Portland's recently created Office of Arts & Culture announced a new process for city-funded small grant awards Wednesday night, along with the three nonprofits it has chosen to distribute funds.

From 1995 to 2023, small grants of less than $5,000 were distributed by arts funding nonprofit the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC). However, last year Dan Ryan's office announced the city would not renew its contract with RACC and would use a competitive proposal process to work with multiple organizations for funding disbursement.

Two of the partnerships are new—Friends of Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center  and MusicOregon—and the third will be familiar with the city's arts scene funding. It's the RACC. 

Of the three allotments, RACC received the largest: $1.2 million to award to local artists and arts organizations. Friends of Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center received $100,000 and MusicOregon $80,000.

Friends of Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center and MusicOregon may be known to readers for their presence in the city's performance scenes. The firehouse is the first place I saw an iteration of Evolve Experience, a theatrical work seeking to challenge public perception of racial profiling in police work. MusicOregon is a local advocacy and grant funding group that organizes Portland Music Week. They awarded $57,000 in grants to musicians last fall.

The $1.2 million allotment is still a shadow of what the RACC used to distribute, diminished from the approximately $6 million the city entrusted it with in its 2023-24 calendar of grant-awarding. 

RACC's former funding was also intended to support larger organizations, like Portland Art Museum, Portland Center Stage, Oregon Ballet Theatre, et al. The Office of Arts & Culture now "provides direct, unrestricted operating support" for 73 nonprofit organizations, including those just mentioned. In the 2010s, RACC reportedly distributed 57 percent of its funding to the city’s five largest arts nonprofits, but moved to create more equitable grant application process in 2019.

Due to last year's apparently contentious fallout between the organization and Commissioner Ryan's office, many in the arts scene worried RACC would be even more severely shut out of the City's arts funding processes.

On July 21, 2023, Ryan's office announced the city would not renew its contract with RACC in 2024. That same announcement notified the public of a new office under Ryan's purview: the Office of Arts and Culture.

Transition plans said that the city would identify who would replace RACC to distribute funds "well before the RACC contract expires in June 2024." That information could have been pulled from a city council meeting report in late November 2023 as OPB did for a recent interview with the new office's director, but this announcement appears to be the first statement to the public that includes information about when the funding rounds open for the respective organizations.

This story is ongoing, and we'll report more as updates become available. Find proposal opening dates and application deadlines at the city's Small Grants Program page.