FUNDING for BIPOC ARTISTS MADE EASY (finally!)

We offer free money to fund Independent BIPOC Artists in Greater Hartford who have projects they are just itching to produce.
Applications are closed for this year, but take a look at past projects funded and get ready for the next round!

PRE-QUALIFY in about 10 MINS.

DEADLINE was MARCH 30, 2024

Answer 5 questions about you and 5 questions about your project. That’s all we need to get the ball rolling.

Made possible by Artists of Color Unite!, an advisory group to Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

WE’RE SUPPORTING the SPIRIT of INDEPENDENTS

Through our work on the Artists of Color Unite! (AOCU!) advisory group, it’s become crystal clear that BIPOC artists face some tough barriers when we look to fund our vision:

Funds are for nonprofits only

Applications are hard and time consuming

Grants are for specific art forms only

Funds cover expenses only, not artists

There’s little guidance through the process

Previously funded artists get more funds

Well, enough of that, already.

With funding from the Hartford Foundation, AOCU! has provided Free Center with resources to address these barriers—real money to make a real difference in the work of Greater Hartford’s BIPOC artists. No more complicated applications that make you feel unworthy, no more competing with organizations with deeper pockets and the experience to get the money, no more paying yourself last, and no more going at it alone. With the Independent Artists Fund, our BIPOC artists no longer have to “make do”—we now have the opportunity to simply “make and do”, to create the brilliance that lifts our communities while taking care of ourselves, as well.

BIPOC artists. We are the Spirit of Independents. Onward and upward!

1.  INDEPENDENT

This program supports the true spirit of the art community. It’s for the thinker, the tinkerer, the innovator, the hustler, the doer. You know how nonprofit organizations have access to grant funding and know a thing or two about grant-writing? This isn’t for them. It’s for the independent “Free Agent”.

For Greater Hartford BIPOC artists.

2.  ARTISTS

Heck yeah, we’re interested in those more established forms of art like painting, photography, theater, dance, music, and written word. We’re also hungry for the new expressions that are shaking up our creative community: spoken word, video, couture, coiffure, culinary, tech, earth arts, everything.

This fund is for all forms of art.

3.  FUND

This is a racial equity arts fund. If you identify as a BIPOC artist in Greater Hartford and tell us about your project (napkin sketches are fine), you’ll pre-qualify for funding from $2,000-15,000. Once you meet the simple criteria, we’ll pair you with a “fund advisor” to help you prep your idea for review.

No mountains of paperwork involved.

HOW IT WORKS

Get started by taking a few minutes to complete our pre-qualifying application. It’s super-simple:

  • 5 questions about you to see if you qualify for Independent Artists Funding.
  • 5 questions about your project so we can match you with a Fund Advisor if you qualify.

Deadline for pre-qualification:
March 30, 2024 / 11:59 PM

Deadline for final application:
April 30, 2024 / 11:59 PM

So, before March 30, all you have to do is:

  1. Have an idea of a project you want to fund. We bet you already have that idea.
  2. Have a sense of how long it will take to complete
  3. Have a rough idea of how much money you need. Rough! You can refine it later.
  4. Spend less than 10 minutes to answer 5 questions about you and 5 questions about your project on our online application.
  5. Hit the send button.

That’s it. 

We’ve been there, BIOPOC artists. For real! We get excited about an opportunity, then we get distracted, then we forget about it. Maybe we didn’t think it was really meant for us. Then, next thing we know, somebody else is on social media flaunting their funding which could have been our funding and now we’re going to have to wait until next time (if there’s a next time).

Independent BIPOC artists—this is our time. Free Center has made getting started a walk in the park. Take a few minutes now and take the dive. This is opportunity knocking. Plus, we’re all excited to hear about your project, so apply today.

We’ll pair you with a Fund Advisor to provide direct guidance and feedback to help you refine your request. Your Fund Advisor will be available to talk about your application if any questions pop up in the review process. Our trained Fund Advisors are all knowledgeable in arts funding and thinking through budgets. They are also all excited to work with you to see your vision come to life.

