Let's Talk About Grants!: A Lengthy, and Possibly Overly-Detailed Primer to Public Arts Funding in Canada, Ontario, & Toronto (Patreon)

Good morning, fair Patrons! I've written a sprawling discussion of the public grant systems that I'm familiar with and try to access!

Before I get down to business sharing what I pulled together for the grant I've written for the next stage of Le Numéro Barbette, I thought it might be helpful to help you gain even a glancing overview of the landscape that I was working/writing within for the past 2 weeks.  It's a rather international community of patrons present here on this page, and heck, even plenty of Canadians (artists and non-artists alike) don't seem super informed or aware of the ways that public arts support works – so it felt like a good place to start!

I think this will provide some useful context for the coming writings about what it is that I've applied for, and what had to go into that application. This could be a total snooze-fest of a read (obviously I hope not! haha), as it's a lot of exposition and not much at all specific to the kind of things I tend to share about my personal work here with you all but – here goes!

Today's post is about 2900 words; Google tells me that this makes this about a 10-minute read :)

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I live in Canada – most of the time in Toronto, sometimes in Montréal, and – more recently, occasionally in Vancouver for stretches of time, for work. Canada has a robust public arts funding system at municipal, provincial, and national levels. For example, there is a Toronto Arts Council (TAC), an Ontario Arts Council (OAC), and the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA). Other provinces and territories have their own art councils, and most major cities do, as well.

There are hundreds of millions of dollars given out every year across multiple granting organizations. The Canada Council alone gives out $150 million in funding every year to Canadian artists. These city-wide, province-wide, and nation-wide public granting bodies all get their money from different sources, but that's the subject of a much-longer, fascinating post that somebody else already did a fantastic job writing about so I don't have to.

Many Canadian (circus) artists I talk to about grants either groan in collective misery at the thought of applying, or grumble that there's no point applying for them at all because 'no one ever gets them'; and yet ... the draw of financial support in the otherwise rather unstable world of being a professional artist remains.

What generally goes into a grant application?

• Grant applications generally require you to write one (or several) essays on what you want to create, how you're going to create it, and why it's important that you create that work
  
• These written components can be 250 words in length, 500 words in length, 1500 words in length ... it all depends on the size of the grant and type of grant you're applying for
  
• Many larger grants also require you to submit supplementary material with your written application: this can include examples of your past work, material showing your expertise or preliminary explorations as it relates to your current proposal, and generally some kind of budget.  
  
• Budgets can be as straightforward as a couple lines of requests for assistance with "subsistence costs" (AKA, you ask the council for help paying your rent for 3 months and for your art supplies so you can paint a new series, for example), or as complicated as a 100-plus-line, multi-sheet Excel files spanning several years of private and public revenues, production costs, technical costs, personnel costs, artistic fees, and the like
  
• AND, there's always a cheeky question at the end of these online grant applications: "how long did it take you to complete this application? Less than 1 hour; less than 2 hours; or 3 hours or more?" I'd love to know who gets these monsters completed in under an hour, because I must spend close to 80 hours researching, writing, editing, and polishing a single grant application
  
• Generally, if you're awarded a grant, you also need to submit a 'Final Report' when it's all said and done: a short essay on the impact and outcome of the work, and (sometimes) examples of what you created with that funding.  
  

How are grants organized? How do you know what to apply for?

All three levels of grant funding organizes their programs and application streams differently:

• The Toronto Arts Council has disciplinary programs, like Black Arts, Creative Communities, Dance, Theatre, Visual and Media Arts, Indigenous Arts, Literary, and Music. These programs are subdivided into grants for individuals, organizations, and collectives. The TAC also has what they call "Strategic Programs": grant money specifically set aside for "Newcomers and Refugees", "Animating Toronto Parks/Streets", "Artists in the Library", and more;
• The Ontario Arts Council  organizes their grant money by funding stream, by discipline, or by priority group (e.g. Indigenous artists, francophone artists, artists living outside of Toronto, artists of colour, etc);
• The Canada Council for the Arts structures their grants through a system that at first glance seems mystifyingly vague: their programs are named things like 'Explore and Create', 'Engage and Sustain', and 'Sustaining Artistic Practice', etc. Applications within these broad categories are subdivided into further, smaller programs and then – internally – through discipline.
  
  For example, within 'Explore and Create' there is the "Research and Creation" program, the "Concept to Realization" program, and "Professional Development for Artists". If you apply to one of these programs, you select the artistic discipline your work should be grouped into and it is evaluated against competing submissions from other artists in your field. Many artists might apply to a "Research and Creation" program under "Explore and Create", but a musician's application would not be evaluated alongside a circus artist's application.
  

How is it decided who gets a grant and who doesn't?: All three levels of grant funding generally use some form of 'peer assessment committee' along with a supervising grant officer, meaning that 3 or more of your professional 'peers' in your artistic field or discipline are invited to read all the applications submitted in a round of granting (providing that they themselves don't have a submission in that round as well).  

