For nonprofits, “operating support” is a deceptively mundane name for one of the most thrilling envelopes that will ever show up in the mail. Most grants are for project support, where you pitch a funder on the one slice of your overall work that best fits their interests; operating support is what fills the gaps in between. It puts paper in the photocopier and gas in the truck and Trader Joe’s cheese on the platters at the opening night party. It pays the staff members whose salaries you can’t cover through project budgets, like your accountant or your office manager.  

It’s what keeps the lights on and the water running, but vanishingly few grantmakers still provide operating support. That’s because staff and trustees at funding organizations often favor the new and shiny over the tried and tested, which frequently leaves nonprofits in a bind. Over twenty years writing grants in Oregon, I’ve seen a number of funding organizations overhaul their policies, frequently with the goal of limiting their focus areas or adding additional barriers to narrow the monumental gap between how many grant applications they receive and how many they can actually fund. Emails with the words “we’ve recently revised our application guidelines!” in the subject line are the reasons I have trust issues.

I mention this by way of retroactive apology for a brief moment of anxiety, upon learning that the Oregon Arts Commission was restructuring their Operating Support grants. As of the 2025-2026 fiscal year, it’s been renamed the Sustaining Arts Program, and at first glance all the posted changes seemed like good ones, designed to make the process more user-friendly. But all my current clients are in this grant pool, which means if there’s a hidden catch in the fine print it’s my job to find it. 

It turns out, rather wonderfully, that the catch with the Sustaining Arts Program is that there is no catch. They just listened to what people needed, and then they did it.

Simplifying the process

The OAC has been funding arts organizations in Oregon for nearly sixty years, and operating support is one of its core programs. With these new changes, they’re exploring an approach that’s still altogether too rare: namely, trusting that the nonprofit itself is the best judge of where that money gets spent. I spoke with Senior Program Manager Liora Sponko and Arts Education & Grants Coordinator Tiff Harker, two of the driving forces behind the shift, about supporting Oregon artists, reducing administrative burdens on overworked staff, and their vision for the future of the program. 

Applications for the inaugural round of the Sustaining Arts Program are due March 26, and will be processed in two categories; one granting $1,000 – $3,000 a year to organizations with annual operating expenses below $150,000, and the other granting $5,000 – $25,000 to everyone else. Eligibility criteria is the same, but there are a few procedural changes. Previously, operating grants ran on a staggered cycle by discipline – all the media arts organizations one year, for example, or all music organizations in another – to give both applicants and staff a bit of a breather. Every three years you’d have to fill out a much longer application with several pages of narrative describing your past 24 months of programming. In between, you’d fill out an infinitely simpler “interim year” version, which asked only for a few numbers and a summary of your upcoming season. Both required the Cultural Data Project’s annual Data Arts report, a standardized form many different organizations use to collect detailed information on your finances, programming, and audience served.

Now, I can certainly tell you why I didn’t love that system. Every three years, when the needle swung back around again to the Full Application year for the discipline “Theatre,” I’d lose the entire month of May to cranking out 7-10 pages of narrative each for five or six different clients.  But for the organizations that can’t afford a Claire Willett to do the heavy lifting for them, that process posed a monumental barrier to entry. The new, annual Sustaining Arts form is even simpler than the past interim year reports; the goal was to develop a grant application anybody could do without needing a professional grant writer. (It still requires the Data Arts report, a lengthy undertaking which poses substantial hurdles of its own; but that’s a topic for another day.)

So far, it seems, the changes are working. Harker says they’ve already heard from a number of applicants expressing huge relief that the form is so much simpler. I have, too; the week the new system went online, a friend texted me, “Um, I just logged in to look at the new OAC streamlined process and instead I just filled it out and submitted it in less than ten minutes???” 

Consistent, stable funding

The OAC’s scope is incredibly broad. This program alone serves hundreds of organizations across the state every year, from big Portland companies with a large paid staff to scrappy volunteer-run rural organizations, doing every kind of project in every artistic discipline. “There’s such an amazing diversity of the types of arts organizations across the state, and the type of work that they do,” Sponko says. In 2024 their 300+ operating grant recipients reported reaching 2.9 million audience members in person and 5.3 million through virtual programming. What they have in common, she and Harker both agree, is that everybody is already doing a lot without sufficient resources. 

The OAC’s grants aren’t huge (generally 1% or less of an organization’s operating budget), but the important thing is that they’re consistent; once you’re in, you’re in every year, and it’s safe to budget around that money. “If you complete the eligibility [checks] and meet the criteria, then you can expect to get funding,” says Harker. 

My first assumption was that reducing barriers to entry was designed to throw the doors wide open and encourage a bunch more applicants, but both said that wasn’t necessarily the primary goal. While they love learning about new organizations, and more funding to serve more people is obviously the dream, all these changes were primarily designed to make life easier for the folks they’re already serving. 

Eliminating review panels

Shifting away from the three-year cycle to a simplified annual form means it matters less which category box you check, a bonus for organizations whose work might cross disciplines. This has major ramifications for another key change: the elimination of review panels for operating support, where a group of volunteer experts in each creative field score each application to determine merit. 

