What Trauma-Informed Leadership Looks Like in Practice: How Strategic Outreach Transformed Equity in San Francisco Arts Grantmaking
- barbaramumby1
- Feb 15
- 4 min read
By Barbara Mumby Huerta
Trauma-informed leadership means designing systems that recognize harm, remove barriers, and co-create opportunities with historically marginalized communities—not merely at the margins but at every step of policy development and execution.
During my tenure with the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), one of the most meaningful applications of trauma-informed leadership was the creation of the Cultural Ambassador Program, a strategic initiative to increase awareness of and participation in the Arts Commission’s grant processes among communities that had historically low application rates.
This wasn’t just about outreach; it was about engaging trusted leaders within those communities to build relationships, reduce fear and confusion about government processes, and generate tangible increases in grant applicants from underserved neighborhoods.
The Equity Challenge: Recognizing Systemic Barriers in Grantmaking
Fostering an iterative environment of learning and improvement, I labored over the demographics after each grant cycle to ensure that our processes were in alignment with our most marginalized communities. After the 2018 grant cycle, it was obvious we were not meeting the needs of specific communities within our Individual Artist category—the numbers showed that Latino applicants were underrepresented relative to their population share, and other underserved groups were similarly absent in numbers proportionate to their presence in San Francisco.
At the time, it was clear that conventional outreach—posting grant opportunities online and hosting information sessions—was insufficient to reach communities facing linguistic, economic, and institutional barriers. These weren’t willing participants who simply needed information; they were artists and organizations who had long been systemically excluded from the grantmaking process.
That was the moment I asked a fundamental trauma-informed question:
“How can we meet people where they are, in ways that reduce harm and increase access, rather than expecting them to navigate systems that were never designed with them in mind?”
Designing the Cultural Ambassador Program
As a result, I conceptualized the Cultural Ambassador Program as a cohort of trusted community connectors—people embedded in historically underrepresented neighborhoods and cultural ecosystems—to actively promote Arts Commission grants, demystify the application process, and provide encouragement and peer-level support throughout.
These Cultural Ambassadors were not interns or volunteers; they were paid partners with lived experience and authentic networks. The concept was to bring intentional relationship building into the heart of grantmaking outreach.
The target communities were identified through data and community input:
Immigrant Latino communities
Native and Indigenous communities
Muslim and Arab communities…groups whose representation in past grant cycles was disproportionately low.
Our team operationalized this by:
Recruiting ambassadors with deep sociocultural knowledge and networks
Compensating them for outreach activities
Integrating ambassador insights into grant assistance workshops and materials
The aim was not transactional outreach but trust building—a core trauma-informed leadership principle.
The First Year: Doubling Equity in Grant Applications
When the Cultural Ambassador Program launched in its first full season, the results were striking:
Grant applications from the identified marginalized communities increased by 100% in the first year of the program’s operation.
This dramatic uptick was not an accident; it was the direct result of ambassadors hosting in-community workshops, following up with individuals one-on-one, and contextualizing the application process in culturally relevant ways. Artists learned not just what to apply for, but how and why it mattered for their long-term creative practice. Stronger applicant confidence translated into stronger proposal quality—which, in turn, improved success rates.
This model is now increasingly referenced by arts agencies and municipal funders looking to increase equity in public grantmaking systems.
Deepening the Practice: Indigenous Cohort and Consultant Engagement
After our initial success, we advanced the equity work further by engaging an external expert, Carolyn Melenani Kualiʻi founder of Kua`aina Associates, to design and deliver a curriculum specifically for a cohort of Indigenous artists. Carolynn’s work incorporated culturally relevant pedagogy—honoring Indigenous knowledge systems, lineage, and community support structures—and created safe, affirming spaces for artists to workshop their proposals.
Rather than traditional application bootcamps, this cohort engaged in:
Collaborative discussions about cultural expression and impact
Storytelling-based grant proposal structuring
Peer reviews and communal feedback loops
This approach resulted in a 100% success rate for the cohort in receiving funding, demonstrating that when you combine culturally responsive support with structural access, outcomes dramatically improve.
Carolyn’s lineage-based approach aligns with trauma-informed principles—recognizing that individuals carry collective histories and that healing and empowerment are communal processes.
Lessons in Trauma-Informed Leadership
There are several key leadership lessons from this work:
1. Power must be shared, not withheld
Traditional outreach reinforces existing power dynamics; ambassadorship redistributes them.
2. Trust must be built before applications are submitted
Communities engage when they see genuine presence and cultural understanding.
3. Technical assistance must be co-designed with those it serves
Workshops led by culturally grounded practitioners achieve higher trust and efficacy.
4. Systems change requires iterative evaluation
Equity objectives cannot be achieved with one-off efforts; they require ongoing refinement and community feedback.
Why This Matters for Equity and Public Trust
Public grantmaking institutions are often perceived as bureaucratic barriers rather than resources for community flourishing. By applying trauma-informed leadership to grantmaking processes, we not only increased quantitative outcomes (a 100% increase in applicant diversity and 100% success among the Indigenous cohort), but also strengthened community confidence in civic systems.
This work contributed to the Arts Commission’s ongoing Cultural Equity Initiatives, which prioritize resources for organizations and individuals from historically marginalized communities, recognizing that equitable arts ecosystems are fundamental to civic health.
It stands as a model for how government agencies can move beyond compliance and toward care-forward practice—where policy design acknowledges historic harm and actively removes barriers to participation.
Conclusion
Trauma-informed leadership is not theoretical; it is operational. It manifests in how we design programs, who we hire, how we compensate partners, and how success is measured. When equity becomes a measurable outcome rather than a slogan, systems shift—and communities thrive.
About the Author
Barbara Mumby Huerta is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and equity-centered leader who has developed innovative, trauma-informed solutions in grantmaking and institutional practice. She served as Director of Community Investments at the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she led systemic reforms to increase equity and access in public art funding.
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