I had some music I was hoping to play from a local artist from Peaks Island and I just don't - I'm not a Zoom expert enough to figure it out so I apologize. I'm gonna get a second I'll put the link in there for you. So, okay, Sally, should we get started and hit record?
recording in progress
Hello everybody. Welcome to our information session. My name is Nat May I use he him pronouns. I am the Arts Program Officer for the Onion Foundation. Today I am working in my home office in South Portland and I'm joined by my Onion Foundation colleagues, Sally and Susan and Roz. You all can wave here too.
We are recording the session. You may choose to leave your camera off if you don't want to appear in the recording. Or we're happy to see your face.
We're going to go through our arts program grant making process and I'm going to talk kind of fast because that's what I do when I'm trying to get through a presentation. But also we value conversation and want to hear your questions so we'll make sure to leave time for that at the end. So if you if you haven't yet, we invite you to tell us who you are and in the chat and you can tell us how you're celebrating this new new light we're finding as the days are to lengthen.
So here's a quick agenda. We're going to talk about the foundation, the mission and the history. We're going to talk about our grant criteria and eligibility. We're going to give an overview of what the arts program is all about. We're going to talk about an upcoming grant deadline in March and in those subsequent deadline in the fall. And we'll tell you about how we evaluate the grants and then we'll get into some questions for you.
So first, here is the mission. The mission of the foundation is to build a more equitable and healthy Maine by deepening the connection of all people to the arts and nature. So we are a private philanthropic foundation working to provide people in Maine with meaningful connections to experiences in the arts in the natural environment, to inspire them to listen to those resources for future upside to sustain those resources for future generations through our grant making and other support to help organizations build their capacity and efficiently achieve their goals. We pay particular attention to rural and under resourced communities and our commitment to fostering and inclusive equitable Maine underlines everything we do. So to date, the foundation has made 566 Arts grants to 217 organizations totaling about $6.6 million. Susan and Fritz onion formed the foundation in 2014. They made their first grants in 2015 through outreach and we've since taken on a more an open application process. That's what we're talking about today. So that folks around the state can tell us what they're doing and request funds. They chose to work in the arts environment sectors because both of those areas bring their families joy and fulfillment. And there's so much meaning to the work that we do for all kinds of health and social benefit reasons. But we don't want to lose back the fact of being joyful in our lives through this work.
So we have some general criteria to make organizations eligible for our grantmaking. We fund 501c3 nonprofit organizations who are designated as such by the Internal Revenue Service. We do find ways to fund projects that are fiscally sponsored through nonprofit organization. If you're not working with a nonprofit organization, often it's helpful to talk with us if that's your situation before you work too much on your application.
Our funding is based in Maine and focused on Maine people. We really want people in Maine to have access to the work that you're doing, and that's the primary criteria for our organization. We do make space for project and program support as well as general operating support and we've really trended over the last few years to make more general operating support grants and more multi year commitments for those operating grants. For our purposes, when we're talking about funding organizations, we're really talking about groups of people who are working to make something available within their community. In the arts in particular, it gets a little confusing when you have artists who are doing work and sometimes find a fiscal sponsor, to be able to produce their work for events or other kinds of sharing with the community. That's not our orientation. So we're really more focused on the organizations that are presenting the work.
So our arts program recognizes the important roles in creativity and sharing of culture and our different perspectives. We feel that the arts are essential for developing our intellect our capacity for joy and compassion, and our feelings of connection to one another so important these days. That we want to connect your work with audiences around Maine and its makers and give people real opportunities for expression learning and inspiration.
So we have three strategies that define the work we do in the art sector for this arts program. The first one is to increase access for educational opportunities in the arts. The second one is to support the public's engagement in art programs. And the third is about building the capacity of the art sector in Maine. That third one is important for us to talk about, but it's not what our upcoming grant deadline is about. That tends to be for invited proposals only our main grant in that area is the for the Cultural Alliance at Maine.
