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Author and visual artist Mira Bartók has won more than $80,000 in grants to support her work over the course of her career. The funds have paid for her to travel to research a reindeer herding community in Norway, attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, professionally document her paintings, and work in her studio. She has lived in Italy twice on language-study grants and participated in residencies in France and Israel. When she had a serious auto accident, grants even provided emergency funds.

Without grants, Bartók still would be an artist. However, grants helped her survive hard times, bought her time to paint and write, and helped her market her work and earn prestige. Artists can’t live solely on grant money, but grants can speed and support the trajectory of a career.

What is a Grant?

A grant is money that an organization gives away to fund a project its founders believe in. Grants are not loans, so they never have to be paid back. But landing a grant requires work, and that work usually involves writing a proposal or grant application. In your proposal, you have to explain why you want the money, why the granting organization should support your project, and how you intend to spend the funds. You are expected to include a detailed budget and samples of your work. Your application is judged by a panel of your peers—that means other artists—in a competitive process.

Writing a proposal may sound like drudgery. You have to follow tedious instructions and dig deep into your plans. But all the hard work—the researching, brainstorming, and crafting your proposal—will not only earn you a shot at a grant but also give you the focus you need to bring your project to life and, in the process, ignite your career.

Grant writing forces you to sit down and write about your project: What is it? Why do you want to do it? Where will you do it? How ​will you create it? Who’ll be involved? And how will you tell the world about it? Every artistic endeavor benefits from this kind of vision and meticulous planning. Applying for a grant forces you to imagine, plan, and call on other people. And this process moves your art further into the world—no matter the result of your efforts.

What Do Grants Pay For?

A grant can fund career advancement or the creation of a new project. It may take the form of a cash award, equipment access, or a residency that provides time and space to work.

​Residencies are as diverse as the organizations that offer them. You could be the only artist or one of fifty. You might teach a workshop at a local school or give a reading. Some offer rural solitude for uninterrupted creative work and others offer the bustle of an artistic community. When I did a residency at Caldera in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, I had my own A-frame house with a kitchen, sleeping loft, and workspace. For a week, my only interruption was the sound of salmon jumping in the river that gurgled by my back deck. With long stretches of time broken up by hikes around Blue Lake, I could edit, write, paint, and dig deep into my next project.

Where Do Grants Come From?

One of the best resources for artists seeking grants from anywhere in the country is the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), whose mission is “to empower artists at critical stages in their creative lives.” Established in 1971 by the New York State Council on the Arts to develop individual artists throughout the state, NYFA is funded by public agencies, foundations, corporations, and individual donors.

Perhaps the most useful service that NYFA offers is a free database called the Source (www.nyfasource.org), which is updated daily. In 2010, the Source listed 2,900 award programs for individual artists, including cash awards, emergency grants, scholarships, residencies, space awards for living or work, equipment access awards, honorary prizes, and grants for professional development.

The Foundation Center is another excellent resource for the grant seeker. Founded in 1956 and funded by more than five hundred foundations, the Center is the nation’s leading authority on organized philanthropy in all areas, including the arts. It has library/learning centers in New York; San Francisco; Cleveland, Ohio; Atlanta, Ga.; and Washington, D.C.; as well as information offered at 425 ​public libraries and other resource centers in every state and some international locations. It also has an extremely useful database you can access for a fee (discussed in chapter 1).

The Foundation Center’s website lists 20,650 grant makers that fund arts and culture. Now, here’s the bad news: Most of this money is slated for organizations, not individual artists.

The good news, however, is the NYFA website lists almost three thousand opportunities for individual artists, and you’ll discover other opportunities as you research. The additional good news is that artists can apply for grants slated for organizations if they work with a fiscal sponsor. (In chapter 11, you’ll learn what a fiscal sponsor is, how to find one, and how it can benefit you.)

Who Funds Grants?

So where do these three thousand grants for individuals come from? Funding for artists comes from both public and private sources.

Government

Public grants—from federal, state, or local government—are funded by taxes. One example of a federal grant is the National Endowment for the Arts’ $25,000 artist fellowship. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other government agencies also provide grants to artists. A local grant might be a few hundred to a few thousand dollars awarded by your state arts agency or town art council.

Most states offer grants to artists. In fact, 12% of total state arts funding is targeted to individual artists. As a group, state arts agencies fund 18,000 organizations, schools, and artists in more than 5,100 communities across the nation. Minnesota and Hawaii spend the most per capita on arts funding, whereas California and Florida spend the least, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (www.nasaa-arts.org).

