Resources
Funding & Grants
How creative programming gets paid for, and the routes partners most often use to fund it.
Where funding usually comes from
- District and school budgets
- Arts, enrichment, intervention, college and career readiness, and expanded learning lines all fund creative programming, often under names that do not mention the arts at all.
- State and federal programs
- Funding tied to expanded learning, workforce development, career technical education, and student support can carry creative programming where the outcomes line up.
- Philanthropy
- Foundations, family trusts, and donor-advised funds. Usually the fastest route for a pilot, and the most flexible on scope.
- Corporate giving and sponsorship
- Companies fund programming connected to their own industry, community, or workforce goals. Often paired with hosting students or supplying technology.
- City, county, and public agencies
- Arts and culture, youth development, workforce, and library budgets, particularly where a program serves a named neighborhood or population.
What Music to the Ears can help with
Music to the Ears regularly writes into grant applications alongside partners, supplies program descriptions and budgets in the format a funder expects, and provides the implementation detail that a reviewer looks for and most applications leave out. Ask early rather than at the deadline.
What we will not do
Music to the Ears does not supply projected outcome figures for a grant application. Numbers go into a proposal when there is a source behind them, which protects the partner more than it protects us.
Next step
Tell us who you want to reach.
Everything on this page follows from that one answer.