Most of our grants go to organizations with an arts mission that are providing ongoing programs throughout the year. We fund all kinds of organizations at all scales. Sometimes they have they're large and have a lot of staff sometimes they don't have any staff at all. We don't tend to support organizations that have just a one day event through the year or you know like a one time one off kind of a thing. So, strategy one arts education. We want to give people in Maine the chance to express themselves to learn about expressing themselves and experience skill building in the arts. We are looking for programs and plans that are well organized that are led by someone with some kind of expertise, skilled teachers. We like seeing some kind of a curricula curriculum plan, some kind of intention. We don't generally fund organizations who have created more casual drop in kind of like activity models for arts education. If you're working in the arts education space, and you charge tuition for your programs, we'd really like to know how you're considering those tuition levels. How you think about the costs? We understand tuition is an important income stream for a lot of arts organizations. But we want to know how you're making accommodations for folks who can't meet the tuition expectation. We tend to be more interested in organizations who acknowledge that at times there should be a low barrier opportunity to participate in the work that you're doing. We're less interested when an organization has a veiled process or an onerous application. Often when we're reviewing a proposal, I will just go to the website or you know, whatever access point there is for that program, pretend I'm a participant or a parent and see what how I would feel if I was trying to figure out how I could get access. Some organizations do a really good job of explaining what their intentions are and what their opportunities are. And I've seen other organizations that I'm really not sure what the likelihood of getting that support would be and yet they're asking for a lot of personal information. So we're, I think that's trending out. That's a conversation we can have with you.
So for our second strategy, supporting public engagement, we really want to know not just that you're doing great programs, and you're selecting great artists and stories to share, but that you're really thoughtful about how you after you've made those programmatic decisions. How are you inviting people to interact with those programs? Who are you inviting? How does your community know that it feels like it's wanted at your program? How are people going to belong your programs? Not every program is for everyone. We don't expect that to be true. We want to know that you've been thoughtful about ---- So we want to know how your organization has been thinking about who you want to be in your audience, how you're connecting with those folks, how you're inviting them.
And then our third strategy as I was mentioning before, building the capacity of our sector, this is not something we're asking you to propose to us through this upcoming grant cycle. These happen a little more informally, through conversations we're having with folks in the field. The Cultural Alliance of Maine is a new initiative that is developing Advocacy and Policy building models for the art sector. So that's something we've been supporting. Excuse me. We've also been experimenting with some capacity building and technical assistance programs for our grantees. Currently, we have offered some capacity assessment tools, some financial literacy training. We're just getting into some cohort learning opportunities for organizations to establish good practices and policies for working with LGBTQ plus communities. And we're also working with the Data Innovation Project to create an open source, easy to use accessible tool so you all can figure out how to track demographic data for your audiences and the artists you're working with and even your leadership and your organization. So those are just some other things that we're working on {in that strategy}.
So when you submit an application to us, we really want you to spell out the basics of your work. You know, we in the last couple of years, we've made grants to about 150 Different organizations as I was saying before, they're all shapes and sizes and choose different kinds of ways of intersecting with their communities. So it's really helpful for us, if you can be specific about what you're offering, what you do who it's for. I'm I'm a very visual thinker. So if you can really spell out what it is and how it works and I can close my eyes and imagine myself there at your program that really helps me get behind what you're trying to achieve. If you're vague, or you don't say how it works, or really tell us numbers of things, it gets a little more cloudy and then we have to follow up with you and ask questions. So these are some of the questions we would ask while we're reviewing. I'm sorry, I'm looking at the wrong thing. Here we go. This is this is what we're asking, Who has access to the work as I was saying before, how are you engaging the community that you're working with? Do you ask your community to give you input with your programs or their partners that are natural for you when you're doing this work? What are your goals? You know, just tell it tell us all these kind of basic things. We don't want these to be burdensome questions. We assume that you would have thought about these things beforehand and the application is just a chance to tell us what the answers are. We're very interested in how arts organizations around Maine are thinking about equity, social equity, racial equity. How are you using the resources that you have to make sure that people around you can get access to what you have to offer?
So here's our timeline for upcoming cycle. We have an open application process currently with a deadline of March 13 at the end of the day. We'll review those applications and notify everyone of results in May. We do sometimes reach back out to folks for questions, so it's helpful if you don't stop checking your email after you've submitted on March 13. You might need to be available for a little bit of clarification. This spring deadline is a really good time orientation if you're an organization that has a calendar fiscal year, and you want general operating support from us, because the end of your grant period would be the end of December, and we'd get a report from you early next year around this time. And that sets us up for the next cycles. We have a fall deadline. The deadline this year will be on September 18. And it's a similar good cycle for organizations that have a July to June fiscal year. We get that you finish the year at the end of June. You report to us in August, and then we're considering you again in the next fall cycle. These are for general operating grants. Those are not hard and fast rules and I know some of you have different kinds of fiscal year dates and we can talk to you about setting that up the right way.
