Why the Fleishhacker Foundation Went All-in on Unrestricted Grants for Artists
Written by Mike Scutari for Inside Philanthropy, originally published September 22, 2025
In 1986, the San Francisco-based Fleishhacker Foundation, which makes grants to Bay Area artists and nonprofit organizations in two areas — Arts and Culture and Social Justice — launched the Eureka Fellowship Program to provide visual artists living and working in the region with unrestricted financial support.
“It was created to address a funding gap for visual artists who may have less access to foundation support because their work is often solitary or outside of the nonprofit structure,” Executive Director David Blazevich told me. “It was also intended to help mitigate the very high cost of living in the Bay Area.”
In the fellowship’s inaugural year, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $900. Now, that figure is roughly $4,286 and $3,200 for the Bay Area writ large.
Unfortunately, the challenges facing artists and arts nonprofits go beyond paying the rent. “Many of the organizations that we support have had their NEA funding cut or withdrawn,” Blazevich said. Meanwhile, a recent survey of Grantmakers in the Arts members found that while 56% of responding funders increased general operating support in 2020, that figure had dropped to 43% in 2024, suggesting they’ve been walking back pandemic-era grantmaking flexibility.
The Fleishhacker Foundation recently announced its 2026-2028 Eureka Fellows against this tumultuous backdrop. The awards will be given to groups of four artists per year over the next three years. Moreover, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the program, the foundation increased the award amounts from $35,000 to $40,000, making it among the largest fellowships for visual artists in Northern California.
“Being an artist or an arts organization in the Bay Area, with its very high cost of living, has always been a challenge,” Blazevich said. “But the arts sector is going through a period of particular difficulty right now. Funding cuts at the federal and local levels have left many arts organizations in dire straits, and many are still working to rebuild their audiences and their subscriber bases after pandemic closures. Those of us in the funding community need to be particularly responsive to their needs right now.”
An overview of the Fleishhacker Foundation’s grantmaking
The Fleishhacker Foundation was founded in 1947 by businessman, banker, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mortimer Fleishhacker to improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay area. In the foundation’s early decades, the Fleishhacker family was deeply involved in a wide range of local initiatives, including helping to bring the American Conservatory Theater to San Francisco.
Over the past four decades, the foundation’s philanthropy has focused on supporting small to mid-sized arts groups and individual artists. The Eureka Fellowship is one of four grantmaking programs to support arts and culture in the Bay Area.
Its Small Arts Grants Program provides unrestricted support to visual and performing arts organizations and film projects, and Arts Performance and Exhibition Spaces Grants disburse multi-year, unrestricted support to mid-sized arts venues. Both programs are open to applicants who meet the listed eligibility criteria. Lastly, the Christine Elbel Linchpin Grant Program, named after the foundation’s former executive director, who developed the initiative before her retirement in 2020, provides unrestricted, multi-year support to organizations providing services like technical assistance, fiscal sponsorship, and policy and funding advocacy.
The foundation’s Social Justice Grants program supports LGBTQ youth, particularly those who are experiencing separation from their families of origin, lack of shelter, or housing insecurity. Click here to check out the foundation’s 2024 Social Justice Grants.
A closer look at the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship Program
In January 2025, the foundation invited more than 100 Bay Area visual arts organizations to nominate artists for the fellowship.
Close to 160 artists were nominated, and more than 130 artists applied. The fellows were then selected through an anonymous process by a panel of three visual arts experts from outside the Bay Area who were provided with applicants’ work samples and artist statements. “Our hope is that experts from outside the area will have a fresh perspective on the artists’ work,” Blazevich said.
Panelists did not have applicants’ names or resumes. Rather, they are instructed to make their selections on one factor — artistic merit. “With the anonymous process, we’re trying to get the artist’s work to speak for itself,” Blazevich said. “The program is neutral with regard to age or stage of career, or the kind of art that the artists make, or even what they do if they get the fellowship.”
Originally, the Eureka program’s grants were awarded for specific visual arts media, like painting or sculpture. But for the past several rounds, the foundation has let the nominated organizations define the term “visual arts” to cast a wider conceptual net.
Fellows’ practices “range in media and in perspectives, but because they’re selected based solely on artistic merit, their work really highlights the diversity and innovation that reflects the Bay Area visual arts sector,” Blazevich said.
Accounting for the foundation’s recent investment in the fellowship, it will have awarded nearly $4 million to 167 Eureka Fellows since the program’s inception.
A summary of the Fleishhacker Foundation’s flexible grantmaking practices
The foundation’s press release includes commentary from 1996 Eureka Fellow Mildred Howard, who testifies that unrestricted support is “so valuable to artists and the artistic community at large.”
The funding, Howard explained, came at “a pivotal moment” in her career. She was working multiple jobs to support her creative practice, and the fellowship set in motion a chain of events that eventually enabled her to become a full-time artist. “That’s the kind of transition that we’re hoping for, when possible, for the artists that we support,” Blazevich said.
Art funders’ reluctance to provide unrestricted support mirrors that of their grantmaking peers across the broader philanthrosphere. Both groups prefer tangible outcomes or fear that recipients will somehow misuse the funding. This can explain why Grantmakers in Arts’ (GIA) member survey showed that some arts funders dialed back flexible support throughout 2024. GIA also found that funders are retreating from other encouraging post-pandemic grantmaking trends, like multi-year funding and relaxed reporting requirements.
The Fleishhacker Foundation is going in the opposite direction. “What we’ve done, largely in learning from the successful outcomes of our Eureka Fellows program, is transition all four of our arts grants programs to provide unrestricted general support to offer the grantees the flexibility that they need to innovate and to respond to opportunities and challenges,” Blazevich said.
In addition, the foundation’s Christine Elbel Linchpin Grant Program and the Arts Performance and Exhibition Spaces Grant Program provide multi-year funding that “allows the grantees to do a little bit more financial planning and to have the security of knowing that they have more than one year of support moving forward, which we think is important for arts organizations right now.”
The foundation has also partnered with other Bay Area arts funders to develop the Common Application for the Arts to streamline the application process. Here’s how it works: Six participating funders maintain their own application systems and funding guidelines. Grantseekers can then cut and paste their responses to the relevant Common App questions into the systems for the funders for which they are eligible, saving them a significant amount of time.
Before we signed off, Blazevich directed me to a quote in the foundation’s press release announcing its Eureka Fellows that powerfully contextualizes the Bay Area’s unique arts ecosystem. “Trends in technology come and go,” said panelist Dr. Rhea L. Combs, director of Curatorial Affairs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, “but the region’s people and their cultures endure.”
Combs’ perspective struck a nerve. While researching this piece, I came across news items that corroborated what I’ve been hearing from friends in the Bay Area — how, against all odds, the region’s arts scene is finding a way to survive, adapt and thrive.
Philanthropic dollars play a critical role in the sector’s resilience and vibrancy, but with more federal cuts on the horizon and funders stepping away from responsive pandemic-era grantmaking practices, it’s worth remembering that the region’s artists and organizations need money and, whenever possible, the freedom to operate with minimal restrictions.
“At a time when organizations’ administrative resources are stretched to the brink,” Blazevich said, “we need to do everything we can to decrease barriers to apply for support, to make that support as flexible as possible, and to consider multi-year funding to help sustain them when so many other things are in flux.”