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As one of the state’s largest private funders of the arts, The James Irvine Foundation’s Arts program seeks “to promote a vibrant and inclusive artistic and cultural environment in California.” This broad goal, in effect, means that Irvine supports arts organizations of all sizes, in all disciplines and in all regions of the state.

But arts and culture in the nation’s most populous state is an enormous and diverse field, with more than 4,000 organizations statewide. Irvine’s five-person Arts program staff would be hard pressed to adequately cover such a broad territory and make well-informed decisions on thousands of grant proposals a year without a little help.

So the Foundation relies on a range of organizations — from community foundations to arts service organizations — to broaden its reach. By tapping the expertise and networks of these organizations in specific regions of the state or artistic disciplines, Irvine is able to keep the quality of grantmaking high, while reaching a larger number of small organizations and individual artists.

“Our partners often have expertise that we don’t have,” said Jeanne Sakamoto, senior program officer in Irvine’s Arts program. “A community foundation, for example, understands the needs of its local community in ways that we never could. These partners allow us to support arts and culture around the state that we might not otherwise be aware of.”

How Regranting Works

The practice is known as regranting: Irvine makes grants to these “intermediary organizations,” which, in turn, use the funds to award smaller grants to other nonprofit arts organizations or individual artists. About a quarter of the Foundation’s $50 million in active Arts grants are funds that are regranted in this way.

The strategy has benefits for the intermediary organizations, as well as for Irvine. It offers them an opportunity to strengthen their leadership role in their community or artistic discipline. And the regranting funds represent an opportunity for the regranting organizations to leverage additional support from other foundations and donors.

Irvine’s Arts program works with more than 25 intermediary organizations. These organizations, in consultation with Irvine and other groups, develop goals and objectives for the regranting program. They establish an application process and set criteria for proposals. And they create a peer-review or expert panel to judge the applicants.

Often, these intermediary organizations provide additional assistance to grantseekers beyond just giving grants. This can include help in writing grant proposals and marketing. And many times they host gatherings for artists and organizations to come together and learn from one another.

Grants range from $1,000 to $35,000 for individual artists and up to $150,000 for arts organizations. For some recipients, these are the first grants they have ever received and can serve as a stepping stone for larger grants from other sources.

Four Areas of Regranting

Most of our regranting in the Arts program falls into four broad categories:

• Geographically focused organizations: These intermediary organizations are usually community foundations or local arts councils. Community foundations, in partnership with local arts groups, decide how the funding from Irvine will help meet community needs. Typically, the community foundations use the regranting funds to spur more donations from the community.
  
  Irvine’s largest program in this area is the Communities Advancing the Arts initiative, created in 2004 largely to increase individual giving to the arts in communities across the state. Irvine has committed more than $9 million to the initiative through 2011, about half of which is for regranting to small and midsize arts organizations.


• Culturally specific organizations: Irvine seeks to support engagement in the arts among people from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. In this area, the Foundation relies on intermediary organizations that possess an expertise in culturally and ethnically specific arts and culture.
  
  One such organization is the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA), which supports a broad range of cultural traditions, from Native American basket-making to African American quilt-making to Vietnamese opera. Organizations like ACTA can make an impact not only in encouraging cultural diversity, but also in strengthening communities.


• Discipline-specific organizations: Organizations working in specific artistic disciplines, such as dance or the literary arts, receive Irvine funding for regranting within their discipline. This takes advantage of the intermediary organization’s deeper understanding of artistic trends and issues, as well as their broader networks within the discipline.
  
  Dance USA, which represents more than 400 dance companies across the country, is using Irvine support to fund the California component of a national pilot program to research and develop new ways to engage dance audiences. Another Irvine regrantee is Poets & Writers, the nation’s largest nonprofit serving creative writers.


• Individual artists: While Irvine itself does not make grants to individual artists, the foundation provides funding to a variety of organizations that do. These grants may be for the development of new artistic works, but more often they are aimed at supporting artists in broader ways, such as through residency programs or with professional development.
  
  The Center for Cultural Innovation, a Los Angeles-based organization that promotes financial independence for artists, uses Irvine funds to offer grants of up to $10,000 for new works or to help individual artists buy equipment and tools that they need to create their best work more consistently.
  
  Another intermediary organization is the Alliance of Artists Communities, a collection of artist communities, residency programs and other institutions that support artistic creativity. The Alliance uses Irvine funding to award stipends and month-long residencies to underrecognized artists to enable them to produce their art.

For Irvine, regranting represents an effective way to extend our reach, given a limited staff and finite resources. But for grantseeking organizations and individuals, these various regranting programs have a more practical benefit in that they represent another place to look for funding opportunities beyond Irvine itself.

To learn more about regranting opportunities at Irvine, click here for a list of participating intermediary organizations and the types of art that they fund.