FAQ

Creative Work Fund grants range in amount from $15,000 to $45,000.

It’s in to the grantseeker portal of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund: https://haassr.fluxx.io

Complete the artist or the organizational eligibility quiz to request your grantseeker credentials. .

Enter “Lead Artist” in the Title field under Personal Contact Information.

Register anyway. We can associate you with your collaborating organization once you have that information in hand. However, you will need that information before you can complete a letter of inquiry.

Two steps.

1. Talk to your collaborating organization contacts to confirm they already have a grantseeker account with us. If they don’t, they may complete the organizational eligibility quiz to request an account.
2. Once your collaborators have grantseeker accounts, email us with their contact and organization information.

We will connect your account to the collaborating organization and send an update to all.

Request a reminder.

It is fine for you to participate in both projects as long as you are not the “lead artist” for more than one of them.  However, the Fund tries to support a range of projects and artists; the two projects will be competing against each other; and in a “close call” it might influence a decision.

You don’t need to have the site confirmed though you should identify some options that seem plausible.

Yes. Only one organization may be the applicant entity, but another organization may be involved.

That is fine if it has a local office and staff with whom you can collaborate.

You may use a fiscal sponsor.  If you choose to do so, the Creative Work Fund will assess the financial stability and organizational reliability of the fiscal sponsor and will evaluate the genuineness of the collaborative partnership between the applying artist and the organization that does not yet have nonprofit status.

Your group may apply for a collaboration with a nonprofit organization.  One member of the group will need to put his or her name forward as the “lead artist” on behalf of everyone.  For example, Taen Linh Saelee served as lead artist on behalf of the Mien Needlework Group, which collaborated with Asian Community Mental Health Services to create traditional Mien wedding costumes.

Yes, that would be fine.  A lead artist may not be an employee or a board member of the organization with which he or she is collaborating.  However, having occasionally done a project with or volunteered for the organization is fine.  If you have questions about your eligibility, call the Creative Work Fund.

Use the Summary Budget form that follows the Narrative section of the LOI.

We encourage applicants to summarize their major sources of income and major costs in 8-12 lines. The readers will want to know that the project budget is feasible and that the project partners are planning to spend two-thirds of the funds on artists’ fees and artists’ direct expenses.

Watch this project budget tutorial on Vimeo.

Click the green plus sign in the Request Attachments box. It’s on the right in the grey header of the box. Follow the prompts to select your file, tag it as a “Manuscript” in the drop down box, and upload.

We don’t permit applicants to delete uploaded materials, but not to worry. If you upload an updated attachment, we’ll only use the most recent one.

It’s harmless. Our system is alerting you whenever a change has been made to your requests, documents or information there. You can click the“update available” badge to refresh your screen.

You are welcome to. However, for convenience you might consider placing all 20 images in a folder on the web. Cut and paste the link to that folder into your CWF proposal.

If your folder is hosted by a storage service (such as Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox), share the folder per the instructions of your storage provider. Cut and paste the link to the shared folder into your CWF proposal.

No, the Creative Work Fund does not mind being a project’s only source of support. It also does not mind project budgets that are higher than $45,000 as long as the project partners have reasonable plans for raising the balance of funds needed.

Not necessarily.  Project budgets should be reasonable and well-considered.  It’s just as much of a disadvantage to request a grant that appears to be too low to meet your goals as it would be to request a grant that appears higher than is reasonable to complete your project plan.

Yes, but they must be two different letters and, if competitive, only one of the two projects would be invited to submit a full proposal.

Yes, a fiscal sponsor may be part of an unlimited number of projects.

Organizations and artists that received grants in 2016 or earlier are eligible to apply if they have completed their projects and submitted their final reports.

The Fund likely will receive 50-80 letters of inquiry in media arts and 50-80 letters of inquiry in performing arts.  From among these, it will invite up to 25 full proposals in each category. An estimated 15 grants will be awarded.

A minimum of two-thirds of the project budget must be dedicated to paying the artists or covering their direct expenses for creating the work.

A lead artist may substitute a conversation with the Creative Work Fund director (with an interpreter) if that would be a better method of reporting on the project.

Email us or call 415-402-2793.