Our Town is the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative placemaking grants program. Through project-based funding, they support projects that integrate arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities by advancing local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes.
Donor Name: National Endowment for the Arts
State: All States
County: All Counties
Territory: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 08/04/2022
Size of the Grant: $25,000 to $150,000
Details:
Project Types
Our Town projects must demonstrate a specific role for arts, culture, and design as a part of strategies that strengthen communities by advancing local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes. Competitive projects often pilot new proposed activities and establish new or deepen existing cross-sector partnerships, while also demonstrating how they strive to lay the groundwork for long-term systems change. Projects may include activities such as:
- Arts Engagement:
- Artist residency: A program designed to strategically connect artists with the opportunity to bring their creative skill sets to non-arts institutions, including residencies in government offices, businesses, or other institutions.
- Arts festivals: Public events that safely gather people, often in public space or otherwise unexpected places, to showcase talent and exchange culture.
- Community co-creation of art: The process of engaging stakeholders to participate or collaborate alongside artists/designers in conceiving, designing, or fabricating a work or works of art.
- Performances: Presentations of a live art work (e.g., music, theater, dance, media).
- Public art: A work of art that is conceived for a particular place or community, with the intention of being broadly accessible, and often involving community members in the process of developing, selecting, or executing the work. Temporary public art may be included. These are works that are meant for display over a finite period of time using easily-removed materials, and are often used to prototype an idea, product, or process.
- Cultural Planning:
- Cultural planning: The process of identifying and leveraging a community’s cultural resources to inform decision-making (e.g., creating a cultural plan, or integrating plans and policies around arts and culture as part of a city master planning process).
- Cultural district planning: The process of identifying a specific geography with unique potential for community and/or economic development based on cultural assets (e.g., through designation, branding, policy, plans, or other means).
- Creative asset mapping: The process of identifying the people, places, physical infrastructure, institutions, and customs that hold meaningful aesthetics, historical, social and/or economic value that make a place unique.
- Public art planning: The process of developing community-wide strategies and/or policies that guide and support commissioning, installing, and maintaining works of public art and/or temporary public art.
- Design:
- Artist/designer-facilitated community planning: Artists/designers leading or partnering in the creative processes of visioning and developing solutions to community issues.
- Design of artist space: Design processes to support the creation of dedicated spaces for artists to live and/or to produce, exhibit, or sell their work.
- Design of cultural facilities: Design processes to support the creation of a dedicated building or space for creating and/or showcasing arts and culture.
- Public space design: The process of designing elements of public infrastructure, or spaces where people congregate (e.g., parks, plazas, landscapes, neighborhoods, districts, infrastructure, and artist-produced elements of streetscapes).
- Artist and Creative Industry Support:
- Creative business development: Programs or services that support entrepreneurs and businesses in the creative industries, or help cultivate strong infrastructure for establishing and developing creative businesses.
- Professional artist development: Programs or services that support artists professionally, such as through skill development or accessing markets and capital.
Funding Information
Grants range from $25,000 to $150,000, with a minimum cost share/match equal to the grant amount.
Eligibility Criteria
- All applications require partnerships that involve at least two primary partners as defined by these guidelines: a nonprofit organization and a local governmental entity. One of the two primary partners must be a cultural (arts or design) organization. Additional partners are encouraged.
- One of the two primary partners must act as the official applicant (lead applicant). This lead applicant must meet the eligibility requirements, submit the application, and assume full responsibility for the grant.
- Eligible lead applicants are:
- Nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) U.S. organizations with a documented completed three-year history of programming. For the purpose of defining eligibility, “three-year history” refers to when an organization began its programming and not when it incorporated or received nonprofit, tax-exempt status. Programming is not required to have taken place during consecutive years. Organizations that previously operated as a program of another institution may include programming it carried out while part of that institution for its three-year history.
- Local governments. For the purposes of these guidelines, local governments are defined as counties, parishes, cities, towns, villages, or federally recognized tribal governments. Local arts agencies or other departments, agencies, or entities within an eligible local government may submit the application on behalf of that local government. The following do not qualify as local governments: state level government agencies, other state-designated entities, state higher education institutions, regional governments and entities, quasi-government organizations, regional planning organizations, city council or aldermen offices, and business improvement districts.
- For U.S. territories, if no local government exists, the territory government can serve as the local government.
- To be eligible, the lead applicant organization must:
- Meet the NEA’s “Legal Requirements,” including nonprofit, tax-exempt status, at the time of application. (All organizations must apply directly on their own behalf. Applications through a fiscal sponsor/agent are not allowed. See more information on fiscal sponsors/agents.)
- Have a commitment to the project from the local government, as demonstrated by the required formal statement of support for the project from the highest ranking official of the local government participating in the project.
- Eligible organizations that received American Rescue Plan (ARP) or CARES Act funding may apply to this program as long as there are no overlapping costs during the same grant period.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
