Oregon Arts & Culture

Our Oregon Arts & Culture* grants seek to support imaginative arts and cultural organizations that nourish our humanity and help build healthy, soulful, and vibrant communities. 

This includes (but isn’t limited to) organizations that:

• Prioritize artists, arts students, and audiences from historically marginalized communities, and celebrate and preserve diverse traditions and heritage.
• Increase under-resourced communities’ access to, participation in, and social and economic benefit from arts and cultural activities.
• Provide arts, arts education, or cultural programming that overlaps with our other funding priorities.
• Work in research, policy, or advocacy to improve outcomes, access, and funding for arts, arts education, and culture at a statewide level.

Oregon Arts & Culture grants receive a smaller portion of our annual grants budget. Accordingly, these grants tend to be smaller than grants in other categories, typically averaging $10,000. Applicants with annual incomes under $5 million are often more competitive than organizations with larger annual incomes. Systems-change organizations may be more likely to receive larger grants.

We don’t fund:

• Arts and culture organizations that are based in or serve states/regions other than Oregon.
• Organizations that don’t center under-resourced communities (including both artists and audiences). Note: we do fund, and encourage applications from, statewide arts/cultural advocacy or policy organizations.
• Organizations with budgets greater than $10 million.
• We used to fund education. We no longer fund education, but we do fund some arts education initiatives under our arts and culture grants. We do not fund arts education initiatives that are housed in private, charter, or public schools, colleges, or universities. Note: 501(c)3-run arts educational programs that operate across multiple schools will be considered.
• School bands, choirs, etc.
• PTAs and school boards.
• Aquaria, zoos, and tourism or experiential attractions.
• New: Playgrounds and other non-program-related capital projects.
• Summer camps, outdoor schools, hospital-based arts, children’s theatres, educational travel, one-off workshops, or other one-time or short-term arts educational or arts opportunities.
• Individual artists, including organizations that center the work of a single performer or creator.
• New: Programs that have a tuition element, even if there are tuition waivers or subsidies. (This is a new criteria: if you are a past partner that this affects, please reach out.)
• Artists residencies and educational retreats.
• Financing requests for independent films, books, podcasts, etc.
• Faith-based organizations. Note: We will consider supporting history, heritage, and cultural organizations or projects that explain or interpret a religious community’s experience or traditions as long as they are open to the public, non-proselytizing, and not based in a school or house of worship (eg. Oregon Jewish Museum and Holocaust Education Center).

Please review our grants overview and general eligibility criteria. We also recommend you explore our grants history for examples of previous arts and education organizations funded.

Thank you for your consideration.

*UPDATE: As of 2025, we are no longer accepting new applications in the Oregon Education space. We still fund in arts, culture, and arts education under our Arts & Culture priority (please see our list of previous partners for examples), and we will continue to consider applications from legacy education partners that have received grants from us within the last two years.

Please reach out if you have questions for us. We apologize: last year, we only gave 4.75% of our funding to Oregon education initiatives and do not feel that we are funding impactfully in that space. We will still accept LOIs from legacy education organizations that have been funded within the past two years,

Photo credit: Wasim Muklashy Photography, Ecology in Classrooms and Outdoors