The mayor of San Francisco (California – U.S.) London Breed, announces funds to financially support local artists during the pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis, with mandatory lockdowns and social distancing, many artists were left with no way of providing for their most basic needs. To tackle this issue, London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco, launched (early in the pandemic) the Arts and Artists Relief Fund through a partnership with the Center for Cultural Innovation, which has provided 527 individual artists and 65 arts organizations a total of $1.5 million to cover their most urgent financial needs.

The current program is called the San Francisco creative Corps, which aims to help visual and performance artists who are unemployed due to the COVID-19 crisis. The artists (actors, musicians, visual artists, painters, and dancers) are being deployed as community health ambassadors to promote COVID-19 safe behavior in public shared-spaces. Among other actions, for example, visual artists create public health-themed murals in neighborhoods experiencing high rates of COVID-19 to raise awareness about safe hygiene habits. The initiative aims to help the artists to pursue their artisticinterests and support them financially while also raising awareness and educating the community through critical messaging about safe health behaviour.

Learn more about the initiative here:

https://sfmayor.org/article/mayor-london-breed-announces-san-francisco-creative-corps-support-artists-and-promote-public

https://www.sfcv.org/articles/music-news/san-francisco-combines-supporting-artists-fighting-pandemic