NYC Cultural Innovation Fund
Groundswell Community Mural Project
The Rockefeller Foundation has provided funding to EmcArts to document the work of 16 New York City cultural institutions ranging from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Each organization received a grant of up to $250,000 to develop a project that enriches neighborhoods and builds a better future through art and design in New York City. The grantees are funded through the 2011 Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund (CIF).
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2011 Cultural Innovation Fund Winners Announced
Photo: Bjorn Wallander
The Rockefeller Foundation Gives Nearly $3 Million to Support Local New York City Artists
Support for Local New York City Artists
Afro-Caribbean dancer at the Hostos Center © Marisol Diaz, 2011
The NYC Cultural Innovation Fund supports creativity and the arts, with an emphasis on innovation. The Foundation awards two-year grants, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000, for groundbreaking creative work that enriches the city’s cultural life and strengthens the role that the arts will play in the future of New York.
New York City is currently experiencing tremendous economic, demographic, and social transformation, opening new possibilities to enhance the City's traditional role as a global capital of creativity, culture and diversity and to ensure the future vitality of its cultural sector.
With the Foundation’s support, artists and art communities can build an innovative creative sector that provokes us to react, question and learn. These grants underscore our commitment to the impact and influence that creative expression and innovation can exert on social progress.
Fund Eligibility
Poetry Projection on New Museum Building © Chris Jordan / Bring to Light
The application for 2012 is closed for Idea Submissions.
To qualify, organizations must meet the following criteria:
- Organizations must provide tax exempt or other charitable status.
- Organizations must be located within the five boroughs of New York City.
- Organizations must upload the supporting documents required in the application.
Grants for projects typically fall into one or more of the following categories:
- Creative engagement with the issues shaping New York City's future cultural and civic agenda.
- Programming and premieres of new artistic work that demonstrate fresh perspectives and can activate new directions in the visual, performing and media arts.
- New partnerships among cultural organizations, community-based institutions, universities and the private sector.
- Interventions designed to confront longstanding bottlenecks and limitations on the expansion of cultural vitality with fresh approaches and solutions
Annual Funding Cycle:
- Idea Submissions are web-based and open in early Fall for the upcoming year's round and remain open for approximately five weeks.
- Full Applications are selected from the Idea Submissions and notified via email invitation shortly after the New Year and remain open for approximately six weeks.
- The Foundation selects and announces the Cultural Innovation Fund grants in early summer.
- Grant terms generally begin on July 1 and run for two year terms but can vary depending on projects selected.
- Organizations awarded funding in the current round are not eligible to apply for the following year.
Innovation is a new product, process or service that is discontinuous from previous practice and yields new pathways for solving acute problems or fulfilling mission. Social innovation is often recombinant: a hybridization of existing elements that are combined across boundaries in new ways to yield better solutions, also leaving healthier social relationships in their wake. *
*This definition has been compiled from different articulations by Richard Evans, Geoff Mulgan and Andrew Hargadon