Sustaining Arts actually merged two previous programs, one specifically providing operating funds to organizations whose annual budget was under $150,000, and another for everyone else. Together, they supported about 345 organizations throughout the state, and the majority of those organizations are too small to hire professional grant writers. Many of them are volunteer-run, or an executive director or board chair writes all the grants for them. 

By definition, there’s an inherent financial inequity if a review panel of strangers is judging applicants who can afford to hire a professional grant writer against those who can’t. In an attempt to address this, the review process for small organizations was never paneled, the way the larger one was and all their project grants still are. “We train our grant reviewers to not score an application based on the grant writing quality, but to really focus on the work itself,” says Sponko, but the concern was always there. 

Three narrative blocks of five thousand characters each is an intimidating hurdle for applicants facing barriers of education, language, literacy, or simply lack of experience in this specific form of writing, which could mean that really exciting artistic work wasn’t getting taken seriously. The shift, then, was twofold: simplifying the form itself to something anybody can do without professional assistance, and moving the decision-making process in-house to focus on strengthening relationships between the OAC and the organizations they fund. 

I was also interested in the thinking behind the new name. To me, “operating support” is a term with positive connotations – the pot of gold grant writers are forever chasing. But Sponko offers another interpretation, calling it “a little bit of misnomer” because it sounds so mundane and administrative. It’s a minor semantic shift, but it expresses something important about what they really hope these grants will be: “flexible, unrestricted funding where an organization can use it for any expenses that they have.” In many cases, she says, it’s going directly to programming, paying artists to perform and produce work. 

Even when the money does go toward boring administrative costs, “operations” does sound very technical, agrees Harker. That’s because those boring administrative costs are necessary to make art possible. You can’t put on your show without paying for insurance, maintenance, and postage. “Everyone knows what operating support is,” she adds, “but I think it was important for us to acknowledge the bigger picture of it.”

Building a relationship of trust

At the end of a project grant, you’ll generally be asked to submit a report which includes a budget with your projections and your real costs side by side, to demonstrate that you spent all their money on exactly what you promised you’d spend it on, and explain any variations or changes that came up over the course of the year. Sponko doesn’t believe this is always the most useful way for a funder to offer support. “We hear so much feedback from our constituents and nonprofit partners [about] how important operating support is,” she explains, “because it gives them that flexibility to use it for whatever’s most needed, and it also creates a relationship of trust.” 

Unrestricted funding means the OAC believes the arts organization is the best judge of where that money will have the most impact; they want to be told what you’re doing, rather than telling you what to do. “It really creates a trust-based relationship and empowers the organization to make the best decision,” Sponko adds, “because they know their community, their organization, their program, better than anyone.”

Harker describes the FY26 cycle as a pilot year, in which they’ll learn more about what works well and what might need further tinkering, but they envision this program as the new long-term direction for their unrestricted support going forward. (The planned merger between the Oregon Arts Commission and Oregon Cultural Trust, proposed for 2027, won’t affect it; it’s designed to leave all grant programs from both organizations intact.) They already have a history of adapting grant processes based on feedback from the people they serve, like shifting their Arts Build Communities and Arts Learning program grants to flat amounts so applicants always know how much to budget for. 

They also recently did away with an eligibility requirement for their Small Operating Grants (now rolled into Sustaining Arts), which used to ask for a minimum of two years as an established nonprofit. This turned out to be a barrier for many grassroots community-based organizations who might have been doing great work for years, but hadn’t yet emerged from the lengthy IRS certification process. Removing that barrier let them apply for vital unrestricted support at a delicate, fledgling stage before they secured the tax-exempt status that would allow them to receive grants from everybody else. 

The reporting process, already pretty simple compared to the detailed narratives required by local arts agencies like the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition and the Regional Arts & Culture Council, won’t change much either. It’s always been a brief summary of basic numbers – your income and expenses, how many people you served, how many of them were youth or artists – along with photos of your programming. New this cycle, they’ll also ask grantees to share one or two impact stories, a change they hope won’t add much of a writing burden. Sponko explains that this provides the OAC with a tool they can use in the field to raise awareness of the arts sector, “to be able to share that out in our social media, in our reporting, in conversations with decision-makers [to] hopefully help the group get some visibility on the great work they’re doing.”

The changes save time for staff members too, who don’t have to spend quite so much time reading and can now engage with grant recipients in ways that everyone likes better. They have a range of ideas like technical assistance, peer learning, and other opportunities to serve the field more broadly. Sponko is particularly passionate about the convenings the OAC facilitates, like a virtual coalition of statewide arts council leaders who meet regularly to exchange resources and ideas, and their recent statewide “Conversations With Funders” tour, a six-stop series of virtual and in-person gatherings with “speed dating”-style breakout rooms connecting arts organizations with a range of Oregon arts funders.

