A New solution for an old problem.

WITH THE: California Arts Council budget reduced drastically, four San Francisco Bay Area community foundations and three state and national foundations have banded together to create a $1 million fund benefiting a key player often excluded from philanthropic largesse--the individual artist. The newly announced Fund for Artists may support dozens of local choreographers and could stand as a national model.

The circumstances prompting the first-of-its kind initiative are hardly surprising. A recently released Ford Foundation Leveraging Investments in Creativity study surveyed Bay Area artists for over 15 years. It discovered that 63 percent earn less than $7,000 annually from their artistic endeavors and that 78 percent of them work more than one job. Meanwhile, the budget for the California Arts Council has dipped to $1 million, for a state that has 35 million residents.

What's new is the response to the study. The James Irvine Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Ford Foundation have collectively offered $500,000 earmarked for artists. According to the initiative, the East Bay Community Foundation, Marin Community Foundation, Peninsula Community Foundation, and The San Francisco Foundation must now match those funds with contributions that support programs for individuals.

John Killacky, the former executive director of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and now the arts and culture program officer for The San Francisco Foundation, sees the new superfund as a big-picture strategy. "We realized we could come together and have a different conversation with our donors to say, 'There's the opera and the ballet, but there's also a whole group of emerging artists who work their way up to places like the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, who make those places possible,'" Killacky says. "We wanted to take an ecosystem approach."

The San Francisco Foundation will partner with four local arts groups to identify grants recipients. For instance, the Foundation will work with World Arts West, the producer of the S. F. Ethnic Dance Festival, to award three choreographers $5,000 each. The grants could be awarded as early as this spring.

The East Bay Community Foundation will focus on commissioning new works, while the Marin Community Foundation will fund online information-sharing between artists. The Peninsula Community Foundation will channel its dollars into artists' residencies. The collaborative effort comes at a crucial moment. "The decimation of the California Arts Council has affected so many artists," says Killacky, who points out that artists-in-schools programs have been cut and the National Endowment for the Arts no longer funds individuals.

Keith Hennessy, a longtime Bay Area choreographer who says he makes less than $10,000 a year from his art, found the Fund for Artists initiative heartening. "Thousands of dollars in surveys repeatedly show," he says, "that art is good for the economy, that making art is work, and that the work, the society, and the economy suffer when artists don't get enough time and money."