 So welcome everyone. My name is Angela Mills and I work for the Town of Amherst. I welcome you all to this webinar today. It is being hosted in webinar format on Zoom and the recording will later be uploaded to our Town of Amherst YouTube channel. And I'd like to introduce the chair of the Amherst Cultural Council, Matt Holloway. Thanks, Angela. So I see we have one person in attendance right now, and you may certainly use the the Q&A box to put in any questions you'd like to let me do address. But as Angela said, and thank you very much for the intro and for setting us up Angela as always. I'm actually the co-chair of the Amherst Cultural Council. And we are about to open our, in fact, we just did open our FY23 grant cycle. And so part of that process for us is a mandatory public meeting that the Cultural Council holds where we answer questions from the public and just sort of talk through our grant review or grant application cycle, I should say. So the grant window opened on September 1 yesterday, and it'll remain open until October 17. And I believe it's a midnight deadline, but I would say, you know, try to get in by noon on the 17th, and you'll be good. So what I like to do is kind of hold for a minute at the very outset to see if our attendees, our live attendees have any questions. And I'll just look at the Q&A box for that. But assuming not all I'm really going to do is share my screen and sort of walk you through the process of applying for an Amherst Cultural Council grant. We will have a second live session in a couple of days. I actually don't have the date right in front of me. I will find that. I'll have a live session coming up in just shortly. I'll show you in a second. And so, you know, if you if you're watching this recording at home, and you're thinking to yourself, oh shoot, you know, I have some questions that I want to ask them. You can always email me or my co-chair, you just reach us through Angela's email address, which I'll show you in a second on the website. And we'll be happy to answer in your questions that way. But also you can come to our second session as well. So, without any further ado, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Go ahead, Angela. So, Matt, I just wanted to give you a heads up when we host in webinar format that Q&A is an operable function in our webinar format so you actually have to look at the participants list and look for a raised hand. Okay, thank you for that clarification. So I don't see a raised hand now but please to RORO please raise your hand if you have questions and I'll be happy to hop over. I'm sharing my screen and I'm one of these people I like to just show people straight, you know, the process from the get go so what I would recommend is that you just Google Amherst Cultural Council, and then we should be your first hit there. And it's going to bring you to the Amherst Cultural Council website. We do keep this current. So it's always worth just hopping over here to see what's going on with it with the ACC. And you see over on the right Angela Mills who is the executive assistant to the town manager is also our staff liaison which is wonderful. And she's very responsive to emails or phone calls. So if you have questions, you can just reach out to Angela and she will get those to myself or Julianne Applegate who is my co-chair, and we'll get back to you promptly. So you see here just a quick overview of what the cultural council is and what we do. So today's session right here, the second at noon. Our second session will be on the 12th at six. And so please feel free to join us at six o'clock on September 12 for another one of these info sessions if you're looking to get any of your questions answered. Let me just scroll down for a second you can see that the cultural council is made of nine appointed members. So Julianne Applegate and myself are the co-chairs. We have our treasurer, and then we have six other voting numbers as well. And it's a wonderful group and if you are an Amherst resident and you're looking to get involved. Please reach out to Angela and we'll get your name on the on the list we're always looking for for new members. So, a couple of things I want to point out on the website. You'll see as we get into the grant application a lot of talk about accessibility. And this is folks who are willing to make an effort to improve the accessibility of their presentation. So we did a recording with with the Massachusetts cultural council earlier this year in April and recorded that so you can access that recording and some of the materials relevant to it on that website there. So we're here to see the list of last year's grant awardees. And you'll see when you do that that we really award award grants to a wide range of a very diverse group of grantees. Everything from sort of the large town institutions that you might think of when you think of Amherst culture like the cinema or some of the larger galleries down to individual artists and and folks who are trying to, you know, just do individuals doing individual projects. So, enough said on that page keep an eye there we do a lot of stuff we're also active on Facebook and Instagram and so if you're if you use social media we're fairly active on there as well. Let me just show you our, our application process. So I just clicked on the link here it said, you know the grant application will be available on the MCC website. So I clicked on that link and that's this is where it brought me this is the mass cultural council website. Kind of a dedicated page for each town, town cultural council, myself and Julian. We will update this email address this email addresses is no longer functioning but if you email to this address, it will get to us actually so don't worry about that. This is our allocation from the state for this year 53 eight. However, that number goes up a little bit because we roll unspent grantees who didn't spend their funds for whatever reason this current year will roll some of that in so we won't know our final allocation for another couple months, but that's the number that we start the process with just just to get people a ballpark number. It's important to read through these, these local priorities, each, each cultural council in the state has a slightly different set of priorities so it's important to look at these. We prioritize projects for and by BIPOC communities individuals disabilities and