I’ve always liked the OAC, who have some of the most communicative and engaged staff members in the Oregon funding sector, and, as someone who writes three to six of these grant applications for different clients every year, I’ve always felt that the operating grant program works pretty well. The primary grant writer’s headaches with it have nothing to do with the agency. They do, for example, have the worst online application portal of any grantmaker on my roster; but in their defense, they know that. They’re currently stuck with the system they’ve got because of Business Oregon’s software contracts, but the news that their proposed 2027 merger with the Oregon Cultural Trust would allow them to build a new platform was met with enormous enthusiasm (at least by me). 

Complications at the federal level

The other occasional hassle is that complications at the federal level can cause unexpected delays in the OAC getting their funding. A million or so dollars a year comes to them from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of their pass-through funding to agencies in every state, and 63% of it goes right back out the door again through this one grant program. (I did once have to submit an OAC report for a check the organization still hadn’t received a year later, but OAC staff wasn’t any happier about it than my client. Annoying, and a tiny bit hilarious, but totally not their fault.) 

Speaking of the elephant in the room, I did have to ask about what’s going on at the NEA. In two separate informational webinars about the controversy surrounding their current round of program grants,  NEA staff were asked whether the compliance terms demanding obedience to Trump’s executive orders applied to state agencies. They responded that they were waiting on clarification from their legal department. Given the OAC’s robust commitment to equity and the new policy changes for applicants the NEA has attempted to implement, are they worried about effects at the state level? The honest answer is that they’re doing exactly what we’re doing: following the updates and making the best predictions they can. Both Sponko and Harker seem as confident as it’s possible to be right now that the money itself isn’t going anywhere. “We are in communication with national organizations that are keeping a pulse on this work,” said Sponko, “and really watching to see how the various lawsuits are making their way through the courts and so on. So we haven’t received specific guidance on that. It’s a wait and see. But at this point, our state allocation from the NEA has not changed, so we are moving forward.” 

As far as the NEA’s attempted bans on telling diverse stories or affirming trans identities using their dollars, and whether Oregon artists committed to such work should worry about losing their OAC funds too, both affirm that there’s no cause for immediate alarm for anyone applying in the current Sustaining Arts Grant cycle. “I can understand it’s a really scary time for arts organizations and the great work that they’re doing,” says Sponko. “At this point, we haven’t heard of any changes to the NEA funds that we receive.” If the circumstances change, she says, “we’ll make sure that we do the best we can to adjust. Our team is definitely keeping an eye on this.” OAC staff is in regular communication with their national partners, like Americans for the Arts and the National State Assembly for Arts Agencies, to keep up-to-date with news and webinars. “We’re staying connected. We’re staying informed. It’s a wait and see, but . . . at this point, there is no concern that our grants will be changing.” 

Harker echoes the point. “I’m just stressing how much we also want to provide that clarity,” she says. “We want to be able to provide information and assurances, but we cannot do that. So we are moving forward with information we have now, which is [that] we expect funding to go through as planned.”

Partners in the arts

Throughout our conversation, both consistently referred to the artists and arts nonprofits who receive funding from them not as grantees, but as partners, and spoke with intense passion about how much their work matters. “I believe public funding is essential to support the arts in Oregon and in our country,” says Sponko. “It really demonstrates that we care about the work and how impactful it is to community building, how impactful it is to economic development. It’s an economic driver.” 

In fact, the average Oregonian spends $40 per person per artistic event over and above the cost of their ticket on things like dining out, parking and childcare, and arts tourism puts big bucks into the hospitality industry. Those factors are important, says Sponko; but, of course, the economics of arts and culture isn’t why we’re here. “[It’s] the intrinsic piece about wellness and personal joy and connection it brings,” she says, “especially coming out of the pandemic. We saw how important arts and culture was when we didn’t have it . . . There was a big gap in our community connections, and a big gap in our own hearts. People were so excited to come back to events, and come back to celebrating their communities or discovering something new.”

It’s unexpectedly moving to hear OAC staff repeatedly express their faith that arts organizations in the state of Oregon are already doing the best they can, with limited and dwindling resources in a time of explosive economic challenges and escalating need. They see their role as a source of support not just for the populations served by those organizations, but for the often exhausted and underpaid people who work there. 

Sponko says she’s spent her whole career in this field (she’s run nonprofit organizations too) and she’s intimately familiar with what it takes. “I think part of the gift we’re giving them is the gift of time,” she says. Writing and managing grants – especially grants restricted to programs, which always bring more complicated paperwork – dump a lot of extra hours on the plates of busy development directors, executive directors, program staff, board members and volunteers, which most of them would rather put towards doing their creative work. This is especially true for applications where the funder’s needs are restrictive and a nonprofit has to jump through a lot of hoops in order to have a shot. 

Frequently, “organizations are trying to fit into the priorities and the boxes of a funder,” an approach they deliberately attempted to invert in designing the Sustaining Arts process. “It’s really flipping that entirely,” Sponko notes. “You don’t have to fit to us. We’re trying to fit to you. We’re trying to make it easier for you, so you have more time to do the work and make an impact in your community.”