Yi Zhong

Community Arts Stabilization Trust

CAST — Community Arts Stabilization Trust — is a community-centered real estate organization committed to ensuring artists and cultural workers can stay anchored where they create. We work in deep partnership with communities across the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly communities that have endured systemic oppression and historical underinvestment. CAST models new ways to secure and steward affordable, inclusive spaces for creative and cultural expression. We do this by applying real estate financing tools and structural models in innovative ways, building community knowledge and agency, and creating and holding space for visioning and arts activation. Our programs and services have helped arts organizations build pathways to ownership, enabled artists to secure long-term affordable leases, and created dedicated spaces for cultural connection and exchange. Together, we are building a new real estate paradigm in the Bay Area — one that recognizes the essential role of arts and culture and gives us all the space to dream. CAST has purchased and opened four arts buildings in central San Francisco, attracted exceptional support from the philanthropic, private and public sector, launched a city-wide mapping of cultural spaces through its online tool Culture Compass (culturecompass.org), and been cited as a creative placekeeping model in publications by the World Cities Culture Forum, LISC and Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. For more information please visit: cast-sf.org Follow us: Twitter & Instagram @CASTSF | facebook.com/SFCAST