low income communities. And our review cycle is a very organic holistic review process all those meetings are broadcast live as well so you know members of the public and applicants can always attend those deliberations and you'll see that we, in fact do. You know we make our grant decisions based on these priorities that you see here we do use a rubric that aligns to these priorities. This is our biggest question this is what sort of all local cultural councils have got to ask is, you know how much benefit will this particular project bring to a given community. And so that's sort of the central driving question of our entire process. This year we wanted to be really explicit about regional collaboration and regional benefit of our grantees, you know where we are the valley is such a tight net tight knit community overall but especially arts and culture wise. So we wanted to be explicit about encouraging events that have some element of regional collaboration in them that makes us really happy. We also really like to see applications that you know if if something is a multi town project, we like to see that you have applied to the local councils in the other towns that that also benefit. That just shows us that you're organized and that you're taking advantage of every resource that's available and, you know, since pretty frequently we have, you know, merit worthy, or, you know, meritus applications that you know we just can't fully fund. We like to see that you're taking advantage of all the available funding sources. This is my cat. She, my cat likes to be a member of any zoom that I do. So moving on. Oh yeah we also this past year this current year. We wanted to just really be explicit that we are looking to have a diversity of different kinds of cultural activities in our granting process. And so we just made that explicit point there because, you know, as we do our deliberate deliberation and if we're going to award grants to 50 or 60 different applicants. We want to see that we're not just giving you know a dozen big band concerts we love big band but you know for example we just we would like to have diversity and so by including that explicitly in our guidelines that allows us to use that as a as a criteria when we're making our deliberations. So those are those are our priorities there are some some kind of you know nuts and bolts requirements of every grant that I'll just take a moment to go through. So first off, you know virtual events are still considered. That was a new thing a couple years ago with the pandemic. We continue to absolutely fund virtual events. You know that being said, we do encourage in person things as much as possible. You know now that some of the restrictions are easing. However, you know, we know that we're not out of this thing yet and so anyway, we certainly consider virtual events. So if you are, if you are participating in multiple groups, and you want to apply for for multiple groups. You know we encourage that, but it really you know, I think most commonly what we might see our musicians, you know, if one musician plays in multiple bands. So that person really shouldn't be you know we won't we won't accept multiple applications from the same person for all the different bands they're in. So you either have to combine all of your different, you know band applications into one single application, and I'll show you how to do that, or just have a different point person for each application. But we do this just to avoid double dipping or the you know the appearance of impropriety on like the double dipping front. So this year we've, we've really, we had several student projects that we funded this year, and the dis the turning point for student projects continues to be the benefit to the community to the Amherst community as a whole. You know so somebody came in and they were just doing their student performance and it was, you know, purely to earn their degree. So it's not likely funded, unless it had a robust structure in place, sorry. Unless it had a robust structure in place for how they were going to try to bring in members of the community to, you know, to also attend. So, you know, we absolutely love to encourage, you know, student events and performances. But again it's got to it's got to make an explicit effort to get out there into the Amherst community. No travel expenditures. We're getting the money. How many times are they performing what are they doing for the stipends, you know, we don't have a, we don't have a hard and fast criteria for how much, you know, how much money goes to a, you know, to a dance performance versus a musical performance or whatever. But we like to see specificity on your end that you thought this through all the way. We welcome, you know, support supporting material that helps us understand better what the project is that being said, you know, I really encourage folks to be as specific and descriptive in their written application as they can, you know, just uploading a scan pdfs of your website we will look at that, but you know we like to see that you put thought into this as a standalone project or a standalone granting opportunity. So, you know, having having inaccessible events, certainly, you know, can be a disqualifying factor and, you know, we look at things individually and holistically we don't make, you know, blanket statements one way or the other. But the things that are, you know, completely inaccessible to certain communities, you know, we definitely take note of that. So we encourage you to be, you know, really thoughtful and ambitious and your accessibility efforts. I have a long statement regarding accessibility here I'm not going to go through that whole thing but I do encourage you to read it, and just really you know what we're looking for is sort of an authentic engagement with this question of each potential grant T. And so we've included a lot of ideas and resources there about accessibility. And we're also willing and happy to speak to you about that as well. So, you also see here. Oh, so we do run a direct granting method. And I'll talk more about that later. But what direct granting means is that once your application is received. We will, we will take about a six week period and review it. And then, and then once you've been approved and awarded. We'll send you some paperwork to fill out and then, you know, we will once we receive that paperwork, when