With guidance from your Fund Advisor, you’ll have an opportunity to update your Fund Request with details our Funding Committee will review as they divvy up our available funds. Some of the items we’ll be looking for:

  • Project Overview: We’ll be looking to get a good feel for what your project will be. Your Advisor will be great at helping you put your best foot forward.
  • Budget: Along with paying for expenses and paying any collaborators fairly, it’s important to us that you pay yourself for AT LEAST the time it takes to produce your work. $35/hour for your time is the minimum we’ll be looking for in your budget.
  • Timeline: We ask for a rough timeline so we can schedule check-ins and arrange process payments. We are accepting fund requests for projects that will take about a year or less to complete.

A Funding Committee will review the finalized requests for funding. These evaluators will make the final call on which projects will be funded and for how much. We may get back to you with recommendations to modify your project based on the project management experience of the funding committee. If we do call you, we may suggest ways to reduce cost, we may suggest a more realistic higher budget, or we may connect you to collaboration opportunities with other Independent Artists Fund applicants to sweeten your request. Our goal is to help you every step of the way—including at the final review phase—to create an engaging and profitable project that will be both great for our community and great for you as you look to secure future funding.  

What happens after the Funding Committee makes a decision:

  • If your project is selected for funding, you’ll receive a letter from Free Center sharing the details of the funding. Those details will include a progress payment schedule based on your project’s production schedule, a timetable for touching base on the progress of your work, and a request for an appointment to discuss how we can promote your participation in the Independent Artists Fund in a way that benefits both you and all other people connected to this fund. We will also send you a “release form” to sign. This gives us permission to talk about your project publicly (in the news and on social media, for example).
  • If your project is unable to be considered for funding at this time, we’ll let you know in writing and share the reason why we declined funding. If we have any ideas about other funding opportunities, we will definitely share them with you. We will not discuss a declined application with anyone but the applicant in private or in public.

This step marks the official start of your Independent Arts Funded Project. Once we receive your signed funding agreement and release form, we will send your first check:

  • We will send a bank check that will take 10-14 days to get to you.
  • If for any reason you can’t accept a check, we will work with you to find an alternative way to deliver your funds.
  • We’re expecting that you will be paying your collaborators directly.
  • The first check we send will be for 1/3 of the total grant award. If your project requires a different amount, we can discuss those options, too.

Free Center will promote and share projects throughout the process of creation and when they are completed. We plan on making a big noise about this work. That said, until we know what the awarded projects are (and their anticipated completion dates), we can’t determine exactly HOW we will make that noise.

You can expect: press releases, social media pushes, exhibitions of these projects at our current and coming Free Center locations.

We will be working with fund recipients to collect documentation of the work in process. We want to look back in a year or two and realize the difference supporting independent BIPOC artists makes in the community, to the funding process, and to the artists, themselves.

FAQS

Free Center received a grant from Hartford Foundation for Public Giving as recommended by the Foundation’s advisory group, Artists of Color Unite! (AOCU!). Our Executive Director, Richard Hollant, is a part of the AOCU! advisory.

AOCU! is looking at ways to create a long-term support structure to benefit artists of color in the Greater Hartford region with a targeted focus on Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. For the advisory group, this new journey into equitable funding is an early step in reimagining how our arts community can better support—and benefit from—BIPOC artists.

BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. It used to be just POC back in the day, but language continues to evolved around race, ethnicity, equity, and justice. Artists of Color Unite! and Free Center have given a lot of consideration to the various ways we talk about ourselves as Black, POC, or BIPOC artists. We came to the agreement that BIPOC is the best term to encompass all the folks we are serving and the specific equity barriers we face. Language is constantly evolving and this is a pretty tough to pin down. We are aware of the challenges with BIPOC, but wer continue to use the term until a better solution arises.

Equitable outcomes sometimes require “unequal” solutions. Systemic Racism is embedded in our institutions and our culture, and the arts sector is not an exception. Historically, White artists have had the most access to opportunity and power. That system is a racket and to disrupt it, we have to intentionally elevate those of us who have been historically left out of opportunities. In the great creative tradition of disruption, this program and every penny of its funding is specifically and unapologetically for BIPOC artists only.

Greater Hartford is a region made up of the City of Hartford along with its inner and outer suburbs. Altogether, there are 29 towns. This funding is to support the fair creation of work by Independent BIPOC artists in these towns. We alphabetized a list of the towns in the Greater Hartford region because we’re like that.

