 Awesome. Have a great meeting. Hello, everybody. My name is Matt Holloway. I'm a co-chair for the Amherst Cultural Council. And what we're going to do right now is talk you through the application process just as it exists. So to do so I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to give you just a very quick and hopefully practical overview of our grant application process. So whenever I have this conversation, I really suggest folks start with our website, which is the Amherst.gov Cultural Council page. You can find it by just doing a web search for Amherst Cultural Council. And then let me just show you some of the information that's on here. An overview, our grant cycle. This is the link that we're going to follow in just a second to the application itself. A live meeting, so you know folks can attend today via Zoom. We'll have another live meeting at the end of the month, September 28th. You can attend here via Zoom. Well, on the page I'll just show you we have a community survey. It's brief, it's confidential, but it does help us as a council guide our priorities for this current fiscal year and future years. So please take that survey. And then finally, as we get into the content of the application, you'll see a lot of references to accessibility. That's a big area of priority for us as a cultural council. And we've had a handful of activities over the past couple of years to address that you can see the recording from around table we did. You can see the slides and then some other resources related to accessibility. And I'll show you more more in there. Finally, this is the list of our current members and their terms. We actually do have a vacancy opening up. So if you are interested in applying to the cultural council, get in touch with us and we'll be happy to talk you through that process. You can see up here is a link to Angela Mills email address. So without any further ado, let me take you to the mass cultural council site. And please do take your time on this site. So this really is an overview of the cultural council program for everybody. And so the application process. Note that the LCC program guidelines that they post that is a standard set of guidelines for all cultural council applications we suggest you read that or at least bookmark it and make sure you know where it's at it has really important information in it. And then I really do strongly recommend that you check out the council profile for each individual cultural council you're applying to, because they are a little bit different from one to the next so it's worth taking just taking a minute and looking at it. I'll click on that briefly just so you can see the Amherst set of profiles. I'm not going to read these this whole thing to you but you see that we have local priorities that are probably very similar to other communities in the state but they're standalone for us. We have local guidelines recommendations, and then we are in a direct granting model which is a very exciting thing for for our cultural council and has been a big, a big area of work for us over the past few years. The LCC has an information session on September 12 that is not going to be the exact same thing as what we present to you here, ours is probably more local, but there's a really useful to so I suggest you check that out if you have the chance. You will need to set up a user account and a profile within the grants management system. I've already done so so I'm going to go down to the online application. And of course, very important that you note the October 17 date that is a hard deadline. This system will shut down, or will close at that point so you won't be able to submit anything at that time. So let me show you briefly, what you'll do is you'll click here, and then you'll have a drop down to select the Amherst cultural council. I already started sort of a dummy application that's in progress, just so that I could take you through it more more efficiently. As you can see as you save it. It's easy to get back in and work on it which is what I've done. So I'm going to go ahead and open that I've already gone through a few of the preliminary steps of, you know, confirming demographic information where you live things like that so hopefully we won't have to do that this time. And hopefully it'll open just a little bit of a in progress bar there. Well we wait for that let me just hop back over to the mass cultural council site itself. And I do want to just show you so the LCC program guidelines PDF. This is a very useful document you see it's 26 pages long. You know table of contents, but this gives you a lot of really important information around the process for applying for a cultural council grant. And it's also important that you know that you know there is a reconsideration process you can request. If you feel like we didn't follow the proper process on reviewing your grant. All of our meetings are public and so you know we will get a lot of applications and I don't know why this is taking so long so I'm going to go ahead and stop it, and I'm going to do it again. Sorry just bear with me a second here. Okay, so sorry about that I just wanted to get this application open for you so now you can see this is what the application portal looks like. Here you have an applicant information section project information so I just created a dummy project I kind of started having fun with this so maybe I will someday put in an application for a for a golden oldies dance off. So amount requested project discipline project title June, you know project when will it take place, I will pause for a second and just say a lot of folks want to give a range or say TBD. We really do look very closely at that you have a date in place for your project. So if you're going to say something like spring of 2024 that you know you want to give some context around that and how that decision is going to be made and when. I think in all cases it's best to give us a date, and then make a note somewhere that says this date may change depending on you know various factors. But we do look very closely at that because we want to know is this is this feasible is this project going to happen. We don't want to fund things that don't happen because that's money that could go to other projects. So I really am, you know, really do try to find a date if you can. You know with location also and you know just general TBDs that don't have any information about location. Those oftentimes get declined on those grounds for us. Number of people served as an estimate doesn't have to be precise that's just