the state gives us our allocation which doesn't happen until, you know, late winter or early spring. When the state gives us our allocation, we will send you a check for for the amount of your grant. And then it becomes incumbent on you to, you know, go out and do the thing that you've been granted for, and then submit a final grant report to us at the end of the calendar year. And that's, you know, this, this is going to be our second year of doing direct granting. We're currently in our first year of it so we're still sort of exploring some of the ins and outs but so far it's been really widely appreciated by our grantees. And it's something that's near and dear to our hearts. We were told the previous method which was a reimbursement method was a barrier for some participants and some applicants. And so we worked really hard with the town and the state to shift our granting model over to direct granting. You know, we hope that reduces the barrier in terms of artists and institutions not having to put the money up front, but instead having the money to use directly. But it does, you know, put a slightly higher bar in terms of getting your paperwork in on time at the end. So, so there's a lot of material that comes to you once you've been awarded to explain the direct granting process. We're really, really excited about it. And we're really grateful to the town for supporting us in that effort because it takes a lot of collaboration between us and the town, the town offices where is an entirely volunteer council. This gives you a feel for the awards and the, and the amounts that we gave out last year, previous years awards or can also be found on the town website. You know, if I were an applicant, this would be helpful to me to sort of ballpark what kinds of amounts are given out to what sorts of events, and to just sort of get a feel for what the range looks like. So that is here and I'm going to scroll down it quickly because at the bottom. First of all, you do have a, the state does issue its own set of local council guidelines here. That's certainly worth reading as well because that gives that, you know, these are sort of the things that we must follow within within this. But what I'm going to show you now is the application portal itself because you know a lot of one thing that's really fun about being in the cultural council is that a lot of our applicants and grantees are first time applicants first time grantees they don't do a lot of this sort of thing so we like to take a moment and just show you the portal itself, and it is a very, very user friendly portal. So the first thing you're going to do you're going to have to create an account within this within this platform if you've never applied with us before. Once you created an account, you'll have the option to apply to a local cultural council, and obviously you'll select from this list. Here I'll just make another plug for the regional priority that I shared earlier. We do like to see things that have a regional benefit, you know, we like to see you applying to multiple councils in the region. But so what this is Amherst obviously so we're going to show you how to click on the Amherst cultural council link. And I'm just going to take you through a dummy application I'll do this quickly and you know if you're watching the recording hopefully you can fast forward if you've done this before or, or whatever. So this is a this first screen is really a an eligibility checklist. You know so these questions. Once you go through these questions and answer them all and I'm not going to read every single one. Once you've gone through and answer these questions yes or no, you will know if your grant is actually or if your application is actually eligible for for an application. So I click the all those things, and then it gives you a helpful, you have to save draft is a really important button as you go through here you click save draft a lot. And then I can click check eligibility, and it's going to tell me congratulations you are eligible to to apply. So then I click proceed. You know it's going to have a place for me to, you know, give you some demographic information about myself. And then I go and I do project information, you know and again I'm just going to take you through it dummy. Just so you can see project discipline it gives you a you know a lot of choices here. You know visual arts project title test, when will the project take place, I will say that this is mandatory for us so we do need to know a date and time for your project and really this year as as you know our funds don't always the. It does become more competitive the application process and so folks who say well I hope to do this sometime in June. I'm going to check out and sort of try to clarify that, but we also may not you know and particularly if it's a competitive field. So I really encourage folks to be specific about the date and time and location of where your grant is going to take place and really doing that work up front. And so it's important you know you have about a six week window for applications to come in. It's important to use those six weeks to start doing outreach to potential venues and you know sort of what other whatever support support you need to hold your grant. So that when you come to us, you know you can present something to us that we can fund and we can feel confident that it's actually going to happen because you know those specifics really help us understand that. Other points in terms of K 12 yes or no, those are information gathering. You know we we certainly love seeing things that support school children and gate in grades pre K through 12 things that happen during the school day. I will say that that if we see that it's not an automatic no, but it does lead us to ask the question. Are we the best funding agency for this and you know it's sometimes the answer is yes we are. But if you're doing something that primarily serves school children during the school day, I would take a moment within your narrative and explain why the cultural council is the best funding source as opposed to the, you know to the public school district itself and any of the many grant opportunities that are available to them. So this is the most important box here. See by the way I'm clicking these tabs along the top so project overview. So the product overview is the most important thing and what I would really