The granting world is divided into two general categories, and they rarely overlap. Some foundations give money to social service enterprises that provide things like education, mental health care, homeless shelters and food pantries. Others give to the arts, keeping museums, orchestras and dance companies in business.
The ins and outs of how money gets from the have-its to the need-it-badlys may not be interesting to most people, but the divisions do make it hard for a lot of valuable social service efforts to get the support they need — things that fall in the middle, like art programs that help veterans deal with trauma, after-school programs that teach kids life skills via computer drawing, and sculpture-making workshops that allow people with visual impairments to appreciate art through touch rather than sight.
Those are precisely the sort of projects the new Arts in Society grant program is targeting, giving out more than $465,000 to 21 artists and organizations across Colorado. The grants are a public-private partnership between the the state, through its Colorado Creative Industries division, Denver’s Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and the Hemera Foundation, based in Boulder.
It’s rare for government and nonprofit grant-makers to work together, but even more unusual for them to break out of their regimens. Bonfils-Stantion CEO Gary Steuer said it happened because the foundations saw these cross-over efforts happening organically in the community and wanted to come up with a way to provide support.
More and more, artists and performers were offering programs with a social service component — not just making art for art’s sake, but conducting theater workshops at rec centers and presenting plays to combat teen suicide.
“And on the other side, human services organizations were recognizing that art can add value to what they’re trying to address,” he said.
The Arts in Society grants helped the funders get into the trenches, figuring out who is offering the most promising work and enabling them to lend a hand.
The grants were competitive — 265 applications came in, but included the kinds of grantees Arts in Society was looking for, like Art from Ashes, which will use its money to inspire young people through spoken word and poetry lessons; Colorado Black Arts Movement, which will develop a performance piece focusing on the the rituals of dinner in households in Denver’s Montebello neighborhood; and EcoArts Connections, which will create monthly Latino youth-organized workshops centered around art and the environment.
The grants will offer support and skills training for refugees and other recent arrivals through storytelling sessions and sewing enterprises; empower residents in Pueblo and Trinidad to reclaim and preserve local history by creating community narratives; and fund Rose Medical Center’s efforts to treat patients with the assistance of dance performances and film screenings.
In Boulder County, a $30,000 grant will help radio station KGNU reach out to folks in mostly Spanish-speaking communities to produce podcasts. Teenagers in Longmont and Lafayette will develop radio novellas — fictional mini-dramas, based on real-life experiences — making art and, at the same time, learning skills in broadcasting.
“If you take away the fear of being in front of a microphone or camera, and you do it in a creative and holistic way, it helps to build self-esteem,” said station manager Tim Russo.
There’s a notable progressive political component to the way grantees discuss their work. Russo talks about how his grant will provide crucial access to technical tools that are out of reach for many, and he hopes the programming that is created will show Boulderites “how the demographics are changing here rapidly and how conditions may not be improving for all people.”
Similarly, a $25,000 grant to Elsewhere Studios in Paonia will help raise environmental awareness in a part of the state that is “under the threat of fracking,” as executive director Karen Good puts it.
Elsewhere Studios is a residency program, and the grant will bring in three outside artists for an extended period of time — perhaps a visual artist, a performer and a writer — to make projects addressing the concerns of local farmers and others over the impact of the oil extraction process. Good talks about it as a way of “bringing together many segments of the community in dialogue,” but there’s a prevailing anti-fracking sentiment in the region and it will likely be evident in the final products.
These are not radical moves by any stretch, but they are new territory, of sorts, for foundations, like arts-minded Bonfils-Stanton, whose grants are more likely to go toward underwriting “The Nutcracker” at the Colorado Ballet or helping the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado put on a concert of Bach.
Foundations like Hemera and Bonfils-Stanton, which are each pitching in $200,000, as well as the state, which is contributing $100,000, have strict guidelines about how they can distribute money; some rules restrict giving to non-profits, while others bar grants to individuals. To allow the Arts in Society initiative flexibility, the grants were decided by an outside panel and will be channeled through the nonprofit RedLine arts center, based in Denver’s Curtis Park neighborhood. RedLine’s community-minded programming already offers things like workshops for the local homeless population, so the new program fits comfortably within its scope. It will collect a fee for its oversight role, so the grants indirectly help that organization at the same time.
Arts in Society has a two-year commitment from its sponsors, so it will issue another round of grants next year. But it hopes to have an impact into the future by using some of its funds to support research into the effectiveness of the money as it goes out. Grant recipients will meet regularly to evaluate successes and failures and a final report will be available to cities across the country who might consider a similar way of distributing cash.
Grant recipients are looking beyond the short-term, too. KGNU’s Russo, for example, hopes one day to expand the station’s outreach via a mobile media lab that can take a recording studio directly to the areas it wants to serve. That will take more money, but the Arts in Society grant could help raise it.
“Once you have a seed like this, it’s easier to do follow-ups,” he said. “The community can see that you have the trust of this competitive grant process and they will want to get on board as well.”