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Date: 2/7/2023
AMHERST — The Amherst Cultural Council recently awarded 73 cultural programming grants to various artists, businesses and institutions. Approximately $61,983 was awarded in total, with the largest grant being $7,000. A press release from the town of Amherst describes the awardees as “music and theater events, visual artists and programs featuring the natural environment.”
Applications for grants were reviewed and later awarded by the council, which is co-chaired by Matt Holloway and Julianne Applegate. Holloway said that this year set the record for the most number of applications with 91, which was most likely due to the high level of public engagement in the process and the extensive outreach work done by the council.
“I would say most of the initial participation in the cycle is people reaching out via email or phone and us just talking them through the application process, and we love that,” Holloway said. “We have an obligation to do public meetings and outreach; we really try to get the word out to as broad and diverse a group of prospective grantees as we can at the outset of the cycle. We worked extremely hard at the outset to hold these public meetings, issue press releases and work social media to get the word out there that ‘This money is available to artists and cultural institutions, and it it’s a fairly down to earth application process.’”
The council wants the process to be as accessible as possible, especially for those who have never written a grant before. These grants come in all sizes; many people who received lower grants were just starting out in their passion, and the award makes all the difference in being able to continue.
“We get a lot of people who don’t write a lot of grants and we love that. We don’t want this to be the type of thing that you have to be or have a professional grant writer. That’s the beauty of it; it’s set up in such a way that we’ll give grants from $7,000 down to $100, and that’s very gratifying to us because some of those smaller grants are folks who have never written a grant before or who are just starting on their journey with their art, their culture, their passion, etc.,” Holloway said.
Holloway explained he feels helping applicants complete the process is the most rewarding part of awarding the grants.
“For the most part, if an application meets our guidelines and we feel that it has benefit to the community, even if it’s something that’s got some serious flaws, we do like to make partial awards to encourage folks to keep moving forward,” Holloway said.
In terms of challenges during the cycle, Holloway said that reviewing every single grant can be a daunting task, but thanked his co-chair Applegate for devising a system to move through applications quickly and come back to any undecided applications at the end of the review session.
“We’re a volunteer council, and in terms of the review process, that’s something we’ve really had to work on, because you have a set of unpaid volunteers who are appointed to the council by the town manager, and really to do justice to all 91 of these, we have to use our time smartly…We had a really nice process that my co-chair Julianne Applegate developed and implemented, which was setting a timer for each of the 91 grants and spending five or six minutes per grant, talking about its merits and how folks think it’s likely to play out, whether it’s going to be a full, partial or denial. If we don’t come to a full consensus in six minutes, we move on and then we have our period to revisit anything that we hadn’t determined. So really, the credit goes to Julianne for running a really smooth review process this year,” Holloway said.
With the application and review process over, the cycle now moves to the awards phase, which Holloway describes as “the fun part.”
“We got through [the review process], we got the numbers straight, we got everybody notified and now we’re in the fun part which is working with the town to get paperwork back from our grantees and start to publicize things. What I love is genuinely attending these events or following it, however I can engage with it. I just love it because it’s a wonderful slate of events for the community,” Holloway said.
Speaking of these events, Holloway said that one innovation in the cycle this year was the placement of the dates of each event in the spreadsheet which lists all awardees. This way, community members can check when an event or project is coming up, spread the word and ultimately grow the community.
“In future years we want to do more of that, helping to get the word out about things because they’re all worthwhile in their own right,” Holloway said.
With the awards process coming to a close, the council will now only meet once a month to review project progress. This will last until June, when the cycle begins anew and the process is planned for the upcoming year. Holloway also mentioned that the council will be throwing a Spring Block Party in downtown Amherst.
“Now we go into a little bit of a hibernation phase from January until maybe June or so where we meet once a month and review the ongoing process. Usually there’s correspondence with grantees that we need to review. And then of course, this year will be the planning for any local projects, especially the Block Party which is going to be big for us in May. The whole cycle picks back up in June and we have to review our local guidelines, so we review what worked last year and what we want to change. Right now we’re in the smoother process of the cycle,” Holloway said.
The Spring Block Party is tentatively planned for May 7 from 12 to 5 p.m. It will take place on Amity Street between Pleasant Street and Prospect Street. More information will be released closer to the date.