Mass Cultural Council Staff
Each month Mass Cultural Council shares a round-up of grants, trainings, technical assistance resources, and opportunities for creative and cultural organizations (a companion to our Useful Links page). This list is not meant to be exhaustive but a glimpse of what is on offer in the coming weeks. (We also publish a weekly Artist Opportunities listing.)
Funding
Mass Cultural Council’s Gaming Mitigation Fund grants are available to Massachusetts nonprofit and municipal performing arts centers to spend on touring shows or touring artist fees. Deadline: Jan. 9, 2025.
The National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures grant program helps preserve nationally significant historic properties and collections that convey our nation’s rich heritage to future generations. Deadline: Dec. 12, 2024.
The National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance, is accepting applications Creative Forces Community Engagement grants to support non-clinical, community-based arts engagement programming for military and veteran populations, including family members and caregivers. Deadline: Jan. 15, 2025.
Essex County Community Foundation is accepting applications for:
- Women’s Fund of Essex County: Multi-year grants of $30,000 each over 3-years will allow organizations to secure support for programs that address longer-term issues to improve lives for women and girls. Deadline: Jan. 6, 2025.
- NiSource Charitable Foundation Fund for Merrimack Valley: Grants of $25,000-$200,000 to nonprofits in support of the core programming around hardship assistance, economic development, safety, STEM and environmental education. Deadline: Jan. 15, 2025.
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read is a national program that offers matching grants of up to $20,000 to support community-wide reading programs. This year’s theme is “Our Nature: How Our Physical Environment Can Lead Us to Seek Hope, Courage, and Connection.” The 22 books that applicants can choose to program all explore our relationship with the physical environment. A mandatory Intent to Apply is due Jan. 23, 2025, with final applications due Jan. 30, 2025.
Cambridge Community Foundation’s Community Fund Grant supports community-based nonprofit organizations that address local challenges and foster opportunities across the community. Community Fund grants make investments in many areas, including arts and culture, child and youth development, community building and engagement, economic security, education, environment, food, health and well-being, and housing. Deadline: Jan. 28, 2025.
Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative Grant is open to cities with populations of 50,000 or more. The program will award 10 cities grants of up to $100,000 each for large-scale projects that will make signature streets safer and more accessible, create dynamic new public spaces, or enact other similarly transformative roadway redesigns. Deadline: Jan. 31, 2025.
Latinos in Heritage Conservation’s Grant Program offers dedicated funding to nonprofits and community groups for Latinx heritage and historic preservation projects. Deadline: Feb. 15, 2025.
MassCEC’s EmPower Massachusetts Program is offering two grant opportunities to increase access to the benefits of clean energy and/or reduce energy burden to previously underserved populations in Massachusetts:
- Innovation and Capacity Building Grants ranging from $5,000-$25,000 offering seed funding to explore innovative ideas for potential program models and to build organization capacity.
- Implementation Grants ranging from $50,000-$150,000 to implement new program models/projects for increasing access to the benefits of clean energy.
Eligibility: Community-based organizations, non-profits, individuals, federal and state-acknowledged tribes, and municipalities. Rolling deadline through April 3, 2025.
Things to Attend
Register for Mass Cultural Council’s next Spotlight Series webinar featuring Open Door Arts’ new organizational Arts and Culture Accessibility Self-Assessment tool. Dec. 6, 2024.
The next CreativeGround Network Leader Workshop is Dec. 3, 2024 at 11am via Zoom. Learn how to utilize New England Foundation for the Art’s CreativeGround.org for your community.
Sound Music Cities, the leading organization dedicated to advancing music ecosystems in communities across the United States, has opened registration for its 2025 Music Census Cohort. The only program of its kind provides cities with invaluable insight into their music economy, culture, and community engagement in a peer networking and cost-effective format. Info session: Dec. 4, 2024.
Apparo is hosting How to Strengthen Your Nonprofit’s Financial Process by Bridging the Digital Skills Gap will explore practical strategies for closing the digital skills gap within your organization, empowering your team to manage finances more efficiently and accurately. Learn how upgrading your team’s digital literacy can improve processes such as budgeting, Accounts Payable (AP), and reporting, leading to better financial decision-making, fewer errors, and more time to focus on mission-driven work. Dec. 5, 2024 at 12pm.
