In March of this year the Oregon Community Foundation and the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, two of Oregon’s biggest and most influential private charitable foundations, announced that each was giving $20 million over three years to nonprofit arts and cultural groups in the state. Combined with $11.8 million pledged by the state Legislature, it amounted to a $51.8 million investment mostly in larger organizations such as the Portland Art Museum, Bend’s High Desert Museum, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and the Oregon Symphony.
The grants were important partly because arts and cultural groups were still struggling after the shutdowns and limitations of the peak pandemic years, which had played havoc with budgets. Many groups are still crawling out from under what amounted to a financial disaster.
Those setbacks affected scores of smaller nonprofit organizations in the state, too, and the Oregon Community Foundation has set up a series of Arts & Culture Rebuilding Program grants to help smaller groups underwrite everything from general operating costs to special projects. It’s an ongoing program, with revolving cycles for application, and so far 21 smaller arts and cultural groups have been informed that they’ve been awarded grants totaling $578,000.
And this is just a beginning. OCF expects to spend more than $4 million on applications received by Dec. 10 of this year, and another $2 million each on recovery efforts in 2025 and 2026.
The grantees are from around the state, from Portland to Springfield, Corvallis, Bend, Redmond, Baker City, Coos Bay, Newport, La Grande, Klamath Falls and beyond. The two largest grants, for $100,000 each, have gone to Portland’s Oregon Children’s Theatre and Klamath Falls’ Ross Ragland Theater, both for general operating support, a crucial category that helps pay for basic organizational operations. Both are significant organizations that were hard-hit by the pandemic: The Ragland Theatre, which is in the midst of an emergency $1 million fund drive, lost huge amounts of touring-performance business during the shutdowns and their slow recovery.
The 21 groups that have been approved for grants under the Oregon Community Foundation’s rebuilding program so far:
— Ross Ragland Theater, Klamath Falls. $100,000 for general operating support.
Sponsor
— Oregon Children’s Theatre, Portland. $100,000 for genral operating support.
— Comunidad y Herencia Cultural, Springfield. $35,000 to expand learning and engagement opportunities for Latinx youth and families through arts and culture from Mexico and Latin America.
— Artists Mentorship Program (AMP), Portland. $25,000 for the Music and Art Drop-In Center, which serves youth experiencing homelessness.
— BEAT, Bend. $25,000 for capacity building and expansion of opportunities for children with learning and physical disabilities.
— Crossroads Creative and Performing Arts Center, Baker City. $25,000 for general operating support.
— Dry Canyon Arts Association, Redmond. $25,000 for in-class visual arts education for K-5 elementary students.
— Favell Museum, Klamath Falls. $25,000 for development of “Voices of the Klamath River Watershed.”
Sponsor
— My Voice Music, Portland. $25,000 for general operating support.
— Performance Works NW, Portland. $25,000 to support constuction of an ADA bathroom and buy ramps to improve building access.
— Rogue World Music, Ashland. $25,000 to increase staff and improve service to Jackson County communities, especially rural, wildfire-impacted, and underserved communities.
— The Hearth, Ashland. $25,000 to develop a facilitator training program.
— Cascade School of Music, Bend. $22,000, for outreach programs to populations that otherwise would not have access to music education and experiences.
— MetroEast Community Media, Gresham. $20,000 for a new Media and Digital Inclusion Educator for members of marginalized communities, primarily in underserved East Multnomah County.
— Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshe Tribe, McDermitt. $17,000 to fund the nonprofit Wayaduaga Apegan to promote revitlization of the Northern Paiute language.
Sponsor
— Egyptian Theatre Preservation Association, Coos Bay. $12,500 for a new theater sound system.
— Corvallis Youth Symphony Association, Corvallis. $10,000 for general operating support.
— Huitzilopochtli Dancing and Teaching Our Indigenous Heritage, Woodburn. $10,000 for general operating support.
— Oregon Coast Youth Symphony Festival Association, Newport. $10,000 for general operating support.
— The Grande Ronde Symphony Association, La Grande. $10,000 to expand youth programs and amplify musical education and performance opportunities to rural students.
— Polly Plumb Productions, Yachats. $6,500 to support the “Living Art Museum of Yachats.”
Bob Hicks has been covering arts and culture in the Pacific Northwest since 1978, including 25 years at The Oregonian. Among his art books are Kazuyuki Ohtsu; James B. Thompson: Fragments in Time; and Beth Van Hoesen: Fauna and Flora. His work has appeared in American Theatre, Biblio, Professional Artist, Northwest Passage, Art Scatter, and elsewhere. He also writes the daily art-history series "Today I Am."