So we have a preview of our grant application. You don't have to log into our system. If you just want to know what our application process looks like. There's an application link, a preview link on our website. It's a Google Doc, you can save a copy of that Google doc you can use it as a place to draft your answers. You can share it with folks in your organization. And if you have any questions about what's in there, feel free to ask us when we get into the review, we're reading everything very carefully. As I said we might reach out to you for clarification. You know, we're not really interested in some sort of gold standard professional grant writing status for you. We want to know that you know what you're doing - you can communicate the basics to us. We're not going to take off points for any you know, minor mistakes or things like that. But do try to make it clear. Do follow our instructions. We've tried really hard to ask for the information in our grant application with some intention because it helps us figure out what we want to know about. We have we have long, deep discussions about the applications and are really trying to be really considerate about what we're reading and thoughtful. And then we have a pretty good, I would say we have a pretty high approval rate from our applications. Not because we can just give money to everybody but because we do a lot of work on the front end, talking to you all about what our expectations are and what our goals are. And I'd say most of the grants that we don't approve, either just did not meet our our goals or eligibility, or they might have even talked to us and then didn't didn't take our guidance about what we're likely to find kind of went off in a different direction. And then it's not, not within our interest areas.
So this is a little bit of a intro into our grant making system we use this product called Giving Data. Excuse me, you need a login. Sally can help you with some of that if you're having trouble. If you are applying to some of our other colleague foundations, I mean I think the Davis family foundation uses Giving Data, some others, so you might already have a login there. One thing that's great about this system is it allows for multiple people to log in and work on the same application. We really prefer that you use an email that you check frequently and that's particular to you to log in rather than a bunch of people sharing a login. So that you know if you need a password reset or whatever it goes to you. Data Management is a whole thing and we try to help you if you need it. So I've talked about that a lot of stuff. I have probably haven't said everything that I could. I'm definitely available to have conversations one on one with you if you have particular concerns or want to talk through your request with me. Sally is going to put in the chat a link to the way you can book a time to talk with me that's also available on our website. I'm the best person to ask about your program fit for our grant making. And then Sally is ready to help you with technical needs. If you're having trouble logging into our system or getting things set up. I feel like I said a lot of stuff real fast. And now I just want to hear what you have or questions. So you can go ahead and you're welcome to raise your hand or write something in the chat. Or just unmute yourself and speak up
all right, my name is Margaret Shively and I'm attending representing a singing group in Southern Maine. We've never applied to my knowledge to Onion but we are looking for some operating expense money this year. This group this organization, the seaglass performing arts folks we've been doing this for, this is 30 year old organization. We're open to non any singers - we don't audition. So it's a pretty open group to join. Our audiences or the public we do two or three concerts twice a year. And I just kind of wondering if you think that kind of an organization would be something that we could apply for for a small organization or operational expense grant?
Yeah, based on what you've said, it sounds sounds like a good thing to talk to us about or to submit a request for. We are funding a few other you know, localized kind of community choir type singing groups, some of them have an audition process. Some of them don't have an audition process. Many of them are oriented around the the the the main activity is the group singing together itself and then they sometimes perform for the public. So you know, it doesn't have to be the public performance doesn't necessarily have to be your main goal. We just want to know, you know a little bit more about what you said, you know, you're open to anybody. So what does that mean to you and how do you get the word out and you know, how do you some there's, there's so many different models, we just want to understand what yours is so right.
Well, our mission statement is to bring good quality choral music to local communities at a reasonable price. So our reason to sing is to prevent is to present a couple of concerts so right yeah, I think that will thank you. Sure.
Hi, Meredith Martin, with Kneisel Hall. I have a question. We actually applied last year and were denied for some community outreach programs that we do in the summer. We are exclusively a summer excuse me music festival in school. So we do not have ongoing year round. programs. So wanted to know, first of all, if we should apply again, and if we did apply again, would you recommend perhaps applying for a different program we also run a program for students of Maine. Maine student program is what it's called. It's a week long music festival that happens at the very beginning of our season, and only Maine students are invited to apply so serving the Maine community in that way. But it is it it does happen every summer although it is not year round. Ongoing in that way.
Yeah, thanks for the question, Meredith. And that's it's your I think this is everyone's benefit. You know, we're not we don't we know that not everything happens year round. So ongoing doesn't necessarily mean every month. I think what what we, what we mean by that ongoing statement is that you're not an organization that has just decided that you want to try an arts program in the summer, and that's all you want to do. Right? So I do recall your your proposal from last year and I don't have my notes about it in front of me on the spot. So I'd suggest you just set up a call for us to talk about it more specifically. Okay, thank you.
Yes, Janet.
You're on mute. So you'll have to unmute yourself.
