants for Early Childhood and K-12 Education
Rainin’s Education grantmaking focuses specifically on “solutions that ensure Oakland children are ready for kindergarten and on track for third grade reading success.”
A main priority of this program is helping teachers, parents and other caregivers effectively scaffold language and literacy development in young children.
Grants have supported organizations including the Family Engagement Lab, Reading Partners, the Oakland Literacy Coalition and children’s programs at the Oakland Public Library.
Education grants have also gone to many public and charter schools as well as other organizations involved in children’s language and literacy development. Grantees include Aspire Public Schools, 3Ls Academy and Education for Change, which offers structured literacy training to early childhood and elementary educators.
While this program does not accept applications or proposals for funding, grantseekers may contact the education program’s staff with “requests for exploratory conversations.’
Grants for Diseases
KRF’s Health funding is exclusively dedicated to the study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and related disorders. Grants support “novel, high-risk research” with the goals of better understanding IBD and exploring “how to help patients manage symptoms and improve their lives even before a cure is obtained.”
Grants are awarded through the foundation’s Innovator Awards Program. Grants for individual research projects are awarded in amounts of up to $150,000, and collaborative projects may receive up to $300,000. The foundation accepts LOIs for this program in August and September and provides detailed instructions on the program’s web page. Full proposals are accepted by invitation only.
Grantmaking for this program is national in scope; past grantees have been affiliated with organizations including Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the Medical University of South Carolina and the University of California Berkeley, among others.
Important Grant Details:
Foundation grants are awarded in amounts that range from $5,000 to $300,000, but amounts are generally specified by grantmaking program.
Grantmaking for the arts focuses on the Bay Area, while education funding stays in Oakland.
Health grantmaking is national in scope and tends to go to leading research hospitals and medical schools.
Application eligibility, guidelines and due dates vary significantly by program, but this funder provides information about each opportunity on individual program pages.
This funder recently joined with two other Bay Area foundations—the Fleishhacker Foundation and the Zellerbach Family Foundation—to streamline its application process.
For additional information about past grants, see the foundation’s searchable grants database.
Address questions to the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s staff via the organization’s contact page.
PEOPLE:
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