Grants
Find your Funding: A Guide for Researching Grants & Gifts
If you have never researched grants before, it might be difficult to know where to look. Grants cater to specific projects in the sciences, city development, artistic practice, and more; when you can articulate the specific needs of your project, you will have more success finding the right grant for it. The guide below creates pathways that connect your project with city, state, and national resources, preparing you to direct your grant research for your own needs.
Before you start your research, ask yourself and your community: what geographic region do we cover? what specific needs do we have, and how much money will help us meet those needs? Are there components of the project (rather than the entire project) that we could focus on securing funding for? What is the timeline for completing your community’s needs? Who does the project team consist of and intend to serve? Answer these questions as specifically as possible, and as you think, keywords will emerge that pertain to your community, such as:
- Storytelling
- Northwest Indiana
- Black History
- Archive or archival gaps
- Grassroots
- Digital archiving
- Digital
- Microgrant
- Community-based archive
- Public knowledge
Keep these keywords handy—they will help you narrow your search. The next decision you need to make is whether the scope of your project is better suited for local, state, or national grants.
Local Grants
City councils typically have some local grant funding and staff that can connect grantseekers with pools of money. Search for your city’s council plus “grants” in Google to get started. Or, if you already have a contact in local government, ask them directly. Local grants are often hyper-specific, reducing competition, and/or offer less money than state and national grants. You should also check with the city’s historical office and the city development group. Finally, your keywords for searching local grants can be more specific to your community (such as Calumet region history in addition to Black history).
State Grants
Government and private institutions tend to have larger financial resources than local government does and therefore apply to large-scale projects. Check with your state’s humanities council and financially successful corporations such as the Lilly (whose endowment allocates money for donations).
National Grants
These grants offer the most money and therefore can be more competitive and labor-intensive in the application and project follow-through than are niche, local grants. These are often directed toward filmmakers due to the time and financial cost of producing movies.
Conclusion
These tips should help you to sift through the thousands of funding opportunities and the sometimes-unhelpful search engines hidden behind paywalls. Even partial financial support for your community archiving event or digital preservation can help to bring the project to fruition.