Two things have taken up a lot of my attention recently and made
me wonder why the decision making in this country is done by
people who know so little about the consequences and folly of
their decisions.

The most pressing thing concerns ArtHouse, my nonprofit for coop
artists’ housing and venues in San Francisco, which is losing
its fiscal sponsor at the end of this month. After checking with
another fiscal sponsor I have worked with before, I discovered
that the policy that is depriving me of this service is happening in
all fiscally sponsoring agencies here: they cannot sponsor any
organization that deals in any way with real estate, or that could
benefit a company or corporation.

When I started working with the current sponsor, 7 years ago, the
director—who had run it for 40 years—told me that I should be
looking for funding in the private sector. The three directors to
succeed him should have known that forming partnerships with
landlords was essential to my business plan, but no one told me
that the guidelines had changed until I reminded the current
director of what I’m doing. And now I’m beginning the process
of filing for my own 501(c)3.

Anyone paying attention to the plight of artists in San Francisco
should know that the current landlord policy is only to rent to
people with paystubs proving they made three times the rent.
They should also know that people in the arts mostly work in the
gig economy and have no paystubs. The fiscal sponsors who
exist for the purpose of helping artists survive and qualify for small
grants don’t seem to care if their clients have anywhere to live. Or
the people making the decision to cut artists off from working with
the private sector have no clue that gig workers can’t get housing,
because they have no trouble renting or buying property
themselves. No thoughtful analysis of the problem took place.
This is madness. It’s been known for a long time that artists have
been fleeing the city, priced out. No efforts were made to keep
them here, and all my efforts to return them have received no help
from the city at all. Even when the NEA offered to fully fund the
ArtHouse project, if we could partner with the city, no one in City
Hall would talk to me. They were glad to replace artists with
people who had paystubs, and now the city can’t shake the
economic downturn. No one in city government seems to have
researched what artists do to benefit community mental health,
longevity, quality of life, aesthetics, and economics.

Similarly, I was just involved in protesting a state budget issue this
month, which cut off funding for acupuncture for MediCal
recipients. I’m an avid fan of acupuncture, and the clinic I go to
asked me to show up and speak at a protest. I was filmed
speaking and it was sent to the governor. I said, among other
things, that the person who decided to cut funding obviously knew
very little about what acupuncture can do, and that if he or she
had consulted the national Library of Medicine, they’d know that it
can do things that Westen medicine hasn’t figured out yet, like
controlling the devastating symptoms of ALS, Parkinson’s,
rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases, while not relying on
chemical pharmaceuticals that are poisoning the water supply. I
also pointed out that a fifth of San Francisco’s population is
Chinese, and for a lot of that community, acupuncture IS
medicine.

This campaign to bring research and reason to solve a problem
was successful, and the funding for acupuncture was restored to
the budget. But it wasn’t just me that fixed a dopey budget
decision; lots of big groups and important people joined the fray.
But I do suspect I was the only one to point out, obliquely, that
cutting funding for acupuncture could lose the Chinese vote in the
governor’s campaign for the presidency.

As I pursue my own 501(c(3, I’m distressed by the obvious lack of
research or critical thinking going on in government. In times
when there are problems everywhere, the need for collaborative
problem solving and cooperation between every potentially useful
party is worth investigation. The business world is not the enemy
of the nonprofit world, since it’s a major source of funding, and the
fact that it’s not available to the fiscally sponsored seems like a
way to make sure they can’t get ahead. Who made this decision,
and why?

I have a few days left when I can still receive charitable donations
through fiscal sponsorship, and donations over the next few days
will be valuable in offsetting the expenses of filing. After that, I can
only raise donations that aren’t tax deductible until the paperwork
clears for my own nonprofit. So, if you have ever thought about
helping ArtHouse to meet its goals, today is a most wonderful time
to do it.

https://arthousesf.org/donate/