Each new round of applications has a new peer assessment committee. The peer assessors or jurors will grade each application on a rubric and help recommend which applications should receive funding and which ones shouldn't. These gradings are then evaluated by grant officers with full-time employment at these Arts Councils, and make their way out to artists.

I can't speak for the Toronto or Ontario Arts Councils, as I've never done peer review committee work with them, but I know that the CCA has a couple more levels of "checks and balances" beyond the peer review committee and I imagine other arts councils function similarly. The CCA  has 'grant officers' assigned to a certain discipline or program, who oversee and lead each peer review committee, and who in turn answer to different directors. Multiple people have to review and sign off on the decisions of a peer review committee (this subject in and of itself could be its own post!). In short, I promise it's not the whims of a few mid-career artists on a peer review committee who get to be the final voice(s) on deciding where hundreds of thousands of dollars of arts funding go.


The different levels of arts funding (municipal, provincial, federal) organize and structure this funding in different ways, and the grading rubrics for an application varies from level to level as well:

• Finding specific information about the evaluation rubric for your application isn't easy on the TAC website. I've heard from an artist who's worked as a TAC peer assessor that it is "scored out of 5", without much more detail given than that.
  
• The OAC has one of the clearer evaluation rubrics available online, noting that they grade an application out of 5 based on Artistic Merit (33% of your final score), Impact (on your community and your career)(33% of your final score), and Viability (how likely you are to be successful at what you're pitching in your application)(33% of your final score).
  
• The Canada Council for the Arts also evaluates submissions based on Artistic Merit, Impact, and Feasibility (similar to the OAC's 'Viability'), but the percentages of importance are different: artistic merit accounts for 50% of your score, impact on your own artistic career and your surrounding community is worth 30%, and feasibility (AKA, does the peer assessment committee think you know how to handle tens of thousands of dollars of grant funding responsibly, or have proposed a project that is possible to execute, etc) is worth 20%.
  

Now let's get a bit more specific about circus arts, and veer away from the nuts and bolts of grants –

Fun fact: the Canada Council for the Arts is the only granting body out of the three I've briefly described above that has money specifically earmarked for Circus Arts.

Circus arts very rarely gets funded by the Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council, versus the Canada Council for the Arts, who funds lots of circus arts. The CCA tries to fund projects equally from all over Canada, but the largest percentage of applications comes from the provinces of Québec and Ontario.

Why is this, you ask?

First up:  the sheer density of the field.

If you are a circus artist living anywhere in Canada, and submit an application to the Canada Council for the Arts (to research a new piece, to pull together a proof-of-concept for a new show, to produce a short digital version of your act, etc), your application is entered into a pool of submissions that only have to do with circus arts.   

But if you are a circus artist living in Toronto applying for funding to create a new act or a short show, your work is lumped in and evaluated next to all the applications that get filed under 'Dance'. If you are a circus artist living in Kingston, Cornwall, Ottawa, or somewhere else in Ontario, if you apply to the OAC your work is lumped in with Dance, or multimedia arts.

Dance alone is one of the most competitive (most applied for) categories in any of these granting organizations.  I was told by a grant officer at the Canada Council for the Arts that the submission pools for categories like Literature and Music are so large that multiple juries are drawn together to evaluate everything in time. There are never enough circus submissions that more than a single peer review committee is required. In terms of a numbers game, the field is way more stacked if your circus application ends up in Dance or Theatre instead of a Circus category.

Secondly: when you are being evaluated by a 'jury of your peers', if it's a CCA application, it's other professional circus artists reading your application. But if you've applied to TAC or OAC, it's dancers or choreographers who have never done circus in their life, that are reading your application. Their understanding of circus might extend to a cheesy sideshow act that rolls through Toronto's CNE ('Canadian National Exhibition') every year, or only think of the massive, family-focused, arena-sized spectacle that Cirque du Soleil used to offer in its heyday – and nothing beyond that. Add this fact in with the reality that your submission is being included with potentially hundreds of other applications, rather than dozens, and things start to look pretty bleak in terms of getting your work funded.

A related problem: a larger issue (at least in Toronto and Ontario), is that circus arts has never existed within the kind of pedagogy, the kind of theory and practice, that grounds things like dance and theatre arts.

You can't go to York University and do a Masters in Circus the way that you can go do a Masters in Dance (you'd have to go to DOCH in Sweden for that! Fun! Tempting...). Dancers working with choreographers and directors who have studied dance for years in studios, or at a post-secondary level, bring the language of academia and theory about dance with them back into the studio, influencing future generations of dancers to also think and talk about their work in this way.

Peer review committees at the municipal and provincial levels in Ontario don't consider circus to be a serious art form, and the ways that folks write about it unfortunately reinforce this stereotype.

While it's not necessary to write an application that sounds like it would belong in a fourth-year undergraduate university course, being able to talk about your work intelligently and articulately goes a long way towards communicating – both explicitly and implicitly – that you know what you're doing, and that you can accomplish what you are proposing to set out to do.

