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Opportunity Fund

Apply for a grant to help continue your professional development, support your artistic career, share your art, and teach others.

Update: The Opportunity Fund application is currently closed.


The Opportunity Fund provides grants of $5,000 and $10,000 to support individual artists and local arts events planned by artists.

Application and requirements

Keep in mind

You can only receive an Opportunity Fund grant once per fiscal year, which is July 1-June 30. This year, we prioritized:

Reporting requirements

If you receive a grant, you must submit a short, one-page report summarizing your experience or artist career development opportunity. The report must describe the outcomes and how the funds were used.

If you don't want to submit a report, you can take part in a question-and-answer session with our staff. The meeting must take place a week after your community arts experience or artist career development opportunity.

Please note:
  • You or your fiscal sponsor must have a Vendor ID number from the City of Boston to complete your application.
  • The deadline to apply for this round of the Opportunity Fund grant in fiscal year 2022 was January 28, 2022 at 5PM.

Grant categories

Grant categories

Artists living in Boston who want to pursue one-time artistic opportunities to further their career can apply for $5,000 grants. This includes funding:

  • to help support an artistic project
  • for artistic materials, and
  • for professional development opportunities.
Eligibility

You need to live in the City of Boston. Your annual individual income must also be less than $50,000. More than 70% of artists surveyed through our office’s Artist Housing Survey make an income of under $50,000. Our office aims to prioritize supporting these artists in Boston.

Eligible expenses include:
  • the cost of artistic materials
  • the cost of travel and travel-related meals, conferences, residency fees, work workshop fees, and
  • costs related to an artistic project, such as help framing paintings before an exhibition, or producing an album.
Who can apply?

Artists, teaching artists, creative workers, and cultural practitioners who would like to bring free arts experiences into a Boston community can apply for $10,000. An individual artist can also apply on behalf of an artist collective, artist group, or band.

Focus communities

This category prioritizes bringing arts experiences into neighborhoods that have a lower concentration of free, public arts activities. They were also hit hardest by COVID-19. The focus communities include:

These arts experiences and events don’t need to happen in these neighborhoods. But, we’re prioritizing these areas. We encourage you to explain how the community where your event will take place is underserved by arts experiences.

Where you can hold events

Experiences can be virtual or in-person. They can be recurring or one-time events. Experiences can also be in libraries, schools, or less traditional arts-learning spaces. These include senior centers, health centers, or community centers. 

Please note

Your arts experience must be free, accessible, and open to the public.

Eligibility

Applicants must live in Boston and the arts experience must take place in Boston. We prefer an event that takes place in one of our priority neighborhoods. This grant is open to individual artists, teaching artists, creative workers, cultural practitioners, and art collectives, like groups and bands.

Eligible expenses
  • Materials for the arts experience (this can include refreshments)
  • Marketing for the arts experience 
  • Renting a space for the experience
  • Paying for artists putting the experience together, or artists hired (this can include the applicant)
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