CNY Arts strives to support and sustain a vibrant arts and culture scene in Central New York by providing innovative programming and critical resources available to artists and art, culture, and heritage organizations across our community. Our funding priorities reflect this mission.
We are consistently surveying artists, arts and culture organizations, and audiences to learn more about their needs, and adjusting our activities accordingly to balance breadth and depth, and to provide support and access where it is most needed.
In addition, specific grants will often target defined geographic areas, organization types/sizes, disciplines, etc., according to the guidelines determined by our funders.
If you would like to share thoughts on where support is most needed, or how we are doing in addressing those needs, please reach out to grants@cnyarts.org. Constituent engagement is necessary for us to fulfill our mission, and we are always happy to hear from you.
The majority of grants administered by CNY Arts are regrants, which means that we receive those funds from government entities (i.e., public funders) or other large grant-making bodies. These sources have included:
State agencies, such as:
- The New York State Council on the Arts
- Empire State Development
- The Department of Education
Federal sources, such as
- The National Endowment for the Arts
Local units of government, such as
- The County of Onondaga
- The City of Syracuse
as well as local and national private foundations.
CNY Arts applies to these grantors to receive these funds for the field, and works with these grantors on formulating grant guidelines and applications. In this way, CNY Arts itself is both a grantee and a (re)granting organization.
Regional arts councils (like CNY Arts) allow for a decentralized funding model that favors local decision-making, facilitated by those councils and practiced in partnership with their local communities. This “ground level” perspective helps to ensure that resources are accessible and tailored to the needs of applicants and grantees.
This fluctuates based on the amount of regrant funding we receive, and has ranged in the past five years from $1.2 million to $3.5 million. These amounts correspond to various types of grants, including support for individual artists, project-specific support, general operating support for cultural organizations and venues, a film fund, and increased capacity for marketing and audience cultivation.
Due to the nature of regranting, our grant cycle can vary. Much (not all) of the funding we receive is awarded annually, and we must reapply for regrant funds each year. That means our grant cycle is dependent on when we receive the funding for which we apply, which is somewhat changeable. Once we have secured funding for a grant program, we will work to develop guidelines, open the application portal, convene panelists, and announce awards.
Unfortunately, we are rarely able to fund off-cycle grant requests or unsolicited proposals submitted outside of our designated application windows. We encourage potential applicants to plan accordingly and apply during the announced application periods.
To stay updated on grant opportunities and application deadlines, we recommend signing up for our grant opportunities newsletter, which you can do from our homepage.
- For each grant opportunity, we do a staff review to ensure that the applications we receive meet the guidelines.
- Then, an independent peer review panel (made up of local artists and arts and culture administrators who represent the disciplines and counties eligible for the specific award) evaluates applications in order to determine which submissions present the strongest case for funding.
- Panelists come to us via nomination (click here to learn more about the nomination process and to see a list of recent panelists).
- Those panelists assess applications according to a scoring rubric that is published along with program guidelines for applicants to view prior to submitting proposals. Panelists are given a period of several weeks to review and evaluate applications, after which they will meet to discuss their comments and vote on which applications to fund.
- Our staff uses those recommendations to determine exact funding allocations.
We support artists and arts and culture organizations in Cortland, Herkimer, Madison, Onondaga, Oneida, and Oswego Counties – these are the regions for which we were designated to provide regrants and services by The New York State Council on the Arts via their Decentralization Program. (You can learn more about our history here.)
Many funders support their money going to arts organizations that they know will use it to compensate artists, rather than giving awards directly to individual artists.
To learn more about the history of public funding for artists, see https://www.giarts.org/support-individual-artists-timeline.
To learn about how you can advocate for the kinds of public spending on arts and culture that you want to see, check out: https://www.americansforthearts.org/advocate.
To learn more about other funding sources for individual artists, visit:
- Artist Trust’s List of National Funders for Individual Artists (by Discipline)
- Cranbrook Art’s Grants and Other Funding Sources for Individual Artists
- Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Grants to Artists
The size of our awards is determined by a combination of factors. In some cases, the maximum amount we can regrant is set by our funders. In other cases, our peer-review panels decide awards based on an equitable rationale that considers available funding, applicants’ budgets, panel criteria and priorities, etc. Our aim is to balance impact on individual artists and organizations, with simultaneously serving the greatest number of artists and organizations.
We endeavor to be as transparent as possible about what we are looking for in a grant application, to take out the guesswork on the part of the applicant. But we understand that grant-writing can feel like its own skill or language, and we offer a number of resources here.
One way to become more confident in your grant-writing is to serve as a grant panelist. You might consider offering your services to any local granting organization, or you can reach out to us if you would like to serve on a future grants panel with CNY Arts.
We aim to make applications as streamlined as possible, while still collecting all the details we need to remain in compliance with our funding sources. Through the questions we ask, we seek to gather enough information about you, your project, and/or your organization, that our peer reviewers can properly advocate for the projects that best meet CNY Arts’ funding priorities. Our applications include optional short surveys, where applicants can let us know how much time each application takes to complete, and provide any additional feedback on their experience.
Our funders require certain information about how their funding is allocated – so we use your final reports to write our own final compliance report for our funders. This process ensures transparency and best practice as we are tasked with the responsibility to steward public and private resources. It is also another way that we can understand how well these funds are serving CNY artists, arts and culture organizations, and audiences. We are invested in your work meeting its goals, and in supporting your efforts to achieve them.