Give Me Money! Issue #40

Uncover your own stimulus package to fund your artistic genius

By Beverly Bryan
Published: June 1st, 2009 | 12:00am

If you, like many talented people, find yourself pursuing your creative calling through increasingly meager means, don’t despair — or commit to being a life-long barista — yet. Plenty of grants are available, if perhaps a bit unpublicized, through corporations, nonprofits, and yes, even the cash-strapped government. While they generally aren’t quick fixes or long-term solutions, these grants may help you get your zine up and running, your accessories line off the ground, or your art collective, well, collected.

The National Endowment for the Arts is working on a plan to distribute its share of the stimulus package, but they deal almost exclusively with nonprofits. Most likely, the only thing between you and those nonprofits is a bit of research. Artists get grants all the time, why not you? You’re awesome, right?

GET STARTED
A good place to start searching for your future benefactor is a Foundation Center library. The Foundation Center (foundationcenter.org) maintains a massive database of charitable organizations, including those that fund the arts and artists. You can access their database and even take classes at center locations in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., or at cooperating collections across the country — for free. Michigan State University also has an online database of grants available to individuals, artists included. You might be surprised how many there are for crafters. And ladies, the San Francisco-based Fund for Women Artists (womenarts.org) provides creative women with resources online and in real life.

GET SPONSORED
Artist support organizations like Fractured Atlas (fracturedatlas.org) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (nyfa.org) offer fiscal sponsorships, which make it easier for you to seek funding. “We try to help artists with the business side of their artwork,” explains Dianne Debicella, fiscal sponsorship program director at Fractured Atlas. If your application is accepted, the organization will provide legal and financial oversight for your project, enabling you to apply for funds ordinarily only available to nonprofits. “It enables them to access some of the benefits of our 501(c)3 status,” Debicella says. Debicella says the most effective way to raise funds for a particular project is to get a fiscal sponsorship and seek donations from individuals, who will then be eligible for a tax deduction.

THINK LOCALLY
Debicella also advises that the next best place to start looking for support, especially if you have a fiscal sponsorship, is your local arts council or local foundations. You have a much better chance with them than a larger organization. If your city or town doesn’t have an arts council, your state does. Their contact information is available at the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (nasaa-arts.org).

THINK POSITIVE
Chantal James, a 23-year-old fiction writer, applied for and won a Fulbright student grant shortly after graduating from Spellman College. The grant allowed her to spend 14 months in Morocco researching and writing her first novel. She’s currently seeking an agent and applying to the NEA for another writing grant. “It was about as rigorous as applying to college,” she says. Her advice to anyone who hopes to win a grant: “Just be confident about it.”