Trump’s budget threatens Bay Area programs that help developmentally disabled artists

07/01/2025, San Francisco Chronicle

Elana Cooper works in the studio at Creativity Explored

The life of an artist, including those with a developmental disability, can be a solitary one, but Elana Cooper is part of a thriving community. Each day, a van picks her up and delivers her to her studio in San Francisco’s Mission District, where she joins dozens of other artists at work.

Since 2013, Elana has been a member of Creativity Explored, a 42-year-old nonprofit studio and gallery based in San Francisco that serves artists with developmental disabilities. Florence Ludins-Katz, an artist, and Elias Katz, a psychologist, founded Creativity Explored as well as Oakland’s Creative Growth and Richmond’s NIAD Art Center.

A staff member makes sure Elana has the supplies she needs and helps her explore new ideas and techniques. They are also there to help when she undergoes a seizure.

“I have many each day,” she said. “It’s so annoying.”

Every year, Elana charts her progress with her team and talks about what she wants to achieve next. To be sure, her art career is one that many contemporary artists only dream of. A painter best known for bold yet tender flower silhouettes, Elana has seen her work exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design and in dozens of local and national group shows. Her work is currently licensed for a Pottery Barn home decor line and is under consideration for a public art commission at a new hospital.

But thanks to proposed funding cuts in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, programs like the one that helps Elana face an uncertain future.

Organizations like Creativity Explored were made possible because of the Lanterman Act, a landmark commitment to people with disabilities in California. The act, passed in 1969, was the result of decades of advocacy by people with disabilities and their families, many of whom were institutionalized in overcrowded, unsafe state hospitals. Through a system of nonprofit regional centers and thousands of community-based providers, the act provides the support people like Elana need to live full lives, such as housing, case management and medical care. The centers serve over 450,000 people with developmental disabilities. While challenged by economic downturns in the past, the regional service center system has been a national model.

Trump’s budget threatens to hobble the services delivered by regional centers and community-based providers that receive significant funding from Medicaid. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are working to pass enormous health care and safety net cuts, including over $880 billion from Medicaid. Already passed by the House, the Senate’s version of the bill could add $200 billion in cuts. Even more galling, the cuts that will hit disabled artists hard were designed to enable the continuation of tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy.

As Creativity Explored’s executive director, I know that even in the best of times, people with developmental disabilities experience poverty at nearly twice the rate of those without disabilities. The support provided by Medicaid and California’s regional centers means that people like Elana can access the things we all want and need — a home, a way to get around, health care, meaningful work and places to go where people know and support you.

Elana not only spends her days in a caring community that helps her develop as an artist and a person — she also earns money from her art. Her earnings supplement the government assistance she receives and have given her the freedomto travel to London, Canada and San Diego.

“I liked this place right away,” she told me about Creativity Explored. “I’d be bored out of my mind if I couldn’t come in.”

The risk to community members like Elana is profound. Approximately 40% of regional center funding to organizations like Creativity Explored originates from Medicaid funds. Without it, services to those we serve will be impacted.

But the risk of indirect impact is even greater. Cuts to Medicaid and other safety net programs threaten services for 43% of Californians. Creativity Explored, which serves 500 adults and youth with disabilities, is just one organization of over 60 in the United States that, through the arts, work to improve the daily lives of disabled people.

By law, services like hospitals, physicians and home health care must be provided by states. As state officials reckon with what are certain to be enormous budget shortfalls, they are likely to look to nonmandatory service areas to close the gap — services like regional centers, in-home care, prescription medication and others that allow people with disabilities to lead lives of safety and dignity in their own community rather than in an institution. The impact of those cuts on lives like Elana’s would be devastating.

In their founding documents, Florence and Elias Katz wrote: “Our philosophy is that each person has the right to the richest and fullest development of which he is capable. Only then can society reach its fullest potential.” Today, the Katz’s vision has spread worldwide, and artists with disabilities have a growing profile in the contemporary art world.

Before Congress rushes to slash Medicaid funding and Trump signs these changes into law, they should know that their agenda will have a profoundly negative impact on the lives of people with disabilities, and one that goes against the principles espoused by the founders of Creativity Explored.

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Linda Johnson is executive director of Creativity Explored. A masters of social work degree holder, she has also led arts education programs serving youth and in local government.