March 04, 2004
City Announces First Recipients Of Cultural Economy Grants
This morning in the City Hall atrium, Rosie Williams of Worksystems, Inc. and Mayor Vera Katz announced the thirteen recipients of Portland's first "Creative Economy Initiative" grants.
"I'm really excited to have you all here this morning," said Williams. "We had almost 200 applicants, but we could only give out thirteen grants."
The program was announced last December and offered grants up to $750 per applicant from a funding pool of $10,000 intended to add "an important new tool to Portland’s efforts to attract and retain artists, designers, and innovators, especially younger entrepreneurs."
Funding for the grants came from a Federal grant received through the Bureau of Housing and Community Development, part of the portfolio of Commissioner Erik Sten.
"We have the beginnings now of a Cultural Economy Initiative," said Katz. "I call you the young and the restless. You're young, and you want to experience alot of the opportunities for yourself and the community."
"You are truly an emerging economy for us," she added.
Katz explained that the demographic group which the 24- to 35-year-old grant recipients represent has been leaving many other cities across the country. Portland, on the other hand, is reportedly fifth in the nation in attracting new residents in that age range.
"You've picked Portland for a particular reason," Katz said. "We want you to stay and we want you to be successful."
According to last December's news release, the grants are intended "to be used as seed money for education or as assistance toward other business-related creative endeavors that will benefit the community." Today's release says they wil be "used for such projects as upgrading production equipment, ongoing professional education, or to begin new commercial projects."
Katz also said that she's been having conversations with a possible private source of further funding for more such grants, but did not name that source.
Here are the recipients (with links if we could find any), along with their creative leanings as listed in today's news release, of the first Cultural Economy Initiative grants:
- Jessica Beebe, fashion designer
- Joseph Bradsahw, magazine publisher
- Tiffany Lee-Brown, writer
- Andrew Dickson, performance artist and filmmaker
- Sarah Dougher, musician
- Eric Ferrari, ceramics artist
- Jalal Jemison, videographer
- Tere Mathern, dancer/choreographer
- Misty McElroy, Rock'n'Roll Camp for Girls
- Camela Raymond, writer/editor
- Vanessa Renwick, film and video producer
- Joanne Vladimir Solomon, entrepreneur
- Rob Tyler, media art
Comments (2)
kebbo on 05 Mar 2004
This sounds like the sort of grant you should get for Communique (though an extra zero or two in the award would probably be more useful). Just in case you haven't already looked into this -- MCPL has many books on how to write/find/get grants.
pdxkona on 06 Mar 2004
I talked to Rosie a couple weeks ago and out of the over 200 applicants they picked 13. After showing the success of this one, she is currently working on getting another bigger grant which may come out in June/July if all goes well.
By the list here that you have I'm not so sure how successful this project is in "attracting new artists to Portland and enticing them to stay" agenda because Tiffany, Sarah, and Vanessa are long time Portlanders.
And one of them is a Professor at a State College and does their artistic endeavor on the side; kind of odd to ask them to use it as "seed money for education" methinks.