do is, you know be as specific and clear in this section as you possibly can and just tell us what you're going to do. I mean, and you know I know that sounds simplistic but really that is the area that we look at the most closely and you know the better your description gives us sort of what it who you are and what you think is the better, you know the better we can review the grant. In terms of the target audience, you know that's, you know, sort of up to you, you describe for us what your target audiences. If attendees have if there's a cost for attendees to participate. That's not that does not automatically disqualify you from us, but it does always again raise the question for us well you know if they're charging for folks to participate, you know then how is our money being spent. So when we have things that that have a cost associated with attendance, and some of our money or all of our money goes into defraying the cost for low income individuals or things like that. That certainly is, you know, is something we like to see. So again, I mean, you know if you have a, if you have a fee based structure for participation, you know just just think about, you know, how we're going to react when we see that. So explain to us why you need additional funds on top of the fees for participation. So again it's not an immediate disqualifier but I just you know I just I just want to share that because, again, this is the question. The public benefit question, you know and so and so the public benefit question is, is the most important thing for us. Yes, the qualification. So this is the sort of the resume section just tell us about yourself and anybody else who's involved with it. The resume piece, other individuals we definitely like to see other individuals and, and I will say to that. You know this is a place where if you're collaborating with with people who are putting in for grants on in other domains to list them out there and but it's helpful for us to know okay you know we're giving grants to these three. projects, there are overlapping folks for each project, but I know that you know person X is the point person for this one person person why for this one and so on so it does help us just if you can paint that picture for us a little bit. Promotion, you know folks that come in without a promotion plan, or they just say you know I'll post it on my Facebook page, you know we definitely take note of that that is something that we, we look for because our question is public benefit, you know and if the public doesn't know about your plan it's kind of hard for us to say that it's going to have benefit so we definitely like to see well thought out promotional plans that doesn't mean you have to have some kind of a marketing, you know, plan or anything like that but just, you know show us that you thought it through. All right so now we're on the budget tab over here so this this arguably is also you know, maybe this is the other most important section is for us to see really explicitly that you have that you have budgeted out how you want to use the funds that you're requesting from us. So what you do is you click the little X there add row. You know you see there's a pretty vast array of different funding areas that you can click on, including accessibility I'll just make a note, you know ensuring access like for an interpreter. You know this includes stipends to yourself, you know if you're if you're an artist who is asking us for money to paint a mural. You know, of course, we were happy to see that you're looking for funds for supplies and things like that. But you know we also strongly believe that artists should be paid for their work so you know it's fine to put in stipends here. You can put in the stipends if you're going to pay them, and that includes to yourself as an artist you know. So I just, I just want to say that so the budget section as you can see is pretty straightforward how to fill it out but please don't skip on time on that. Sorry about the cat, because you know it really is one of the main things that we look at is, you know do you have a clear plan for how you're going to spend the funds. Okay, so if you have any leftover rows it won't let you save just so you know. Okay, close out of there so that's your budget. Other sources of income, as I mentioned earlier, excuse me, we like to see that you have multiple streams of funding for your project. You know, pretty frequently we only partially fund the majority of our projects. So you know that's that that's up to 8090% for certain projects but it's pretty frequent for us to you know to find people at the 40% level, especially if they can illustrate that they have other sources of funding for their project as well. If we're the only source of funding for your project. You know then then that tells us well they may have they may not have fully thought through all the available resources for their project so again you know wherever you can diversify your funding sources we really encourage you to do so. In kind support we like to know you know our people working for free do you have you know resources that you can draw upon that don't cost funds. And so you see here this next question is explicitly about the partial funding question. How will you adjust if we can't fund the entire amount. And just give us a reasonable explanation for that, you know whether it's additional fundraising through other sources, or cutting back the number of performances or you know whatever it is that makes sense for your project. But we do like to see that you've thought that through because that's a very likely scenario for for applicants. I already referred to this within the within our priority section but we definitely want to know if you have a project that does or may benefit multiple communities in the area. We like to see that you applied to multiple councils so so please do give us that list. And that's something we look at favorably in the review process. As I said already, you know, it's kind of funny this says supplemental materials are limited to three pages. So if you upload three pages will accept that some people have told me in the past that the system doesn't allow them to go up to the 10 that are posted on the Amherst site. If you're in that boat you can always email us additional pages so I apologize for that in congruity. That's something we kind of inherited and we probably should