Microgrants!

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With sites like Kiva and Kickstarter, microlending has become a term we are familiar with. It is a way of supporting people in poverty and cultural producers (respectively) on an incredibly small scale. Together, however, these small loans are able to make a difference in people's lives, for both the lender and the borrower, without the intervention of traditional funding and lending organizations.

Alongside the development of microlending, a new type of grant-making is emerging in the art world (and probably beyond, though I don't know about it yet). My first contact with microgrants was in 2006 with the "Service-Works" project by Josh Greene, a waiter and artist who gave up his tips one night per month to support an art project. Greene wrote that he wanted to "bridge the gap between my art career and my service industry career." The project funded 17 artists over 17 months in the range of $160 to $450. Then there is InCubate's Sunday Soup project, where they invite an artist/chef to prepare soup for a dinner where everyone who attends pays $10 for a meal and a vote towards a creative project grant. These grants are about the same size as Greene's grants, but what's great about InCubate's project is that it has inspired over a dozen other groups to take up the model and make it their own. For instance, the small town I live in, Iowa City, has started a SOUP grant, giving between $50 and $100 to one project a month. Finally, my own tiny micro-grant, the smallest of them all. I noticed that I spend about $2 a day on coffee when I don't make it at home. That's $60 a month that disappears without me noticing it. I decided to try and make coffee at home, and for every day that I don't buy a cup at the local cafe, I set aside that $2 for a small grant. I've been doing it since January, and the grants have ranged from $34 to $50 per month depending on the amount of coffee I buy, which is nothing, but it might be the tiny amount of money that makes someone else's project a bit more doable. There are more of these microgranting projects popping up every day.

These microgrants mobilize our individual surpluses to create something a bit bigger than ourselves. If it isn't the financial boost that an Local Cultural Council grant would be, it is the affirmation that someone believes in your project enough to have dinner with friends, or to drink less coffee, or to wait tables for you for a night. Microgrants are about the belief that we can create something together, perhaps with a little less of the government funding many of us have come to desire. It is about becoming the granting institution you want to see in the world. What would your microgrant look like?