National Endowment for the Arts: Challenge America

Challenge America offers support primarily to small and mid-sized organizations for projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved populations — those whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability. Grants are available for professional arts programming and for projects that emphasize the potential of the arts in community development.

The involvement of professionally trained, experienced artists, and arts professionals is essential. Note that age alone (e.g., youth, seniors) does not qualify a group as underserved; at least one of the underserved characteristics noted above also must be present.

Grants encourage and support the following objective:

• Engagement: Public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across the nation.

Challenge America supports focused, distinct projects that take place over limited periods of time and involve limited geographic areas. All projects must extend the reach of the arts to populations that have limited access to the arts due to geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability. The involvement of experienced artists and arts professionals is essential. An applicant must present a project that reflects only one of the three project types below:

• Guest artist projects: An arts event or events that will feature one or more guest artists
• Cultural tourism: The unified promotion of community-wide arts activities and/or the development of cultural tourism products to enhance public engagement with arts and culture in communities and in cultural districts
• The development of professionally directed public art projects through community engagement: This project type is for visual arts projects, which may be temporary or permanent (e.g., murals, sculptures, multi-media or environmental art developed through a meaningful community engagement process)

Amount: Grants of $10,000 will be made and require a $10,000 match.

Eligibility: Nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3), U.S. organizations; units of state or local government; or federally recognized tribal communities or tribes. Organizations must have a three-year history of programming prior to the application deadline.

Link: https://www.arts.gov/grants-organizations/challenge-america/grant-program-description

Note: The April 12 deadline is for submission to Grants.gov. Applicants must submit additional information to NEA-GO by April 24, 2018.

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