information for us to review. Summarize the proposed project or program. Notice that's only 900 characters. So, you know, and that's, that's 900 individual characters not words so it's a short very short summary of what it is. So that's all these dance off target audience for the project. We really do want to have good information on the on the target audience, you know, obviously, excuse me one second. Obviously the more specific, you can be the better cost for participation attendees that's not an automatic disqualifier if attendees have to pay. You want to know what it's going to be and then, you know, usually if there's a cost for attendees. That's something that we do like to see that you're making an allowance for folks who, you know, have varying income levels. So just think about that. How does the proposed project provide public benefit and current contribute to the cultural vitality of the local community as a whole. Please address actions that the proposed project includes to advance diversity equity inclusion and or access. A really important one I encourage you, you know, it's only 700 characters so it's not a lengthy one, but I really do encourage you to be thoughtful about this one because the main criteria that every local cultural council really is applying is public benefit. So, so please do put some thought into this one this is not not a good question to blow to blow off. In the description of the qualifications of key players. This one folks tend to do pretty well with just because you know these are artists performers cultural institutions. Other individuals that are involved in the project please list them. It's always, you know, we like to see that this is something you've engaged with a large range of collaborators on that's always a good sign in terms of cultural vitality public benefit, and also feasibility to happen. And then also promotional materials are always great if you can attach a flyer or a website or anything like that. That's really useful to I'll show you where you can attach materials in a second. I encourage you to use the save draft button frequently because like any online platform, you know, it's easy to get kicked out or get interrupted so saving the draft is very helpful. So with the budget, just want to make sure everybody sees that the budget, you have to click on this button, and it's going to give you. So, you know you create lines in your budget here, and then each line you pick, you know, what the, what the expense area is, what the description of it is and the amount. So, very important that you actually give us a projected budget here. And then you'll see it show up. Here. So everything that I put in there is showing up here projected income. Oh, so a note, when you're putting out your budget please put out your complete budget, not just what you're paying for or hoping to pay for out of cultural council money, because again it helps us see what your grand plan is and assess the feasibility of your project. We also want to know other sources of income how are you going to get the whole thing done. In-kind support, in-kind support really does help make a compelling application, because it lets us know, you know, again that you're collaborating with other folks and who you're working with and how you're making it happen. This question, how will you adjust the project if the council cannot fund the entire amount you're requesting? This is an important question. The majority of our applications are partially funded. We just have a limited amount of money and a lot of, you know, really worthwhile applications. So we really do want to see that you've got a plan for how are we going to fund for this fund your project if you don't have full support from us, financial support. And then if you've applied to other local cultural councils, please list them. Please make sure you do that. You'll see if, as you read our local guidelines for Amherst, we really want to see projects that address regional benefit. You know, so we're specifically focused on the people of Amherst, but given that the Pioneer Valley, Connecticut River Valley is such an integrated cultural network, we really want to see that you're applying to other councils. And, you know, you could apply for things that are not happening in the town of Amherst with us, and we may fund them if you can make the case that you have adequate public benefit for folks who live in Amherst. So strongly recommend you do that. Additional materials. I feel like every year this comes up. So three pages that you scan into as PDFs. That's what we're looking for for additional materials. You'll notice on the Amherst local council guidelines, it says, please do not submit more than 10 pages of materials. Please keep it to three if you can. Folks reach out to us and say, Hey, you know, we really want to give you nine and a half pages. We, you know, we'll let you email them to email them to us and scan them and send them over but in general, just try to keep it to three if you can that's that's very helpful. And then the other pieces here there's an acknowledgement, you know, you read this through carefully at a station I agree and then you can submit right there. And that really is the entire technical side of the application process for the Amherst cultural council. I guess the other things that I wanted to make sure I shared with you is our email address. So you can always reach out to myself and Julianne Applegate who's my co chair, and our email address is posted on the mass cultural council site. And it is a second, make sure I get it right. It is chair dot of dot Amherst dot cultural dot dot council at gmail.com chair dot of dot Amherst dot cultural dot council at gmail.com. And of course you can always get a hold of us through Angela Mills as well in the town manager's office. So that concludes the presentation for today we're going to post this online and folks can access it as they want. If you have questions comments or concerns please reach out we're really happy to talk to you in advance about your project and we really spent a lot of time actually talking to potential grantees about what their projects look like so don't hesitate to reach out and If you haven't seen it already please know that September 21st the cultural council is sponsoring a showcase stage at the annual Amherst block party. That'll be a stage down at the north end of Pleasant Street near Kendrick Park. And we are going to be showcasing a bunch of our grantees from this past fiscal year. So come down say hello and meet some of us in person. Thank you everybody. Thank you.