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Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:00:00] I’m Ericka Cruz-Guevarra and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted. Last month, a free event called Ploverfest, featuring local artists and musicians, was scheduled to take place in San Francisco’s Sunset Dunes Park. Musician Sweet Lew was among those invited to participate.
Sweet Lew [00:00:25] And I was really excited and I went to post the flyer and upon checking the flyers I realized that they were funded by the Civic Joy Fund.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:00:36] The Civic Joy Fund is a privately funded initiative backed by some of San Francisco’s richest and most powerful people. And while its stated goal is to help revitalize San Francisco through arts and culture, some artists say that the city’s struggling arts scene has left them with few good choices. And some of them, like Sweet Lew, say it’s time to boycott the Civic Joy Fund.
Sweet Lew [00:01:08] I didn’t want to be a part of it. I didn’t want to take their money, I didn’t want to play on their stage anymore. Like the more and more private equity gets in and the more we let the ruling billionaire class like muscle their way into our spaces.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:22] Today, the Civic Joy Fund and why some artists are boycotting it.
Emma Silvers [00:01:40] I think the first thing to understand about the Civic Joy Fund is it is very much a product of tShe time it was founded.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:48] Emma Silvers is a co-founder and editor at Coyote Media Collective.
Emma Silvers [00:01:54] 2023, if you will recall, San Francisco made a lot of national headlines in a bad way.
Newsreel [00:02:03] San Francisco spent millions of dollars for a national tourism campaign, hoping to change the perception that one of the world’s most beautiful destinations has turned into an urban nightmare.
Emma Silvers [00:02:13] We were sort of the butt of a lot of jokes here. We were described as a failed city. A doom loop narrative. Exactly.
Newsreel [00:02:21] So-called poop maps and poop apps have been created over the years to help residents avoid the excrement on sidewalks and streets. And there’s a lot of it.
Emma Silvers [00:02:34] In May of 2023, Daniel Lurie and Manny Yakuteil started the Civic Joy Fund. It’s an initiative of a larger nonprofit called the Civic Space Foundation. And the whole idea was to quote unquote, revitalize San Francisco through arts and culture. Street parties, live music, they hired artists to paint utility boxes, they did a lot of street cleanups, and the whole idea was basically let’s get outside, let’s quote-unquote activate San Francisco streets use arts and culture as a means to economic recovery.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:21] And so, Civic Joy Fund started in 2023 in the midst of this doom loop narrative in San Francisco. It’s billed as this thing to help bring San Francisco back. How involved, would you say now, is the Civic Joy fund in the San Francisco art scene?
Emma Silvers [00:03:40] It is massively involved. For a variety of reasons, including the loss of public funding for the arts, the Civic Joy Fund is playing a really huge role in shaping cultural events in public space. According to their most recent tax filing available, which is from 2024, Luke Spray, the executive director of the Civic Joy Fund, told me that in 2025, they supported 938 events. Which were attended by more than 506,000 attendees. It’s a lot of programming and it’s reaching a lot people. Some of those are trash cleanups, but a lot them are these larger scale night markets and block parties.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:29] Your story Emma, of course, focuses on how artists are feeling about the Civic Joy Fund. How would you characterize, I guess, the range of feelings that artists have about doing work with the Civic joy fund these days?
Emma Silvers [00:04:42] I think a lot of people feel really conflicted. I heard some artists calling for a boycott, like Sweet Lew, saying the only way we fight this is to withhold our labor. Other artists, I think, are, you know, don’t love it, but a paying gig is a paying gig.
Stella Lockman [00:05:10] To me, nuance is the capital letter quote.
Emma Silvers [00:05:15] Stella Lockman is an artist and an activist and a long time San Franciscan. And she told me that I was, I think the third or fourth person who had called her that week alone to ask about the Civic Joy Fund. It’s in the zeitgeist and no one wants to do the wrong thing. She helped me really understand I think the landscape of the arts in San Francisco and the way that it’s changed. In the time since the Civic Joy Fund was founded, public funding for the arts has really disintegrated.
Stella Lockman [00:05:50] You know, tale as old as time, the city is and has been slashing arts funding consistently.
Emma Silvers [00:05:58] The past few years have been really, really bleak in terms of cuts to arts organizations in San Francisco. We’ve seen venues like Bottom of the Hill announcing their closures, as well as tons of art galleries, California College of the Arts.
Stella Lockman [00:06:13] What gets me about Civic Joy Fund is that it’s part of the shrinking art ecosystem and it stands out a lot stronger and seems to have an inflated sense of importance within the city’s ecosystem because the arts infrastructure is collapsing.
Emma Silvers [00:06:34] She sort of said that in a healthy arts ecosystem, we wouldn’t even be in this position. And the Civic Joy Fund is as a result playing a bigger role in the ecosystem than it might otherwise.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:51] It does seem like who is behind the Civic Joy Fund is a big part of artist skepticism here. What did the artist you spoke with say about that?
Emma Silvers [00:07:01] So one of the big reasons artists have a hard time with the Civic Joy Fund, in my experience, is that they do not have to tell us because it is a privately funded initiative.
Stella Lockman [00:07:15] People want to know where that money is coming from. And unlike civic funds, they don’t really have to tell you anything.