Join the Sasaki Foundation in Boston for Emerging Professionals Craft Night, planned by their 2025 DESI teaching assistants! Enjoy a night of crafting, networking, and exciting discussion around interesting topics in the design industry. Dec. 5, 2024 from 6:30-8:30pm.
Register for the 2024 Creative Aging Institute hosted by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and E.A. Michelson Philanthropy. Open to organizations, individual artists, and aging services practitioners with an interest in creative aging. Dec. 9-11, 2024 from 2-6pm via Zoom.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy is offering:
- Advanced QuickBooks Online for Nonprofits, a two-part workshop on Dec. 4 and Dec. 6, 2024 from 1-3pm. Registration includes both sessions. You will receive access to the Dec. 6 session (Part 2) after the Dec. 4 session. Sessions will be recorded and available on demand. Registration: $199.
- Unlocking the Power of Social Sharing: How Nonprofits Can Maximize Support, a webinar through Classy by GoFundMe, on how to utilize storytelling in the social media landscape for fundraising. Dec 5, 2024 at 2pm via Zoom.
- A Perfect Storm? A New Administration, Stubborn Inflation, Fiscal Unease explores how leaders can plan for various scenarios, prepare for anticipated policy changes, reduce risk amid fiscal uncertainty, and understand how grant making may shift in response to these factors. Dec. 10, 2024 at 2pm via Zoom.
The UMass Fine Arts Center hosts “Clean Energy in the Cultural Sector”, a virtual panel with the UMass Arts Extension Service and Clean Energy Extension highlighting their program with Mass Clean Energy’s EmPower Innovation & Capacity Building Grant, a grant which provides “seed” funding for the exploration of innovative ideas for potential program models or projects that would increase access to the benefits of clean energy to and/or reduce energy burden on previously underserved groups. The event is free, but registration is required. Dec. 11, 2024 from 12-1pm.
Tech Impact is hosting Preparing for AI: Key Considerations for Nonprofits on Dec. 11, 2024 at 1pm. There is more to AI than asking ChatGPT to summarize your board meetings. AI and its cousin Automation promise to lower our manual labor effort, improve our bottom lines, and increase our social impact. But, in order to realize these promises, your organization has to be AI Ready.
Other
Organizations are invited to host their own Poetry Out Loud Competition, a dynamic, national poetry recitation competition for high school students that lifts poetry off the page, creating community and connection. A partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, and state and jurisdictional arts agencies, Poetry Out Loud provides free poetry education resources, including lesson plans and other educational materials for teachers and organizers, tips on reciting, and an online anthology of more than 1,200 classic and contemporary poems. Contact the Massachusetts Poetry Out Loud coordinator to get involved in this year’s competition. Deadline: Dec. 20, 2024.
Are you ready to share your expertise and inspire the arts and culture community? American’s for the Arts’ call for breakout session proposals for AFTACON is open. Submit a breakout session proposal by Jan. 6, 2025 and help them shape the CONversation at AFTACON.
MassCEC’s Building Electrification and Transformation Accelerator (BETA): Project Planning offers free, in-depth building audits to support organizations in planning electrification and decarbonization retrofits. Deadline: Rolling.
The National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts has announced a new interagency partnership to expand a National Inventory of Humanities Organizations (NIHO) dataset, originally designed to identify nonprofit humanities institutions, to incorporate 80,000 additional arts and cultural organizations. This broader remit will allow for the capture and reporting of a fuller range of humanities, art, and cultural activities happening at nonprofits across the United States. Read more about the renamed inventory, the National Inventory of Cultural Organizations (NICO).
Access/VSA International Network offers The Theory and Practice of Anti-Ableist Arts Education, a 15-module asynchronous online course. Each module may be purchased individually for $75 each, or in discounted bundles. Purchase the complete bundle and receive a $100 discount. Modules 1, 2, and 15 are their gift to you and are FREE with the purchase of any single module or bundle (a value of $225).
Read Previous Months’ Listings
If you have an opportunity or resource for cultural organizations that you’d like to pitch for our monthly round-up, please email us. Efforts to submit the opportunity in a format similar to our standard (see listings above) are deeply appreciated. Because space is limited, the best submissions are 60 words or fewer and include links to web pages with more information.