Welcome to My Grant Info Session
Welcome to My Grant Info Session
December 6, 2023, 11:14 pm
Filed under: art, art institutions, business, Non-Profit | Tags: arts, arts funding, Big Give, community engagement, grant info session, grants, Indie Space, wasting artists’ time
There are about thirty artists in the classroom that is not designed for a lecture but is being used for one anyway. We are required to attend this information session in order to be eligible for our local arts funding. It is a two hour Power Point presentation about how to fill out the grant form. About an hour into it, the facilitator asked “Are we having fun?” and the silence was deafening. The facilitator is very personable and he’s working so hard to make this content less deadly than it is. But telling thirty artists how to fill in forms for grants, mostly between $1000 and $5000, is not scintillating presentation material.
I’ve been sitting in presentations like this for over twenty years now and every single one of them is like this. Or worse. They are a colossal waste of artists’ time, no matter which borough or organization is sponsoring them. Whether it’s the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council or the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Queens Council on the Arts or the Brooklyn Arts Council, they all require that artists sit pliantly in uncomfortable chairs for two hours to hear how to fill out a form. Every time it makes me furious and is a major reason for my not applying for funding as often as I should. The grants themselves are onerous but the patronizing info sessions are somehow worse.
Each time I go to one, I find there’s a new thing that pisses me off. At the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance one a while ago, I was struck by how infuriating it is that none of these places would fund your whole project. This time, I found myself furious about the info session itself. Here we were, thirty artists, none of whom knew each other and all we did was stare at a screen and parrot back facts we were given. My only engagement with my fellow artists was in the elevator on the way up, and down the hall to the elevator on the way back.
Most artists in this city are pretty isolated. Now more than ever. Before I went to this event, I was actually a little excited to get to be in a room full of artists again — that is, until I realized there would be no opportunity to engage with any of them. I knew what these things were like (I’ve been to enough of them) but I still somehow hoped for a little community atmosphere.
My sense about these things is that everyone does them this way because everyone does them this way. That is, Brooklyn Council on the Arts does their info sessions this way because LMCC does theirs this way and LMCC probably does them this way because NYSCA does them this way and so and so on.
Our guy last night told us he was telling us this stuff because he didn’t want us leaving money on the table. That is, he didn’t want us to lose the grant because of dumb or avoidable mistakes. I appreciate that. I would love to know all the available tips and tricks for winning over a grant committee — but I’m just not sure sitting in front of a Power Point presentation for two hours is the best way to receive those tips. And the investment is out of balance with the reward. These grant applications take a lot of time to fill out. They require a lot of careful consideration, finessing and math. If I applied for the individual artist grant, the most I could get would be $2500. If I hired a grant writer to get me this one, the funds would basically just pay the grantwriter.
A fellow theatre maker said recently that he was working on two grants: one for his job that was for $2 million and another for his art that was for $5000 and he reported that they took the same amount of time.
When I first started applying for grants, we were told that it basically worked like a scaffold, that we’d do a lot of work for a $500 grant which would help us get progressively bigger grants. Well, friends, I’ve been doing this for over twenty years and the largest amount of official grant money I’ve received were two $3000 grants. Ten years ago.
The growth model just doesn’t reflect the way artists and arts organizations work. Our budgets don’t just automatically grow over the years. We don’t graduate from city funding to state funding to federal funding as the years go by. This is a fantasy. Maybe it happens for an organization or two but most of us don’t grow like that.
Most arts organizations I know continue to make their work in fits and spurts with not enough money and the occasional pat on the back. Grantmakers seem to think there are only two ways to be an organization — grow into an institution or die. They know most arts companies don’t make it to the five year mark. That part is true. But they assume everyone who makes it past five years does it by growing, by becoming an institution. That’s just not how it works for a lot of us. You don’t become eligible for more funding the longer you exist. You become eligible for more funding by getting more funding. The grants my company can apply for are for arts orgs with budgets under $100k and $250k. Once you have more than that, then you can apply directly to the bigger funds. But how you’re supposed to do that five thousand dollars at a time, I do not know.
There is no reward for making tiny scrappy shows for over twenty years. No one gives you an award for this. Which is fine. I’m not after any awards. What I would like, though, is not to have to endure the same humiliating, infantilizing speeches about following directions every time I try to raise a couple of grand from a local arts council.
As a person who has sat in so many of these info sessions over the years, I would like to offer a short presentation about how to give these presentations.
