Oregon Arts & Education

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

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

• Combat education inequities, improve education outcomes, and advocate for the future success of students and families.
• Support adult learners, digital literacy, vocational training and other less well-resourced categories of education.
• Prioritize artists 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, cultural, or educational programming that overlaps with our other funding priorities (for example, STEM education and climate literacy).
• Work in research, policy, or advocacy to improve outcomes, access, and funding for arts, culture, and education at a statewide level.

Oregon Arts & Education is a secondary funding priority for us and receives 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, culture, or education organizations that are based in or serve states/regions other than Oregon, including orphanages.
• Organizations that don’t center under-resourced communities (including both artists and audiences). Note: we do fund, and encourage applications from, statewide education or arts/cultural advocacy or policy organizations.
• Organizations with budgets greater than $10 million.
• Private, charter, or public schools, colleges, or universities. Note: 501(c)3-run educational programs that operate across multiple schools will be considered.
• Athletic teams, school bands, choirs, etc.
• PTAs and school boards.
• Aquaria, zoos, and tourism or experiential attractions.
• New: Playgrounds and other non-program-related capital projects.
• Updated: Summer camps, outdoor schools, hospital-based arts, children’s theatres, educational travel, one-off workshops, or other one-time or short-term educational or arts opportunities.
• Updated: 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.)
• Updated: Artists residencies and educational retreats.
• New: Financing requests for independent films, books, podcasts, etc.
• Updated: Faith-based organizations. Note: We will consider supporting history, heritage, educational, 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.

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