Davis Arts & Culture Grant

The Davis Arts & Culture Grant is a one-time grant program, offered by the Yolo Community Foundation and funded by the City of Davis with funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. The goal of the grant is to stabilize the City’s nonprofit arts & culture sector, which saw a significant negative economic impact due to the pandemic. The grant will therefore take the form of unrestricted general operating support, with the intention of providing financial relief to eligible nonprofits, to help them on the path back to financial sustainability. As part of this grant program, the Yolo Community Foundation will also provide non-financial capacity building support (e.g., training programs) that serves the same objective. More information about the capacity building programming will be available once the grants are allocated.

The proposal that was funded by the City Council outlined three distinct groups of nonprofit organizations:

• Organizations with brick-and-mortar facilities: These organizations typically had significant fixed costs during the pandemic, as they were unable to hit pause on rent/mortgage and maintenance costs, even as the facilities sat empty and revenues evaporated. More recently, as the organizations have prepared for reopening, they have been significantly impacted by inflation and supply chain challenges. Finally, many of these facilities serve the sector at large, as other arts & culture nonprofits rent them for performance or exhibition space.

For the purpose of this grant, facility is defined as a building that an organization owns or rents on an ongoing basis (i.e., year-round), is financially responsible for (e.g., rent/mortgage, mainten7ance costs, expense of adapting the space for programmatic uses, etc.), and uses for programming. Eligible examples include a space for public performances or classes, a gallery, clustered art studios, etc. It does not refer to a space used strictly for program administration (i.e., an office), storage, etc.).

• Organizations without facilities but with paid employees: These organizations often struggled to keep paying employees in the face of significantly decreased revenues.

For the purposes of this grant, paid employees refers to full- or part-time year-round W2 employees that run the organization – e.g., administration, management, fundraising, etc. It does not refer to staff members hired for a defined period of time to deliver a specific program – e.g., actors, accompanists, etc.

• Organizations without facilities or paid employees: These organizations were often able to significantly reduce expenses as long as revenues were decreased; however, they now require support to get back to operating at full capacity and achieve long-term sustainability.

For the purpose of this grant, arts & culture is defined as the creative expression of beliefs, customs, institutions, values, goals, and other products and manifestations of human work and thought, shared within and among communities, passed on from one generation to the next through experiences and learning.  May include visual art, dance, theatre, writing and other literary arts, performance, music, traditional arts and crafts, oral traditions, and other forms of human expression.

Please note that, while the funding is intended as general operating support, grant recipients must use the funding in a way that complies with America’s Rescue Plan Act requirements: The funding must be spent by December 2024, and it must be spent in such a way that it serves the grant recipient’s mission, serves Davis residents, and addresses the negative economic impacts the pandemic had on the recipient organization.