  • Andover
  • Avon
  • Bloomfield
  • Bolton
  • Canton
  • East Granby
  • East Hartford
  • East Windsor
  • Ellington
  • Enfield
  • Farmington
  • Glastonbury
  • Granby
  • Hartford
  • Hebron
  • Manchester
  • Marlborough
  • Newington
  • Rocky Hill
  • Simsbury
  • Somers
  • South Windsor
  • Suffield
  • Tolland
  • Vernon
  • West Hartford
  • Wethersfield
  • Windsor
  • Windsor Locks

There are two main reasons:

First—traditionally, arts funding has gone to nonprofits and not to individual artists. It’s maddening. We can barely figure out what the real (and most likely tremendous) impact independent artists have on our economy and quality of life because we pay so little attention to individual artists. We are looking to change that—to develop new habits and inclusions. The Independent Artists Fund  is set up to specifically support those left out of traditional funding opportunities.

Second—actual paid studies confirm what we’ve known all along through simple observations: from executive staff to boardrooms, the leadership making decisions for arts nonprofits in Greater Hartford is overwhelmingly white. If we look at Hartford itself, that’s a heartbreaking realization. Art tells our story and while the people running the arts in the city might empathize with our narrative, they can’t own it with us. Independent Artists Fund puts the power over the money in the hands of independent BIPOC artists who rightfully own our narrative. 

If you’re an arts nonprofit looking for grants, check out some of these resources. You’ll find a lot of great opportunities there: 

Oh… Oh! No one has asked this yet. We just imagined someone wondering this and we upset ourselves.

This fund is for independent BIPOC artists because there are almost no funds specifically for independent BIPOC art projects. And when there is funding, there’s usually lots of hurdles, strings attached, reporting, and administrative stuff to do that’s unrelated to the actual making of art.

We are supporting the BIPOC Artist’s “Spirit of Independents” with this funding. Let’s all come together and lift up our BIPOC Indie Artists. If you work for an arts organization and think this idea is right-on, would you do our community a favor and spread the word through your organization’s network? We’ve got all kinds of graphics and language ready to share. Send an email to zoe@freecenter.us and she can send a packet to you along with our deep gratitude.

Yes! Don’t be worried about the unknowns. We’ve purposefully set up our process so that we can give feedback and guidance to anyone unsure of how to request funding or what to request funding for.

Quick story: we were talking with the person that set up the internet system at Free Center. He mentioned that he wouldn’t know how to do what we do. We mentioned that he’s there because we didn’t know how to do what he does, either. We then all took a sip of our coffees and looked out the back window of our main meeting room. There were squirrels gathering things, rabbits were off rabbiting, and the birds in the trees were keeping busy. It was a nice moment.

We are running this program to put money in the accounts of Independent BIPOC artists so they can do the work they are meant to do. The funding is for creating art, not for grant writing chops or budget wizardry. We think it’s a lot to ask of someone to be all things—to check all the boxes—at all times. Back in the day, our parents called it being “a Jack of all trades and a master of none.” What we want from you is passionate visions, meaningful expressions, personal explorations. Great art. We aren’t expecting you to be a squirrel, a rabbit, and a bird. That’s where the Fund Advisors come in.

Fund Advisors are experienced artists and arts administrators who are familair with the Independent Artists Fund. They’re here to help provide you with insights and guidance to refine your final fund request. After you submit your initial request, we will connect you with an advisor if you’re interested. Working with a Fund Advisor is not a requirement of your application—especially for BIPOC artists who’ve not hesitated to apply for arts funding before. We want to level the playing field and we want this funding process to be as easy and enjoyable for you as possible. 

Nope. You have to make your art. You have to treat your collaborators fairly. You have to get out there and talk about your work so you can grow the resources to keep doing your work. Free Center will take care of all the reporting to our grantor.

You are not a grantee. Should you be awarded funding, you’ll be getting money to do your work.

Final fund requests are reviewed by a Fund Committee. While the amount of money we are distributing feels massive, it’s also all we have to work with. Free Center will work with the Fund Committee to figure out how much each request is granted based on the number of requests received, the total amount the project is requesting, and other factors that will be considered by the committee (we don’t even know what those factors are yet—when committees like these come together with great insights on both the arts and our community, really amazing and deep ideas start manifesting. We’re excited. Can you tell?).