It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Sing with me now: It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Yup, it’s grant season again – that time of year when most proposals come due, and we’re working late nights designing projects, talking to potential collaborators, building budgets, and in all possible ways turning dreams into tactical steps.

While this might be a really stressful prospect, it’s probably the most exciting part of the season in a lot of ways. We get to decide which of the crazy ideas that have come up in the last several months will actually get submitted for funding and production. We get to actually meet and speak with people we’ll be working with sometime in the next one to three years. Yes, there’s a lot of paperwork involved, but, at the same time, distilling your ideas down into 1000 characters in a way that others will understand and buy into brings things into pretty clear focus.

A couple of things we’ve learned along the way:

• Build great projects first, then find funding matches (as opposed to chasing dollars).
• Having trouble writing that project up into a narrative that fits the guidelines? Maybe it’s not the right fit, or maybe we haven’t thought about all aspects of the program in enough detail.
• Finally, dare to dream. This is the time to think big picture about large-scale organizational goals, and consider which projects will get you closer to that mountain. Chances are, those will make for the best art, the best proposals, and the most successful match.

And on that note, I’ll see you all in May. Time to dive under that pile on my desk!