Gearing Up For Grants #3: Where Can I Find Them?

Welcome back to my corner of knowledge about grants! Today I'm gonna talk about the next step after you've determined what your project will be and determined how realistic it is to produce with a grant. I'm sure at this point you're wondering...where exactly do I find these grants?

Your state's council for the arts is a good place to start, because then you can look up whether your town (or neighboring towns) has a local cultural council. You can also check out if there's a regional arts fund that gives out scholarships for projects, and if you already have a Patreon or are familiar with sites like IndieGogo, you can reach out to people you already know to sponsor your project as well. (Note: if you have to use IndieGogo and other crowdfunding platforms, I recommend that you do it well before your project is supposed to take place, that way it takes time to gather the funding you need and you aren't rushing around and getting those grey hairs I was talking about in earlier posts.)

Grants.gov is a database of grants from all sorts of departments including and outside of the arts, and from several nonprofit, corporate and federal agencies. They also include cooperative agreements and procurement contracts, with will involve substantial staff involvement from the agency and depending on the terms, will involve a fixed price or reimbursement on services delivered to help your project

The National Endowment for the Arts (arts.gov) offers grants ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 for arts projects of nonprofit institutions, particularly those that involve minorities. (If you're in a minority yourself and in the arts, there really isn't a better time to be in the arts since the work of minorities gets priority consideration in grant funding and competitions these days.)

Fractured Atlas (fracturedatlas.org) is an organization that helps artists and arts organizations with fundraising tools and education support, and even lists fiscal sponsorship as an option for funding instead of grant funding. This is when a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and a group/individual have a relationship where the non-tax exempt group/individual can use the benefits of the organization to raise funds and execute projects as long as their work furthers the mission of the nonprofit. It's a good idea if you want to offer a tax deduction to potential donors, apply for a wider pool of grants or run a tax-deductible crowdfunding campaign, and don't have the money to personally finance them yourself.

So that's just a brief overview of where you can find potential funding. Now you've found your options...so what's next?

You've got to apply. And determine if you meet the eligibility requirements. I'll give you some pointers in the next article.

Stay tuned!

-Alexia