Gearing Up For Grants #4: Is This Grant Right For Me?

Many factors determine this.

For starters, is it a type of grant that will award you money upfront? Or will they reimburse you for expenses after the fact? Or expect you to pay it back? Or, (gasp) is it a contract where they have to have some kind of control as a requirement to give you money??

Please do that, dear reader, and save yourself a ton of headaches later.

But also, who else is applying? Who has applied in the past? What kinds of projects are the granters looking for? What's their theme if they included one in the summary? How does your project fit into it, no matter how small a connection to what they're looking for? What demographic requirements are they looking for about you? If you're a POC and your potential granter has a history of granting money to people outside of that demographic, keep that in mind, unless that's what they want. If you're based in Minnesota and they want applicants based in New England, don't make yourself look like a rebel (if that was your intention, you'll look like a very stupid one) who can't follow directions.

And lastly, how much money are they awarding? Is it just $400? I don't know; maybe all you need is $400. But if not, do you have other plans in place to meet your financial goal in order to bring the project to life? Or are they giving an insane amount, like $20,000, which might have a lot more competition? (Note: I'm sure a lot of us would just love to have $20,000, but since you have to report how you use grants, don't hoard it all to spend on your living expenses please. Most granting companies will say outright that you can't do that since they assume that you already have a job to do that.) Either way, you'll have to work to stand out. And I'll explain how to do that in the next post on this topic.

Getting more educated? Confident even? Then join the email list, sign up for my Firebird Flock, social media, all that good stuff, and make a video with my newest single, a cover of "Dos Oruguitas" from Encanto. Us artists gotta stick together!

Click here for the song!

Lots of light,

Alexia