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Funding Opportunities
Requested information regarding the availability of grants and/or direct funders interested in supporting projects around religion/deconstructing religion, BIPOC experiences, survivors of violence (interpersonal and institutional), Trans/Transgender identities, and Queerness/LGBTQ experiences is compiled in the attached spreadsheet.
Summary of Findings
Grant#1: Poets $ Writers
- Poets and Writers offer grants for writers who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) and live in Detroit, Houston, or New Orleans.
- As part of our ongoing initiative, these grants will assist BIPOC writers in presenting virtual events that will engage communities in these cities.
Grant#2: The Writers' Colony-Celebrate! Maya Project
- The Writers Colony invites young writers between the ages of 18 and 25 are invited to apply for this fellowship, which focuses on social justice issues such as racial discrimination, women's rights, and educational disparity.
- The work can be in any literary genre, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose, or a combination of the two.
Grant#3: Leeway Foundation- Art and Change Grants
- The Leeway Foundation invites women and trans* artists and cultural producers in Greater Philadelphia to apply for grants of up to $2,500 to fund art for social change projects.
- The grant is project-based and available to artists and cultural producers working in any medium, including traditional, nontraditional, multimedia, and experimental forms.
Research Strategy
After a long and exhaustive search for organizations that offer grants and/or direct funding to support projects around religion/deconstructing religion, BIPOC experiences, survivors of violence (interpersonal as well as institutional), Trans/Transgender identities, and Queerness/LGBTQ experiences, the research team was only able to find 2 organizations that met the given criteria; which was to include grants that had to amount to at least $5,000. The grants also had to be open to book projects that already have a publisher and have to be currently open for applications (or at least open before the end of the summer). However, in our research, we were able to come across one organization that met a majority of said criteria except for the amount they had to grant. The Leeway Foundation offered a grant of up to $2,500, which was half of the asked amount. Moreover, the research team noted that several grant offering organizations had already met their deadlines for the year with some very close deadlines. These organizations include but are not limited to; Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Royal Society of Literature, to mention a few.
While conducting our research, we focused mostly on organizations in North America, specifically the U.S. The research team also tried to provide organizations that did not have state constriction, meaning that only individuals of a particular state could be helped by the grants being offered. Here, the research team was able to identify a few organizations that highlight the grants available to both BIPOC writers and those in the LGBTQIA community. The research team also noted that due to the current pandemic, some organizations did not offer grants for the year 2021, while others like the Literary Arts Emergency Fund "provided $3.5 million to the literary arts, a field that COVID-19 has disastrously impacted. Regrants from this fund were made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."