Rural Placemaking Grants

What is Rural Placemaking?

Placemaking is an approach to community development where residents are encouraged to connect and contribute toward a shared vision for their community, and work toward achieving that vision. It can include creative and cultural activities, community-centered design, and lively gathering spaces – helping people feel connected to one another and their community.

Placemaking should engage across sectors of the community including public, private and philanthropic organizations, and include residents often overlooked, such people with lower incomes, young people, and community members from Native and other cultural communities. An inclusive process builds trust and increases a community’s capacity to take action around shared values, ultimately leading to greater community well-being.

Placemaking projects may be as simple as new playground equipment or bathrooms at the park, renovations to a community center or other public building, a mural on the side of a building, or converting an empty lot into a pop-up park. These activities can make a huge difference in the character of the town, and draw people together to use the amenity. It can help promote connections between people, foster community pride, help residents see themselves as leaders that can make change, and their place is worth investing in.

Placemaking should enable positive economic, physical, and social changes in the community, increasing civic engagement and pride in place.

Projects should demonstrate how community participation in decision making around issues that affect their quality of place will result in:

• New or strengthened capacity for local community development, including seeking artist and cultural perspectives when addressing civic challenges and opportunities.
• Improved quality of civic discourse around issues that affect a community’s ability to thrive, such as an increased number of people engaged in community conversations, including typically under-represented populations, or improved ability of community members to take productive action around an issue.

Or involve making visible improvements to community gathering spaces, including increased visibility of the arts, that respect the local landscape, people, and culture:

• New or upgraded indoor and outdoor public spaces and/or community amenities.
• Increased number of community art installations and/or cultural activities.
• New or strengthened local arts and cultural organizations.
• Increased number of community members participating in local arts and culture activities.

Our Commitment to Reducing Disparities

Rural communities and Native Nations face systemic discrimination because of place (where we live), race (who we are), and class (economic status). The Foundation will consider these disparities when making funding decisions.

What that means is that proposals for amenity upgrades or beautification projects from communities that are small (under 5,000 population), more remote, lower income, and with greater racial diversity will be considered more favorably than similar projects from larger rural hub communities. In larger communities, projects should build capacity of the community to engage in placemaking and include an explicit strategy to engage people who are often underrepresented in the community.

These dates may change depending on the volume of applications received.

LOIs open on April 1 for statewide rural non-profit organizations.

Grant Eligibility & Applications