My apologies. I was having trouble getting to the unmute. So my name is Janet raffle, and I'm from the Maine Jewish Museum. And since we hired an Executive Director about two years ago, the number of arts programs that we've been running has expanded pretty significantly. And I'm wondering whether if we're going to be applying for an operating grant. You want to hear about the breadth of our programming or whether you would prefer that we select one or two or so to focus on.
Without knowing more about the breadth, the you know the full scope of the programs and what you have planned. It's hard for me to answer that question, but I would I would encourage you to set up a time to talk with me and we can just we can get into more specifics about what you're doing.
Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, I don't need to bore everybody with our entire agenda.
We have other questions that I can answer. Sorry, it sounds like I'm not answering questions. Really. I'm just telling people to meet with me. But then sometimes there are questions that I can answer and that other people might benefit from.
And I talk I don't know how to Natasha. Hi, am
I muted? You're not muted. Oh, okay. Yeah.
I have two questions. One is do you need letters from the different allies you're working with within the school and the museums and the community?
That is a great question. Thank you for asking that. So, in general, we've never, we've never required any kind of letter of support, letter of partnership, that kind of thing. However, we are more and more now, when organizations are planning to work with a public school- we are asking for some kind of a commitment from that, from that school and you know, a person at that school a leader at that school, who actually is in a position to make the commitment to work with the nonprofit organization. The reason we're doing that is we have made a number of grants to organizations that had great plans, great intentions, were ready to do the work. And it's an it's just the fact that a lot of times schools and Maine are saying actually we did not have the capacity to work with you, we're not ready to work with you or the teacher that wanted to work with you is no longer here or there any number of reasons that are not always clear to us, but but those programs aren't working out the way we thought that would work out at the time we made the grant. So we're hoping that the opportunity of the grant is a good prompt for a school official, you know, could be a superintendent or a principal to say yes, we do want this work to happen in our school and we do value the work that this organization is going to do. And that happens early in the process. So that we feel good about making the grant commitment and you feel good about actually continuing to plan to do that work with that partner so that no one's wasting their time.
Thanks. And I have one other question. Sure. Is matching money and in kind money helpful?
So we don't have requirements about matching funds or in kind funds or volunteerism or anything like that. I will say we don't often fully fund any one program. And that's not to say it never happens. Our expectation is that when you're sharing a budget with us that you are naming all of the sources that contribute to the doing that work, so that might that might be other grants that might be some earned revenue, that might be in kind support, et cetera. So we don't we don't have we're not asking you to orient and organize all that in any one particular way. We just want to know what your plan is.
Any other questions Natasha? Oh, okay.
We have a possibility of asking MOFGA to be the fiscal sub sponsoring agent or the Union of Maine Visual Artists. Do you look much more favorably upon an arts organization? That all their work is arts related?
In terms of fiscal sponsorship, I think the most important thing is that you have a relationship with the fiscal sponsor and that you that the fiscal sponsor understands you you know, if you're doing a project with Moscow and you want Moscow to be the grantee, maybe that makes sense. If if you're just finding you know, a fiscal sponsor organization because your your sister's partner works for that organization, and they said they'd be willing to that may not be the right kind of, you know, relationship that serves what you're going for. So, I think, you know, our preference typically would be that your fiscal sponsor organization has a mission that fits within our program area. So whether you're an environmental organization, seeking a fiscal sponsor, you'd want to you want that to be an environmental fiscal sponsor. If you're an arts organization, it's preferable that your fiscal sponsor is an arts organization. There might be reasons to work differently. Thank you. Just Just as an aside, we have teamed up with some other partners around Maine to commission a study on the state of fiscal sponsorship and Maine we're gonna try to do some work to understand who the fiscal sponsors are around the state, what the needs are of organizations that that require Fiscal Sponsorship. We're really interested in supporting the fiscal sponsor model because we don't think the world necessarily needs new nonprofit organizations for all of the activities that we want to see happen. So that's a that's a thing that we're working on this year. Thanks, any other questions?
I see someone asked in the chat if this will be available. Yes, we're recording this and it'll be posted to our website.
Great, well, if you don't have any questions, we can we can finish up let you go about your day. And, again, please do be in touch with us. We'd love to chat with you. I'd even love to chat with you twice. Two different meetings if that's helpful, rather than you spending too much time trying to figure out how to write something in a request and then us spending too much time trying to figure out what you were trying to tell us. You know, sometimes, sometimes a quick phone call or a Zoom meeting, or an email exchange can really be helpful to clarify some things. So we really appreciate your attendance and your interest in our work, and we wish you luck with what you're trying to work on. Thank you Thank you.