San Jose Downtown Foundation's mission is to advance a vibrant downtown by fostering cultural awareness and community participation through arts and beautification. 

To achieve its mission, SJDF commits to: 

• Engaging youth in the arts

• Reflecting and involving San Jose's diverse citizenry

• Collaborating with other organizations on common goals

• Beautifying Downtown San Jose 

• Supporting quality programming in many forms
  

SJDF began in 1995.

Downtown Doors is the model for creating a community-involved program, fostering cultural awareness, leveraging San Jose’s amazing diversity, and creating a more inviting, beautiful and inclusive downtown. 

Downtown Doors allows student artists an opportunity to convey important messages from their perspectives to the entire downtown community. The need of the project is to provide an extremely rare opportunity for youth to express themselves publicly, offer something of beauty to the urban environment, create art to specifications and on a larger scale than normal, and to learn about art as a business. 

All the while, they are enhancing urban settings with artwork that can surprise, delight and cause passersby to stop, ponder and interpret the artwork’s meaning.