Department of Art and Culture Awards Over $6.4M to Arts, Cultural, Social Justice and Social Service Organizations

To support local arts nonprofits and the communities they serve, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture or Arts and Culture has announced more than $6.4M in grants to 318 nonprofit organizations through its 2024-2025 Organizational Grant Program and Community Arts Impact Grant awards.

Thanks to leadership from the Board of Supervisors, there was a larger allocation of funding this year, due to a $1.2M increase to the organizational grant program or OGP, the first increase in more than 15 years for LA County’s longest-running arts grant program. OGP grants will go to 238 organizations, 34 of which are first time applicants to the program. The total allocation for grantees this year is $5,668,000, and awards range from $700 to $122,300.

OGP strengthens the Los Angeles region’s cultural ecosystem with funding to organizations of every artistic discipline, budget size, and geography. Grantees can use these funds to support critical needs, from staffing and organizational infrastructure to public arts programming in museums and visual arts, performing arts, film, arts education, arts service organizations, literary arts and more. Grantees can also access Arts and Culture’s slate of professional development opportunities—programs designed in-house, as well as scholarships for trainings and conferences. OGP addresses systemic inequity in arts funding; 94% of the organizations that were awarded have budgets under $5M and 50% of those have budgets under $200K. These organizations are often underfunded and include those that reflect and serve communities of color, historically marginalized, and rural communities. 

Different than Arts and Culture’s longstanding funding for nonprofits with a primary focus on the arts, the Community Impact Arts Grant (CIAG) supports arts-based programs of social justice and service organizations. CIAG was designed to address two priorities: making arts services available to LA County residents who might not experience them through traditional arts venues and outlets, and encouraging integration of the arts in cross-sector work at local nonprofits. Grantee programs span art forms and communities reached, from therapeutic visual arts, to social justice filmmaking, music education for youth, dance empowerment, and memory programs for dementia.

There were 80 awarded organizations in CIAG this year, 19 of which were new awardees—making this year’s grantee pool the largest in the program’s history. The total CIAG allocation is $750,000, and awards range from $6,300 to $10,600. A complete list of CIAG grantees, and the programs and events this funding will support, can be found here.

Details: Find a list of OGP grantees, and the programs and events this funding will support here.