Arts Program — Equity Journey

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation initiated a multi-year equity journey to more fully embody its commitments to equity, interdependence, and creativity across its work. Within this effort, the Arts Program — dedicated to ensuring Bay Area artists thrive — sought to clarify how its funding strategy could meaningfully advance equity within the regional arts ecosystem.

CSC partnered with the Arts Program to support the first phase of this transformation.

Rather than approaching equity as a standalone initiative, the engagement treated it as a systems-level evolution — aligning internal values, external relationships, and capital strategy. The work focused on:

• Articulating a clear theory of change for advancing equity in the Bay Area arts ecosystem
• Mapping the broader landscape of aligned organizations and movements
• Examining how existing funding practices reinforced or disrupted inequitable patterns
• Identifying opportunities to refine, deepen, and experiment with strategies accountable to beneficiary communities

Through facilitated dialogue, strategic analysis, and reflective inquiry, the program strengthened its capacity for adaptive learning and institutional change.

This first phase laid the groundwork for subsequent structural shifts — readying the soil for deeper alignment between values, relationships, and investment practices.

The engagement reflects CSC’s broader commitment to supporting philanthropic institutions in evolving toward greater coherence — where equity is not a programmatic add-on, but embedded within strategy, governance, and decision-making.