You don't need to do this to love dance, of course: you can just love dancing! And create work, or participate in work, that reflects that. But – as artists have done for probably forever – you can also use dance as a means to talk about life experiences that feel bigger than words, that feel ineffable, that are sticky or difficult to grapple with, that strive to make us feel something, or relate to one another in a particular way ... you name it.

Let's take the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad as an example: if you were a young Conrad and wanted to apply to the Toronto Arts Council for a writing grant, your work would be perceived – and received – very differently if you described the project as:

"I want to write a story about a guy named Marlow who goes on a riverboat journey in the Congo."

vs.

"My story explores themes of imperialism and colonialism in relation to historical Belgian-Congolese examples of slavery, exploitation, and violence. Underpinning these broader sociopolitical commentaries is a central theme of hypocrisy and a lack of truth."

Both of those sentences/phrases give us important information about the work.

But which one gives you a clearer idea of what the work is about, as a whole?  

Which one gives you the why and not just the what?

Circus artists – at least in Toronto and Ontario, where there is no prestigious National Circus School, and where the cost of living [in the former] has recreational group classes running for $40/class right now (*exploding head noise*) – for the most part do not have access to this lineage of pedagogy, unless they decide to pursue it of their own accord. Most circus artists I meet in Toronto, or in many other circus communities across the rest of the country for that matter, are not pushed, provoked, or encouraged to approach their work in these ways because the kinds of gigs and contracts they have access to do not require this depth.

The kinds of performing opportunities in these places are limited to corporate, commercial work that prioritizes body type ("being hot") and doesn't care much about technical skill/high-level tricks; the training opportunities in these places can also be limiting in that artists at a high technical coaching level tend to gravitate towards Montréal or Québec City for work (or further training for themselves).

In other words, a lot of circus artists are pretty bad at talking about their work, even on a surface level, because they've never had to do it.

Most circus artists in Canada don't get training at a prestigious post-secondary institution purely dedicated towards developing an artist in various circus disciplines. It is a (very) small subsection of the Canadian circus community that receives training at the École Nationale du Cirque, and – to be quite honest – I'm not even entirely sure if young artists going through training at ENC are encouraged to think about, write about, or create their work in a way that reflects the above example. But – ENC does tend to create technically fantastic artists, and circus is still a world where technical virtuosity will carry you a very, very long way, regardless of whether or not you're interested in work that uses acrobatic vocabulary as a vehicle to discuss other topics.

As a result, circus artists (at least where I'm from) don't tend to talk about their work in the same way that dancers or actors or musicians or visual artists talk about their work; and to a jury of your peers, if your peers are dancers or actors instead of circus artists – it just looks like you don't know what you're doing, or that your work is superficial in depth compared to your peers.

"Circus artists don't think about the body in space," is something that my first artistic mentor (a former professional circus artist) lamented bitterly to me when I asked her why she didn't choreograph specifically for circus anymore (her work is squarely in the world of dance, now). If you pick up a Circus Studies book, you'll find plenty of scholarly essays (some from former and/or active circus artists) that talk about visual metaphor in circus, about gender performance and circus, about apparatus in relation to the acrobatic body, and more. Heck, it's the stuff I like to write about, as you all pretty much know by now!

But some folks will staunchly tell you that the core directive of circus arts is entertainment, spectacle. I've met plenty of local circus artists here who are frustrated with the 'requirement' for your work to 'mean something', and who complain that there should be funding available to them whether or not their work is rooted in whatever deep philosophical concept you'd like to throw out there.  

That's fair – but then you still need to be able to talk about it! You need to be able to make an argument about why whatever it is that drives your work, is worth receiving public money – public money that is partly derived from taxpayer dollars! Your work needs to make an impact on more than just you (and there's lots of ways to talk about that: centring it around historical events or persons, talking about joy, community, connectivity, colour, certain sounds or types of music, and more).

If you're a visual artist and you want support to make a series of paintings, I'm going to understand a lot more about the importance of your work if you tell me that it's continuing in the traditional of Impressionist painters or Neo-Cubism than if you just tell me that you want to paint 3, large-format canvases.  

If you're a dancer and you want to spend time in studio researching the beginnings of a new choreographic work,  I'm going to understand a lot more about the importance of you and your work if you can tell me other dancers or choreographers who have inspired your current idea, either positively ('I want to continue in this tradition, with x changes') or negatively ('I want to depart from this tradition for x reasons').

In other words, you need to be able to locate your work within the larger context of your practice. Or, at least, being able to do so is awfully helpful when applying for grants.

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I could go on, but I've already waxed rhapsodic about several different facets of the world of grants within Canada (and Ontario) (and Toronto) and I think that's quite enough for one day's reading!

I promise you your next eyeful of words will be bringing things back to familiar ground with the projects I've got on the go, and how they fit into this picture I've painted for you in the above!

To wrap things up here for the day, what about you folks? How does this compare to your experiences in your respective disciplines (if you're Canadian!) or your countries (if you're not!)?

In the meantime, stay strange and wonderful

XO

Ess