​Only 11% of individual artist grants come from the government, according to data compiled in 2007 by the Urban Institute for the New York Foundation for the Arts. The majority of grants for individual artists come from foundations and other nonprofits.

Foundations and Other Nonprofits

Private grants are funded by foundations, corporations, nonprofit organizations (like an art center or an art service organization), or individuals. Foundations are nonprofit organizations with a mission and money to support that mission. They are eligible to receive tax breaks and are required by law to donate 5% of their assets annually to programs including grants.

Foundations come in all shapes and sizes and go by different names. Some are named after one wealthy individual; others are called family foundations. You’ll also hear about community foundations. Corporations may have a granting program through their corporate foundations. To make matters more confusing, some foundations aren’t even called foundations—they’re called trusts.

Don’t let this confound you. The important point to remember about foundations and other nonprofit organizations that fund grants is that each one is as unique as the people who started it. You’ll have to research each one to ascertain its particular interests and application process. The smallest foundations may have no full-time staff or website, so researching them will be more challenging. The biggest foundations have dozens of staff members and extensive websites that provide guidelines and detailed information on how to apply for funding.

Non-Grant Sources of Funding

To finance your artistic projects, you’ll need to venture beyond grants for other donations that provide cash and resources. These contributions are crucial and may not only make your project possible but may also make your grant applications more attractive to funders. Funders ​don’t like to be the only entity funding you; they like to see that you have other means of support. Although this support can come from other grants, it also can come from cash donations from individuals or “in-kind donations” from individuals, corporations, and small businesses.

In-Kind Donations

An in-kind donation is a contribution other than money, such as an item or service that you otherwise would have to pay for. When a printer agreed to print my theater programs in exchange for an ad in the program, his gift was an in-kind donation. Other examples of in-kind donations include the two hours that a graphic designer donated to design my marketing materials and the platter of appetizers that a local deli donated for opening night.

An in-kind donation can come from an individual, a small business, or a corporation. Caroll Michels, career coach, artist-advocate, and author of How to Survive and Prosper As an Artist, has orchestrated several donations from big companies. One contribution was aluminum from a major aluminum company for a sculpture exhibit. She researched companies using Standard and Poor’s Rating Guide, wrote letters to all the major aluminum companies, and had her donor within six weeks. Another major contribution was bread and cake from Pepperidge Farm, which she and two colleagues used to sculpt a twenty-four-foot-long edible model of Central Park that featured Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers swimming in the park’s pond.

​Individuals

Individuals donate more money to good causes than corporations and foundations put together. In 2008, $307 billion in private money went to nonprofits, yet only 18% of this amount was from foundations and corporations—individuals made up the rest, according to Giving USA. In chapter 11, I present all the ways to raise money from individuals including direct mail campaigns, fundraising house parties, and creative strategies that artists from Los Angeles to New York have used to find support from individual donors.

​Grants Are Not Charity

Many artists I’ve spoken with over the years have told me they sometimes feel that applying for a grant is like begging for charity. A grant is not charity. Granting organizations believe in art and its power to transform individual lives and, in turn, the world. Funding art is a crucial part of their mission, not because they feel sorry for artists but because they believe in what artists do.

A quick cruise through the mission statements of granting organizations at all levels shows an enthusiasm for and loyalty to artists. At the federal level, the National Endowment for the Arts is dedicated to “bringing the arts to all Americans.” At the state level, the South Carolina Arts Commission “pursues its public charge to develop a thriving arts environment.” Washington’s Artist Trust’s sole mission is to “support and encourage individual artists working in all disciplines in order to enrich community life throughout Washington State.” The Jerome Foundation “seeks to support artists who exhibit significant potential yet are not recognized as established creators.” The Puffin Foundation seeks to “open doors of artistic expression by providing grants to artists and art organizations who are often excluded from mainstream opportunities due to their race, gender, or social philosophy.”

These organizations and others like them need you to complete their work in the world. Your job as a grant-writing artist is to make the review panel’s job as easy as possible: Follow the application instructions to the letter, demonstrate that you understand the goals and missions of the granting organization, and convince the decision makers that your project is the perfect way to manifest their vision. When writing your proposal, remember that the organization you’re applying to already believes in what you do.