Ebony McKinney Arts Leadership Award
She was always looking ahead. She never stopped. She was always challenging everyone to be better.
QWOCMAP is honored to serve as community steward for the Ebony McKinney Arts Leadership Award. The award recognizes one San Francisco arts and culture leader whose work reflects what Ebony understood: that arts and culture workers are essential infrastructure, not afterthoughts.
In this political moment, artists and cultural workers are lifelines sparking opportunities to create, connect, and care for our communities. They’re keeping communities alive and imagining futures worth fighting for. Often without recognition and while managing their own challenges. Always in service of something larger.
Honoree
QWOCMAP is proud to announce that Alma Robinson of California Lawyers for the Arts is the recipient of the 2026 Ebony McKinney Arts Leadership Award.
If you’ve ever worked in San Francisco’s arts and culture ecosystem, there’s a good chance Alma has touched your work. She’s one of those people who, when you say her name, the response is immediate recognition – oh, Alma – because her fingerprints are on so much of what makes this city’s creative landscape possible.
Alma Robinson creates opportunities for artists, arts organizations, and arts educators that solve systemic problems through inter-sector, cross-cultural, and inter-agency collaboration grounded in principled negotiation, inclusion, and facilitation.” – Devorah Major, nominator and 3rd Poet Laureate of San Francisco
Across decades, Alma has cultivated fertile ground for the Bay Area’s arts and culture ecosystem, making sure it always bears beauty, blossoms, fruit, and sustenance for our communities.
Alma is the kind of leader who builds the foundation of the house and then makes sure everyone can get through the door. She’s helped so many artists and arts organizations across San Francisco, including QWOCMAP. At an organization that believes in the power of culture to hold communities together, we know that work when we see it. Alma has been doing it for decades. – Madeleine Lim, Founder & Executive/Artistic Director, QWOCMAP
Among Alma’s most important contributions are programs providing paid internships and professional development for youth and adults pursuing careers in arts and culture. Her Designing Creative Futures program created paid internships for formerly incarcerated people. The Arts in Corrections Initiative demonstrates the transformative power of art in prisons and jails. Through this work, she has nurtured what colleagues call “inspired art producers” and “stalwart community citizens who can work in a myriad of art support services.”
Alma has served historically Black San Francisco neighborhoods and organizations – the Bayview, where she lives, and its Bayview Opera House (increasing civic engagement and voter registration), the Bayview Alliance (promoting dialogues about community and city issues including the arts), and Western Addition’s African American Arts and Culture Complex (providing professional development in mediation, negotiation, and facilitation).
She is currently completing a book, From Prison Arts to Designing Creative Futures, which makes the case that whole communities benefit when formerly incarcerated people have pathways to return to society with clear focus and new skills. The book also calls for universal arts education to keep young people out of the school-to-prison pipeline.
Alma shares important connections to Ebony’s own work, including promoting emerging arts professionals, advocating for arts and culture, and working as a Black woman committed to her community. We’re thrilled to honor a leader whose work spans communities and cultures, as well as decades and generations. Alma Robinson is just that.
The Ebony McKinney Arts Leadership Award is a $20,000 award honoring arts and culture leaders in San Francisco who embody Ebony’s vision for equity and the power of the arts. It was started by the people who knew and loved Ebony, including Emerging Arts Professionals, one of the organizations she co-founded to support arts and culture workers and organizations. The award was funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission. Any future iterations of the award will be carried by community stewards to honor Ebony’s legacy.
