The Path To Funding

Based on coursework developed at Peabody Conservatory, this book breaks down the process of developing an artist mission statement, generating new ideas for creative projects, and creating an engaging project description. It also covers methods for artists to identify their audience, generate a comprehensive project budget, collect compelling work samples, and identify potential funders to support their creative work. Written by a team of active artists and educators, this resource provides creatives with tools and strategies to communicate passionately and effectively about their work and take control of their financial and artistic future.

This book is a hybrid resource. It is part textbook, part workbook. Our goal is that you arrive at the end with the tools and confidence to build your own projects, for grants or otherwise. While we've centered the process around building a grant proposal, all the tools outlined in the coming pages can be helpful when creating an independently funded project, a crowdfunded project, or even just figuring out how to manage your artistic career.

The book provides new tools and processes to create ideas (there is a science to creativity!), describe your ideas, develop a budget and timeline for them, and talk about them to other people. You learn how to locate potential funding for those ideas, how to support them with examples of your past work, and how to identify who might be interested in your idea. For each of these steps, we walk you through a method for creating the content or building the skills, as well as explore your own methods. This is a guide, not a set of laws.

We hope that when equipped with these skills, each artist takes ownership of their art. With the confidence to find funding for your projects, you can also generate and sustain financial and creative freedom.

This open book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY). You can download The Path to Funding ebook for free in PDF format (8.1 MB).