change it but um, you know the truth is that a lot of folks have a lot of rich material that we look at up to 10, but within this system this only allows you to upload three. That's not mandatory though, you know we frequently we award grants without any additional materials uploaded, and that's totally fine so I, you know, we welcome the additional materials but it's definitely not mandatory and really we like to emphasize, you know put your application portal as the easiest thing for us to look at and that's kind of the most standard form for us. So if we have to kind of parse through a bunch of pages of your website. We may still award the grant but it will take us more time more thought and probably raise more questions. So you see I'm free I'm frequently saving the draft because that's just key here. So then there's an acknowledgement that you've read the, those guidelines that I showed you a moment ago the actually these as well as the local guidelines, you click on the. I agree, save draft, and then, and then you're literally at the, at the end of the whole thing and you can click submit. And it'll give me yes no I'm going to say no just so I don't, you know, bog up the system, but that's all there is to it for you as a grantee. And I'm going to stop sharing for a moment there I don't see a hand up so I'm not worried about that. But that's that's basically what I wanted to just take you through is that's the website and that's kind of how the process works. So the documents are posted on the ACC website as well as the MCC website, but I'll just kind of talk them through very, very briefly here. So, September 1 through October 17 is the grant window. And that's, you know, that is a that's a hard deadline of the October 17 we can't accept anything beyond then. And what the local council do is we wait for actually we have to wait because the mass cultural council will then take all those grant applications, and they will collate them and consolidate them into a single sort of large PDF for us. So that takes them a week or two. And so to be safe what we as a cultural council do is we schedule our grant review meetings which as I said before our public meetings. We schedule them for about six weeks, November into December. And those are all posted in advance on the town website, you know, following Massachusetts open meeting law. If you're interested in attending the deliberation on your grant application only, which makes sense. You can, we do try to keep that up to date in our in our agendas but as you can imagine you know the deliberation kind of ebbs and flows and sometimes we go faster or slower than we expect. So if you really want to see the deliberation for your own grant. I would encourage you to reach out to Angela who will then pass it along to myself or Julian. And we can kind of give you a sense of that because we do think folks deserve to hear their deliberations if they want to. So that's the that is our deliberation window is is November into December. We have a deadline of early January to get sorry I'm just looking to remind myself. It's it's early to mid January that we have to give our decisions to the state to the mass cultural council. Excuse me one second. We will communicate with you as an applicant before we we communicate that list to the mass cultural council because sometimes folks withdraw sometimes it's clarifying questions and so you know you'll probably know. Before the middle of January if you've been approved or not. But but certainly no later than you know the third week in January, you'll know if you've gotten the grant or not. And one of the big that's the big news for you as as the applicant is, you know, once you know that the funds are coming to you, you can then start taking action and working on things. I will warn folks that we are in the direct granting model. So that's good. That means once we have the funds we turn them around to you very quickly, as long as your paperwork is in on time. However, you know, we are a little bit at the mercy of the mass cultural council in terms of how quickly our allocation comes to us. So we were we were expecting to receive our allocation in March this current year. We didn't wind up getting it until actually early May. We did make for things, you know, I think the direct granting model is really exciting to our to our grantees, and it is really exciting. But for folks who had events that were happening early in the year. That was a little bit of a, you know, they had to, they had to spend their own money and then be reimbursed or wait for their stipends as the case may be. So that's kind of the reality of things we are we're optimistic that MCC is going to be a little bit faster with the funds this year. I would say that if you're if you're a planner and you're really counting on having these funds in hand in order to implement your project, you probably want to, you know, come in with a date of May or June as opposed to earlier in the year. So I'm just I'm just putting that as a tip I can't I can't necessarily say that it's going to be that delayed again but that was a lesson we learned is that you know there's no there's no guarantee when those funds will come to us. So let's turn around really quickly. The town offices here in Amherst are wonderful to work with and they get the funds out quickly and I will say that you know everybody within the town hall and also within the cultural council is very responsive to email and phone calls. And you know if you don't hear back from us in a day or two. I encourage you to follow up again because it probably means we just missed it. We tend to not sit on things we take pride in being responsive to the questions and comments of our of our grantees. Okay, so I think that's really all the content that I had and Angela I don't see any questions or any hands raised in our attendees. So I'm going to assume there are none. And so therefore I'm going to kind of sign off and then this recording. Of course we'll go on to our website and be available to folks to view later or you can attend the September 12 6pm session as well information session as well. And so with that I'm going to conclude and I wish everybody good luck. Don't hesitate to reach out we're always happy to communicate with you, clarifying questions in advance so don't hesitate to reach out to myself or Julian through Angela, and, and you know happy, happy granting and happy