#1
Don’t.
Skip it. Offer a workshop for the people who want/need one and let the rest of us just fill out your forms.
#2
You have things you want to make sure the people applying know? Have us send you an intent to apply email and then send us a daily/weekly hot tip. If we need them, we’ll read them. I signed up for this one podcast network and when I did, they gave me an option to receive their daily podcast tips for a few weeks. You know what? I’ve been podcasting for a while. I can be just as jaded in that field as I am in theatre and I read them. I even took a few on board. You can get information to people without boring them to pieces.
#3
If you absolutely have to get us together to tell us things, please make it a party instead. Do like they do at my college alumni parties, let everyone mingle for an hour and a half with wine and cheese, then ding your glasses, make us listen to a series of 10 minute speeches and then let us talk to each other some more. Call it a grant info session if you must. But you’ll do a lot more for the arts in your local area if you help bring artists together. I’d like to suggest you do it the way Indie Space does their Big Give. Fill out a VERY SHORT form with no essays or nothing. Those forms enter us in a lottery. To get the money, we go to a party where we eat and drink and hang out with our fellow artists and when we don’t win the lottery it is fine, because we got to have some good conversation.
#4
Let’s talk about community engagement for a second. All of these grants ask artists to talk about how their work will benefit the community. Artists are charged to make contacts in the community, to get community leaders involved in their work and then explain how their project will benefit people in that community. Some artists are well positioned to do just that. And they are usually the ones who receive this kind of grant. But a lot of artists are not great at this. They want to be. They aspire to get more people involved and to make a difference. But this is a special skill that is not an automatic accompaniment to art making.
I’m actually pretty good at engaging with a community, given the opportunity. Working in Senior Centers, working in schools, in public libraries, in public parks and spaces — I have done all of these things, but I still would not like to depend on any of these things for my art making. It’s quite difficult to make inroads outside of one’s own circles. People leave these sorts of positions often. Maintaining this sort of network can be a full time job. Depending on artists to do this is a little bit bananas. It often leads to mediocre art, as well. I’m not saying community engaged work can’t be good. I love it. It’s some of my favorite stuff I’ve seen — but if our arts councils are only funding people who know how to go out and busk it with particular communities, they’re not funding the arts so much as social services with an artistic component.
You want artists to make work with a community spirit? Introduce us to the community. Let these relationships form more organically. Let’s say I wanted to make some shows with refugees; If I did it the way the funding models suggest, I should come up with a project, budget it out, go find some refugee organizations and make it happen. But what if my local arts council brought artists together with community leaders? Maybe I’d meet someone who has been hungry for someone to make some theatre with the refugees in their organization. Then we design a program together instead of a weird top down, “I bring the arts to you” model. Or maybe at this community engagement event, I meet someone doing something I’d never have thought of and we find a whole new way of making work together.
What I’m trying to say is that arts councils could do a much more active job of creating community engagement instead of placing that responsibility on the shoulders of artists.
I love engaging with communities, truly. But I absolutely loathe talking about it on grant applications. It feels like I’m using whatever vulnerable population I’m working with to get paid. It feels mercenary and disrespectful of the people I play to and for.
Anyway — I’m veering into what these applications should be like now — and I for sure have thoughts about that, too. (Lottery! They should be a lottery!) But I came here to talk about grant info sessions.
I think they’re meant to be a teaching tool. I think they’re meant to be instructive. After a couple of decades in arts teaching, I can tell you that these info sessions could use some pedagogical improvement. I’m pretty sure the science is in on sitting and listening for two hours straight and it is not the way to get people to learn something. Recent science suggests humans need to get up and move around every half hour at least.
But the thing is, I don’t think that the goal of these info sessions is actually instruction. I think it’s box ticking. It’s numbers collecting. It’s proving to the funders higher up the food chain that you can get numbers. And congratulations, you have found a population with a great deal of willingness to sit around a room for the chance to get a pretty minimal sum of money. And if you think artists don’t see that this is how it is, you’re underestimating us. Check in and find out. Are we having fun yet? Listening to a two hour Power Point presentation that many of us have been hearing a variation of for the last twenty years? You think you can make that fun? That silence tells you everything.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
*
Want to be better than a grant?
Become my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
Or you can subscribe to my Substack
*
If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
To help me pay off my trip to Crete, donate on Kofi — ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on December 7, 2023.
