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Oakland ArtSource features Cultural Funding Program updates, Public Art project opportunities, Oakland Art Gallery happenings and other Oakland arts news. 

Watch this space as we'll soon be posting Oakland ArtSource online.  In the meantime, read this featured article from the October 2008 edition highlighting the work of the East Bay Community Foundation.

Community in Focus: East Bay Community Foundation

Since 1928, the East Bay Community Foundation has provided funding to nonprofit organizations in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.  The Foundation has served as a leading resource for mobilizing financial resources and community leadership to transform the lives of people in the East Bay. 

Over the course of those 90 years, more than 400 funds and endowments have been established.  Last year alone, the Foundation and its donors granted $36.7 million to nonprofit organizations, and today, charitable assets under their management total more than $300 million. 

In 2008, the East Bay Community Foundation Board of Directors established a new mission:

Be the organization of choice for philanthropy in the East Bay through leadership in leveraging all assets in our communities to speed the transformation of low-income, disadvantaged, impoverished, underserved and underrepresented people.

East Bay Fund for Artists

One of their programs of particular interest to the Arts community is the East Bay Fund for Artists which encourages individuals in the East Bay to support commissioning of new art works. The Fund was created in the summer of 2003 and is supported by “Leveraging Investments in Creativity,” a nationwide initiative of the Ford Foundation with grants from the James Irvine Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Wattis Foundation.

Since its creation, the East Bay Fund for Artists has partnered with over 850 community donors and 35 community arts presenters to commission new works by 76 local artists. Using grants from Irvine, Hewlett and Ford, as well as the East Bay Community Foundation’s own donor contributions, the Fund has leveraged more than $1 million in new financial support for the arts in the East Bay.

 “What is both unusual and especially valuable about the East Bay Fund for Artists,” said Sam Miller, President of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, “is the way the East Bay Community Foundation is using it to build support for new art among individual citizens at the local level through its matching grants.”

Oakland recipients from the past round of funding include the following:

• "Oakland B Mine" is a short narrative film by Oakland filmmaker Mateen Osayande Kemet in which a young man falls in love with a woman he sees in the Airport baggage claim area. He follows her through a romantic dreamscape of Oakland neighborhoods, hoping she will notice him. Kemet's film, along with the work of three other Bay Area artists, will loop on the new media wall in the Oakland Airport's Terminal 2 baggage claim area through January 2010.

• “The Pornography of Greif: Seven Monologues of Seven Widows in Seven Ages” - Philip Huang explores the widow figure through seven monologues set in seven historical ages. In her grief she bridges all time, all cultures and stands universal and genderless, manifesting in every human era. “The Pornography of Grief” will premiere in 2009 at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. 

• In 2009, composer Mary Watkins will present new operatic work about civil rights leader Fanny Lou Hamer, SNCC, and American civil rights history in the regional South at the Oakland Opera Theater.

 The next deadline for funding is scheduled for January 2009.  For more information on grants from the East Bay Fund for Artists, use this link:  

http://ebcf.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=268

The East Bay Community Foundation’s offices are within the 1914 landmark De Domenico Building next to City Hall in Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza.  For additional information visit www.eastbaycf.org, email info@eastbaycf.org or call (510) 836-3223.