Rethinking Grants: Sometimes Smaller is Bigger
This week marks the opening of our third round of our project grants. This past year we’ve seen such an incredible array of artists and organizations hard at work to create new music. Last year alone, we received over 2,700 projects involving almost 6,000 artists and organizations. These numbers were just as surprising to us as they were to our applicants. Almost half of our awarded projects involve artists or organizations that have never received funding from us before. We are delighted that so many artists and organizations, new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, played a crucial role in the early stages of our new platform.
This is new territory for us, too. While we have a strong vision for our project grants, we serve the whole new music community. This is why we asked the 6,000 individuals involved with the first two rounds to give us their thoughts about the process and ways in which our platform can grow for the future. We received some great insight and perspective.
One of the most prominent requests from the field was to support more small projects and to award more small grants—and we hear you. In response to this feedback and conversation, and in the interest of spreading as many of our resources to the greatest breadth of artists possible, we’re increasing this round’s allocation for small grants by 400%. The total breadth of awards will still range between $250 and $20,000 (so large projects, don’t despair), but we will award at least $100,000 to requests of $3,000 and below.
Our decision to award more small grants is driven by the same underlying principle that has motivated our entire approach to project grants: bringing artists into the public limelight is crucial for a modern-day healthy ecology for new music. Artists and organizations requesting these modest grants are often those that benefit most not only from funds, but also from the visibility our project platform can provide.
We want to bring tremendous attention to the artists who are creating art today, and to bring tremendous attention to the immense need of those same creators. We didn’t conjure up the thousands of new artists we met with the launch of our project grants; they’ve been there, creating and working tirelessly the entire time. What we did do was make our organization and our field more welcoming to the extent that thousands of new artists felt that they were a part of both.
It’s 2014 and the game has changed, and our process is changing with it. Politically, socially, and culturally—in an age so strongly defined by instantaneous connection and online engagement—artists must be present in a space that resonates beyond performance. This unquantifiable visibility is imperative to our long-term survival and validity as a field. Music is in our neighborhoods, in our communities, with our children, with our families. We are part of a network that defines the still-forming identity of a nation, and this network has measurably positive effects on grades and intelligence as well as reducing crime and community empowerment. Look at artists. We need them, we need to see them, and we need to see how much we need them.