Denverâs COVID-19 Arts & Culture Relief Fund awards new funding to 52 organizations
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and last updated 2021-03-17 13:42:04-04
DENVER â More than 50 arts organizations will receive second-round grants ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 from Denver s COVID-19 Arts & Culture Relief Fund.
After a year of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, many businesses have suffered, including those involved in arts and culture. To help, the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and The Denver Foundation announced Wednesday that 52 local art organizations will receive grants through the second round of the COVID-19 Arts & Culture Relief Fund.
These grants total $892,500, and range from $5,000 to $50,000 per organization.
Gary Steuer, president and CEO of Bonfils-Stanton Foundation, said they are pleased the fund was able to provide more support to the cultural community.
The organizations that excel at getting funds are masters of what Tatiana Hernandez, a seasoned leader in arts philanthropy and the new CEO of Community Foundation Boulder County, calls “grantsmanship.” But polished grants don t necessarily mean an organization is tied to the community or is all that effective at anything other than paperwork and spin.
“Are we giving to organizations that are actually doing the best work? she asks. Or are we giving to organizations that are giving us the best grants?”
Duffy is among those nonprofit leaders who would prefer that foundations focus on her organization’s work and not polished applications, with their time-consuming and needlessly complicated paper and video reports. Still, she and other beleaguered nonprofit leaders play the game, contorting themselves into pretzels to meet foundations requests. They field endless questions from grant managers, rewrite their budgets to fill in each funder’s slightly different form, and
Now the foundations are leading the charge on a second round of funding.
“The arts are a critical component of the Denver metro community bringing us joy, belonging, vibrancy. As a sector, they also employ and generate thousands of jobs in our community, and the truth is, they are experiencing a deep economic crisis due to COVID-19,” explains Bonfils-Stanton Foundation head Gary Steuer. “Right now, many of these groups are barely hanging on, while at the same time working hard to continue to bring the arts into our lives when we need it the most. We must do everything we can to help these organizations survive in the months to come.”
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As the year comes to a close, the pandemic continues to hit Denver’s arts and creative sector especially hard. In the early fall, Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and The Denver Foundation awarded nearly $1.2 million to 41 organizations thanks to the
COVID-19 Arts & Culture Relief Fund. Now, the Foundations are gearing up for a second round of emergency funding.
“The arts are a critical component of the Denver metro community–bringing us joy, belonging, vibrancy. As a sector, they also employ and generate thousands of jobs in our community, and the truth is, they are experiencing a deep economic crisis due to COVID-19,” says Bonifls-Stanton Foundation President & CEO, Gary Steuer. “Right now, many of these groups are barely hanging on, while at the same time, wor