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Patience and pacing are two important things to keep in mind when applying to any grants program. “When you start working on a project, you obviously want to do it now, like, ‘Everyone, let’s get this started!’� Fromm says. “But it doesn’t happen like that. You need the money, you need the means, you need the understanding of the community. And that’s hard in a culture where we’re very impulsive and we want to make a video, for example, and immediately upload it and then immediately see people engage with it and with our work.�

Mean It

“You have to be committed,� she says. “If you don’t have the ability to hold on to something and be willing to see it through a long process, then applying for grants is kind of dissatisfying and really difficult, because you can’t just instantaneously get the money.�

Think Ahead

“You apply in February and you hear back in November,� Fromm says of the application cycle she followed while applying for an NEA grant (the other cycle starts in July). “So right away, you know the project can’t actually start until that January after. �

Know That It’s Complicated

“It does get confusing to apply to the NEA,� Fromm says. “You have to first apply to SAM [System for Award Management] and make a workspace, and then anybody else that’s going to work on it, they have to be invited to the workspace.� You also have to be an organization first, which means having an Employer Identification Number and a Commercial and Government Entity ID.

Success Is the Name of the Game

“The cool thing about granters is that they’re really flexible,� Fromm says. “They understand that if you are willing to write this grant, that your budget is likely to have shifted. They understand that there is inflation, or maybe something the property that you’re working at or with has sold. There’s just a lot of unpredictable pieces to every project, and granters totally understand this.�

Granters are open and caring, she adds, and “the end goal is to help people making art that the community will engage with and appreciate, and art that maybe will change their lives.�

Keep Your Receipts

Not all granting agencies will give grant money up front. Some grants, like those given by the NEA that Friends of the Orphan Signs received, follow a reimbursement model, meaning that it receives money after they spent it. Other grants offer money ahead of an organization spending it, but often in increments.

“With the NEA, you can invoice at any point for the most part, and you have to tell them a whole bunch of stuff,� Fromm says. “You have to show them how much you’ve spent, line by line, and you give them an update of where the project is at, what you’ve done, what you spent the money on. They go over it, and then they check and make sure the invoice aligns with the official budget that you’ve given.�

New Directives

On February 6, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the cancellation of the Challenge America grant for the 2026 fiscal year and that it is currently revising guidelines for that same year’s grants for art projects — like the one awarded to Friends of the Orphan Signs. It has pushed the GAP 1 deadline for art project grants to March 11.

According to The Washington Post, the NEA will moving forward prioritize art projects about the Declaration of Independence.

There are also other issues to take into account now. Fromm says the next thing she is concerned about is whether the staff at the NEA will be cut. This would in turn mean longer wait times for reimbursement and disbursements, which could jeopardize not only the FOS project supported by the NEA grant, but also the projects of hundreds of organizations nationwide.

Check Out New Mexico Arts

You can apply for an NEA grant directly, the way Fromm did for Friends of the Orphan Signs, or you can apply for an NEA partnership fund through a government agency at the state level. In New Mexico, the largest such agency is New Mexico Arts.

“The NEA was created in 1965 and then every state in the Union designated or created a state arts agency that is the federally authorized state arts agency for that state or jurisdiction,� says Michelle Laflamme-Childs, the executive director of New Mexico Arts.

The reason for establishing these agencies was to help distribute National Endowment for the Arts Partnership funds.

“The NEA and the federal government recognize that they don’t have the expertise about all of the individual nonprofit organizations in any given state, but that people [who live and work] in the state do,� Laflamme-Childs says. “So, they give every state a chunk of money, and then that money is distributed by the state arts agency to eligible, usually nonprofit or government or public educational institutions across the state.�

Laflamme-Childs adds that 40% of the National Endowment for the Arts budget is set aside for these partnership programs at the state level. Each year, each state agency, like New Mexico Arts, has to apply to the NEA. On average, New Mexico Arts gets $800,000, which that must then be matched by the state legislature, which Laflamme-Childs says ensures that states themselves also continue investing in the arts.

The application process for an NEA partnership grant works a little like the one for a direct NEA grant and can be time consuming. Laflamme says that for this reason, New Mexico Arts will this year start a two-year cycle for all applications.

“There are a lot of rules and processes that have to be followed,� Laflamme-Childs says. “We decided to ease the burden on these small nonprofit arts organizations, and one of the ways we came up with is to make them only have to go through a full application every two years instead of every year.�

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