Tourists and residents of the five-county Philadelphia region are fortunate to have access to an impressive array of art and cultural institutions. While the region is rich culturally, the breadth of the organizations throughout the five counties also leads to duplication of efforts in terms of funds that need to be raised to support everyday operations. Costs and time devoted to infrastructure, marketing and human resources can divert valuable resources and energy that could be directed to more innovative programmatic activities.

At Barra, we believe in creating opportunities for arts and culture organizations to work in more collaborative ways to achieve economies of scale. Our grantmaking strategy encourages the arts and culture sector to become more innovative by sharing resources and developing systems and processes that serve a number of organizations while keeping each unique mission intact.

Specifically, we have two objectives in our goal to encourage collaboration in the arts and culture field:

• To support arts and cultural organizations that enter into long-term collaborative relationships to improve organizational effectiveness. Collaboration should lead to creative program initiatives, enhanced marketing and outreach, or other operational efficiencies.
• To support arts and cultural initiatives that achieve an impact broader than a single project or audience by either partnering with other organizations in the sector or by engaging organizations outside of the traditional cultural community.

Requests will be evaluated based on the extent to which they address these objectives and also our overall criteria for Project Grants, which are as follows:

• Demonstrate a novel way to approach emerging, current or persistent issues
• Will be more effective than existing or past solutions
• Will provide meaningful and measurable results
• Can demonstrate a reasonable plan for sustainability
• Have the potential to be widely adopted or to catalyze change in a particular field

Project Grants usually range from $50,000 to $150,000. Project Grants are not intended to provide funds for general operating support.  For more information about our grantmaking guidelines, please visit our FAQ page.