Emma Silvers [00:07:22] Unlike something like the San Francisco Arts Commission, the grants that the Civic Joy Fund issues are decided on by a small group of people, the Civic joy fund staff. There’s no process for regular people in San Francisco to weigh in on what’s getting funded. And there’s sort of a lack of transparency about where the money is coming from in the first place. I think their largest benefactor is still Chris Larson. The founder of Ripple, a fintech company. He’s given a lot of money to the San Francisco Police Department and engaged in other forms of support for political causes that many artists are not in line with. Joby Pritzker, who is from the Hyatt Hotels family, Bob Fischer of Gap. They also have money from the Levi Strauss Foundation, Michael Moritz, a lot very wealthy, I think it’s fair to say power brokers in the Bay Area. One thing I kept running into with this story is a lot of artists have strong opinions that they will tell you off the record. A lot of people did not want to talk to me on the record for this story. I mean, Chris Larson in particular is fighting labor unions and working to defeat the billionaire’s tax. I think there is a sense of frustration at culture in the city being shaped by people who are arguably, with the other hand, supporting or enacting legislation that does not help working class people or artists to survive here.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:16] I mean, we’re just talking about San Francisco art scene, struggling, we keep hearing about these closures of small venues. Affordability is just such a big topic right now, especially for artists, always has been. It seems like there’s this sense among artists that the Civic Joy Fund isn’t helping the way that they need it.
Austin Woz [00:09:47] San Francisco seems so invested in entertainment and so uninvested in art.
Emma Silvers [00:09:52] Austin Woz is the founder and frontman of an awesome band called Analog Dog. He is also a booker at Kilowatt in The Mission, which is an independent venue.
Austin Woz [00:10:05] They view it all as entertainment, and they don’t understand the complexes that support art at the very foundation.
Emma Silvers [00:10:11] He describes a situation where there’s just so little support from the city and then this massive entity that is supported by so much private funding that is ostensibly supporting arts and culture, and it just doesn’t feel like the money is going where it needs to
Austin Woz [00:10:31] I think that there’s this staunch reality where you have these opportunities that come up in the streets one day, one fund, and they put $100,000, $200,000 up to half a million, maybe a million dollars into these things, when you could have saved an entire community with that fund. You could have created the conditions with just those funds for one day that would allow a venue of 10 venues to flourish.
Emma Silvers [00:10:57] I do see artists saying it feels hypocritical for politicians and billionaires to pat themselves on the back and sort of position themselves as these benevolent philanthropists when artists are struggling so severely.
Austin Woz [00:11:15] And it’s really good at creating, you know, a nice bandaid that makes it really seem like these things are going well and that San Francisco is so back. But those of us on the ground who work at this day to day, we know that it has never been more difficult to be here and to try and provide the city with the core thing that it is known for in its global history, which is free thinking, progressive ideologies and good art.
Emma Silvers [00:11:44] Can you expand rent control? Can you ensure that artists have adequate health care? All these things that are sort of less flashy, they’re not photo opportunities. They’re institutional, structural support that will make it possible for artists to survive here. And I think people are starting to ask, you know, can we ask for more?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:19] How does the Civic Joy Fund respond to these criticisms as well, especially this discomfort around the people who are behind the fund?
Luke Spray [00:12:27] For as long as San Francisco has existed, it has had benefactors, some of them of questionable politics and morals.
Emma Silvers [00:12:36] Luke Spray is the executive director of the Civic Joy Fund as of last fall. He took that position over from Manny, I believe in September of 2025.
Luke Spray [00:12:48] The San Francisco that we have is the result of like this push and pull this like tug of private and public.
Emma Silvers [00:12:57] He said that, you know, San Francisco has always had benefactors. This is part of the way culture works, is people with the means to do so, donate money to support things. And this is no different than that.
Luke Spray [00:13:12] And the city that we get as a result of those conversations and like, I can think of a way to get there them up, bringing people together in public again. And again, and again, markets and block parties and all that to start. A dialog and a time where, like, we’re drifting away from that and it feels so, so, very important.
Emma Silvers [00:13:34] He also said, the outcome of getting people out of their houses and talking to each other is the goal, and they are achieving that goal. And the massive amount of need as evidenced by the insane number of grant applications they get, I think is validating in some ways.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:58] What do you think this story says about what it means to be an artist in San Francisco and the Bay Area right now?
Emma Silvers [00:14:08] I think it shows how difficult it is. The idea of, especially in the music industry, there’s no such thing as clean money. Every time you play the film where you’re talking about working with Live Nation and Ticketmaster, if you go to Coachella, you’re supporting Golden Voice. We live under capitalism and how you make choices about your own politics and how they intersect with money is such a personal thing when you also have bills to pay.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:42] For people who are not deep in the San Francisco art scene, what do you hope they take away from this story?
Emma Silvers [00:14:48] I hope that people will be moved to ask questions about the economics behind their entertainment. To me, this story requires a little bit of an ability to yes and. I think that they are supporting events that get people out and talking to each other. And especially given the pandemic, I think, that’s really important. I also think it’s okay to poke at the larger situation and say, What does it mean that the health of the arts ecosystem relies on a few very wealthy people? The Civic Joy Fund, depending on how you look at it, it’s sort of a hidden picture psychological test. Whether you see benevolent, rich people swooping in to save the arts and fill in these gaps in funding, or see nefarious billionaires taking over public space.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:52] Emma Silvers, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with me, I appreciate it.
