Arts & Culture Board Awards Over $719K to Artists and Creative Groups

Published on June 22, 2023

Latest allocation brings recent total to more than $10M from the Infusion Fund

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (June 22, 2023) –  On Tuesday, the City of Charlotte’s Arts and Culture Advisory Board awarded $719,577 to support 34 projects by local nonprofits, individual artists, and creative groups through the Infusion Fund, a partnership among the City of Charlotte, The Foundation For The Carolinas (FFTC) and private donors. Applicants submitted proposals for a variety of projects including performing arts, visual arts, educational programming, training and development, exhibits and festivals.

The awards come from a portion of the Infusion Fund known as the Opportunity Fund, a relatively new mechanism that supports local arts and culture projects, programs and initiatives that may fall outside existing grant cycles or structures in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area or that need supplemental support, and that signify new or expanded programming opportunities for the applicant and/or for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community.

The current grant cycle, which opened in February, brings the total amount of these grants awarded since the inception of the Opportunity Fund to $1.6 million in new support for arts and culture projects that was not previously available.

In this grant cycle, 165 grant requests were received and, and proposals were evaluated by review panels of arts and culture practitioners. Based on application data, of the approved applicants, 82% serve historically underserved or marginalized populations:

• 70% serve African, Latinx, Asian, Arab or Native American populations.
• Nearly one-third serve the LGBTQ+ community.
• 50% serve one or more of the City’s Corridors of Opportunity.

Advisory board members initially allocated $325,000 in Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) funds for the Spring 2023 cycle of the Opportunity Fund. Recently, another $1.325 million from FY24 funds was allocated for Opportunity Fund grants, with the ability to use a portion of them to enhance the grant support provided through the current cycle. The board’s vote on Tuesday leaves $930,423 to award through the Opportunity Fund in FY24.

This spring, the board awarded another $1 million in support of the Arts & Science Council’s grantmaking programs to individual artists and creatives and groups, namely the Artist Support grants, Cultural Vision grants, and Founders Grants, for which the Infusion Fund provided seed funding in FY23. The board also voted to award $8.48 million in FY24 support for the operations of 37 arts and culture organizations of many types and sizes across Charlotte and Mecklenburg County that receive annual operating support.

The upcoming fiscal year will be the third and final year of the Infusion Fund. Before the Infusion Fund ends in June 2024, the board and other local stakeholders will finalize a long-term cultural plan.