A professional grant writer had a piece on the Oregon ArtsWatch website where she expressed her disbelief at the Oregon Arts Commission’s (OAC) new grant guidelines.
But it was all in a good way. Claire Willett writes that not only did they make the process simpler, they also made the use of the money flexible and unrestricted. For years now there have been calls for funders to support operational and administrative expenses rather than excluding them as permitted areas. Oregon Arts Commission is allowing funds to be used for that or pretty much anything else.
OAC also simplified the process significantly. Willett said she would typically write 7-10 pages of narrative for her clients. This year OAC’s goal is to make the application process simple and accessible for organizations who don’t have the capacity to hire a grant writer.
Apparently they made great progress in this direction:
….the week the new system went online, a friend texted me, “Um, I just logged in to look at the new OAC streamlined process and instead I just filled it out and submitted it in less than ten minutes???”
They also eliminated grant review panels. The grant staff at OAC Willett spoke to said that they instructed panelists to focus on the quality of work being done rather than the quality of writing, but they were concerned an unconscious bias toward those who could afford a professional grant writer might exist.
They also eliminated the long narrative sections from the application. (Personally, I was excited to learn they had allowed 5000 characters given most applications ask for a comprehensive review and allow 500 characters. But on the other hand, not having to write a comprehensive review in the first place is awesome.)
Three narrative blocks of five thousand characters each is an intimidating hurdle for applicants facing barriers of education, language, literacy, or simply lack of experience in this specific form of writing, which could mean that really exciting artistic work wasn’t getting taken seriously. The shift, then, was twofold: simplifying the form itself to something anybody can do without professional assistance, and moving the decision-making process in-house to focus on strengthening relationships between the OAC and the organizations they fund.
The OAC sees many of the changes they have made as moving toward the goal of developing and strengthening trust with groups throughout the state. They have even removed the requirement to operate two years as a non-profit from the eligibility criteria for a smaller grant program in recognition of how lengthy the IRS non-profit application process can be.
