The Weird Way I Found Out About the Insidious San Francisco 'Civic Joy' Fund

07 Jun, 2026

It pays to check notifications on your discarded social media every once in a while I guess lmao

Because “curious quail” is our band name but also has been my primary online identity since like 2008, if I have an account somewhere and I stop using it for any reason, I usually don’t delete the account because I don’t want someone else to yoink the name¹.

Like, I’ll never post on Twitter or Instagram again (and on the former I deleted all my posts) but the accounts still exist. For insta in particular I left a "contact us elsewhere" back in 2020 and then only ever did album promo in 2024; I don't have the app installed, and I have all the email notifications off...but sometimes, a notification will slip through my preferences for reasons I don't understand and for once, I'm glad one did.

I got an email that DocPop had tagged us in a comment on an instagram post, and from the email preview of said comment I knew I was going to have to go take a look.

It read:

"Shoutouts to @curiousquail, the awesome band in that featured image."

We've not done any press stuff in a while, don't have a release to promote right now so I was curious (hah) what the hell this could be, and it's pretty bonkers:

Photo of my band playing outside at a street fair; text over the image reads 'Musicians call for boycott of Civic Joy Fund, citing its major donors, crypto billionares, and political PAC conservatives' A lower caption reads 'Coyote Media Collective is one of the few media outlets to cover the backstory of the Civic Joy Fund. 'A private initiative founded by the mayor and backed by crypto billionares is increasingly shaping San Francisco's arts scene. Musicians are asking questions and some are calling for a boycott.''

That's us performing at San Francisco Sunday Streets in like July of 2014??

So let’s unpack this:

An account I’ve never heard of posted about a journalism team writing about musicians boycotting a city initiative for a place I do not live, using a photo of my band performing at a street fair in said city from like twelve years ago as the header image.

The photo was taken by Allan Wan, who fucking rules; I haven't spoken to them in years but I loved their work. I perused the rest of this instagram account (P.U.M.L.) and not a lot of their posts have photo credits so it's wild that specifically this one by Allan (which I knew who took it to begin with cuz I have copies of it) has a photo credit in the lower right corner.

We used to regularly perform at San Francisco's 'Sunday Streets' events (forgive ignorance because I no longer live in California so if they still do this apologies for the past tense) where entire street blocks would be closed off to car traffic and performers, artists, street vendors etc would take over. We did this numerous times over the years, here's just a smattering:

Sunday Streets advertisement featuring a band performing outside next to sun tents

Photo of a band performing under a gazebo with "SUNDAY STREETS" information at the bottom including dates and locations

Photo of a bunch of people's shoes standing in a row, all different colored chuck taylor converse; SUNDAY STREETS is written on it with dates and locations

Wait so How did this happen

Dude, beats me lmfao

The organization who wrote about the boycott (Coyote Media Collective) did not use the photo in any of their posts or articles - the repost account (P.U.M.L.) did, and since the photo by Allan is licensed CC-BY creative commons I'm guessing they just grabbed it from some kind of archive?

But the more I look into the "Civic Joy Fund" the more I agree with the post (and Alexi from The Y Axes who also tagged us in the comments) that we would boycott it.

So what IS the Civic Joy Fund and why is it bad?

Here is Coyote Media Collective's in-depth piece on the Civic Joy fund and how it is an active threat to the arts in San Francisco. It's kind of a culmination of tech money, tax evasion, artswashing "philanthropy" and capitalism overreach you might expect from the last decade or so but I'd do the article injustice by paraphrasing.

I've written a few different times on this blog about music venues and art spaces in the Bay Area being forced to close due to capitalist overreach (and I have another one I've been prepping in light of San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill closing at the end of this year) - and the people behind that shift are the same people funding these "festival" events as a way to sort of "carbon credit" the bad will but as we learned with crypto; planting a tree does not replace the benefit provided by the old tree that was cut down.

I've always been very careful about events we participate in², and any funding from organizations on the Crypto side or individuals with significant financial ties to Israel - especially during said country's unceasing genocide of Palestinians - would be a hard no for us.

So I guess on the one hand I'm glad that if someone was going to randomly use a photo of our band and our faces prominently placed, at least it wasn't on an article in favor of this fund? At least it was something we tangentially agree with even if none of us live in the location anymore.

Weird time to be alive, man.

It really does not matter in the scheme of things but someone else having @curiousquail as their handle on tiktok bothers me to no end lmao↩
It's possible Sunday Streets also had some sort of ill funding behind it but this was a decade ago and at the time, we couldn't find anything shady about it. If anything, the city council members involved were also involved in efforts to protect music venues from real estate development closure↩

#San Francisco #civic joy fund #msdblog #music #social media #sunday streets