Our Town

Our Town is the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative placemaking grants program. Through project-based funding, we support projects that integrate arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities by advancing local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes.

Successful Our Town projects ultimately lay the groundwork for systems changes that sustain the integration of arts, culture, and design into local strategies for strengthening communities. These projects require a partnership between a local government entity and nonprofit organization, one of which must be a cultural organization; and should engage in partnership with other sectors (such as agriculture and food, economic development, education and youth, environment and energy, health, housing, public safety, transportation, and workforce development). Cost share/matching grants range from $25,000 to $150,000, with a minimum cost share/match equal to the grant amount.

Projects

We encourage applications for artistically excellent projects that integrate arts, culture and design into strategies for strengthening communities. As part of these strategies, arts, culture and design may uniquely:

• Bring new attention to or elevate key community assets and issues, voices of residents, local history, or cultural infrastructure.
• Inject new or additional energy, resources, activity, people, or enthusiasm into a place, community issue, or local economy.
• Envision new possibilities for a community or place - a new future, a new way of overcoming a challenge, or approaching problem-solving.
• Connect communities, people, places, and economic opportunity via physical spaces or new relationships.

The National Endowment for the Arts plans to support a variety of projects across the country in urban, rural, and tribal communities of all sizes.

Visit https://www.arts.gov/grants/our-town/program-description for more information.

Deadlines

• Part 1 - Submit to Grants.gov by August 5, 2021
• Part 2 - Submit to Applicant Portal by August 10 - 17, 2021