Model and Strategy
The Civic Joy Fund (CJF), an initiative of the Civic Space Foundation, was founded in 2022 to launch a suite of initiatives designed to activate San Francisco’s greatest civic spaces: our streets. The Civic Joy Fund creates vibrant street activations to draw residents and visitors to public areas. This programming—developed, designed, and executed in collaboration with community stakeholders—energizes the streets with activity, drives foot traffic to nearby businesses, and generates income for local artists and performers who contribute to the unique character and vibrancy of our city. The Civic Joy Fund currently executes nine simultaneous projects:
- Downtown First Thursdays: a free, all-ages monthly street party hosted in Downtown San Francisco taking place on every first Thursday of the month. A collaboration with Into The Streets, it features disco in the streets, DJs, live music, drag, fashion, food and street performances.
- Neighborhood Night Markets featuring local merchants and food vendors.
- Summer of Music: Paying musicians to play every Saturday on commercial streets in nine neighborhoods during the summer.
- Clean up the City: Local, weekly trash pick ups followed by communal brunch.
- Civic Joy Corps: A large monthly volunteer event, partnered with a local organization.
- Paint the City: Hiring local artists to paint and maintain utility box murals.
- Other current initiatives are Pop up Town Squares, a Block Party Fund, and a Street Activations Fund
Other projects in 2023 included Adopt A Block, which invested $100,000 each in give corridors around the city to help with physical improvements; Halloween Back in the Castro, which brought movie screenings, a costume contest hosted by the Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, and family-friendly fun throughout the neighborhood; and San Francisco is a Drag, a weekend-long, city-wide extravaganza featuring over 100 drag performers, transgender luminaries, and allies.
Throughout 2024 and 2025, the Civic Joy Fund will expand and refine its pilot programs, scaling them to reach more neighborhoods and involve a broader range of local artists and businesses. As an example, based on feedback from its 2023 “Summer of Music” program, CJF refined this year’s programming to include a greater number of artists, distributed in a more concentrated fashion along commercial corridors, and over more weeks of the Summer. CJF is taking a similar approach in the development of its other projects to ensure that their programming has the maximum positive impact on our city’s streets.
Impact
One of Civic Joy Fund’s key achievements has been its ability to rapidly implement and execute effective programming. After beginning operations in Q1 2023, CJF launched more than six projects in as many months—an effort that required extensive collaboration between CJF and various public and private organizations, as well as considerable community organizing and engagement. The Civic Joy Fund collects a range of quantitative metrics for its projects to understand the reach and success of its initiatives, including event attendance, revenue generated for local businesses, and the number of artists and vendors participating. Highlights include:
- Clean Up The City has brought more than 5500 volunteers out to San Francisco’s streets to clean up 11 beloved neighborhoods, collecting more than 10,000 bags of trash, and paying local restaurants for more than $100,000 of communal meals.
- Summer of Music 2023 brought together 190 local performers and 60+ business owners in nine San Francisco neighborhoods to throw more than 750 admission-free performances across 15 Saturdays. This equated to over 100,000 minutes of free live local music and more than $190,000 paid to local artists. Local businesses experienced 12-33% increases in sales and noted how much vibrancy and energy the musicians brought to the streets.
- Paint the City 2023 saw more than 100 utility boxes across the city transformed into unique pieces of art. This initiative involved more than 30 local artists, who were paid to create and maintain murals on utility boxes in their communities.
- Civic Joy Fund’s newest project, Downtown First Thursdays, has proven to be a catalyst for boosting foot traffic and economic activity in our city’s downtown core, drawing over 12,000 attendees to each event since its launch in May 2024.
“In bringing energy and vibrancy back to San Francisco’s downtown streets, we are actively challenging the notion that downtown is unappealing to San Franciscans. Instead of discussing why people don’t visit, the conversation has now shifted to about how to bring swathes of people downtown more often – inspiring hope and greater optimism. With each event, Downtown First Thursdays is not only revitalizing our city’s downtown core but also reshaping the narrative of San Francisco’s ‘Doom Loop’." — Manny Yekutiel, Executive Director
Given that its mission centers on fostering joy and vibrancy, CJF considers qualitative feedback from community members one of its most important metrics. Its leadership team attends, engages and interacts with attendees, local business owners, and artists to understand and evaluate the impact of its programming. They table at each night market, host regular check-ins with clean-up captains, organize weekly calls with all of our project teams, and gather testimonials and success stories from participants and community leaders.
Leadership
-
Manny Yekutiel
Executive Director
-
Caleb Hilladakis
Deputy Execuive Director
-
Angelina Polselli
Director of Community Engagement