Title
Program Solicitation: Our Town Technical Assistance Program
Agencies
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
Description
The National Endowment for the Arts is creating
a pilot program to provide select grantees of the agency's Our Town funding program with targeted
technical assistance(TA) to execute their projects and to further inform the Arts Endowment
in its understanding of the creative placemaking field. Creative placemaking is when artists,
arts organizations, and community development practitioners deliberately integrate arts and culture into community work -- placing arts at the table with land-use, transportation,
economic development, education, housing, infras
tructure, and public safety strategies.
The intention of creative placemaking is to foster a positive impact on a place, resulting
in a variety of potential outcomes, including improved quality of life, reduction in crime,
strengthened social cohesion, and increased economic activity.
The Arts Endowment strives to assist organizations
to effectively incorporate the arts into community development efforts. These activities have primarily been supported through the
agency's Our Town grant program. Since the
program's inception in 2011, more than $21 million has been awarded through 256 Our Town
grants in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to support creative placemaking projects.
The agency has also created numerous online
resources and learning opportunities for the country's practitioners and Our Town grantees,
most notably launching the Exploring Our Town
storybook and hosting topical webinars and
convenings that both inform the field and
educate the agency about the needs of
its constituents.
In the course of this work, however, it has become clear that many Our Town grantees would benefit from direct, hands-on technical assistance while executing their projects at the local level. The Arts Endowment staff does not presently have the staffing resources to execute
this direct assistance at scale.
This pilot program is intended to fill a portion of this gap, and increase the likelihood that grantees' projects are both successful and catalytic, resulting in longer term positive outcomes for their communities. Lessons learned, significant field trends, and other program resources will be shared with the public to inform practitioners and assist the agency in determining whether this type of technical assistance would be beneficial to all Our Town grantees.
More Information
http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/our-town-technical-assistance-program-rev.pdf
Submission Limits
An organization may submit only one proposal under this program solicitation.
Deadlines
Internal Notice of Intent |
May 28, 2015 |
Notification of Internal Competition |
May 29, 2015 |
Internal Pre-proposal |
Jun 3, 2015 |
Results of Internal Competition |
Jun 5, 2015 |
Agency Notice of Intent/Pre-proposal |
N/A |
Agency Proposal |
Jul 21, 2015
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