City of Houston Awards $14.7M in Grants to support the Arts and Culture
HOUSTON, TEXAS- The City of Houston Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs (MOCA) is awarding $14,795,116 in grants to 102 individuals and 156 arts and culture nonprofit organizations and fiscally sponsored projects offering public exhibitions, presentations and performances in 2025. The funds are awarded via the Support for Organizations, Festival and Support for Artists and Creative Individuals grant programs, which support individuals, nonprofit organizations and fiscally sponsored projects with annual arts and cultural programming that is available to Houston residents and visitors. These competitive grant programs are managed and administered annually by the Houston Arts Alliance (HAA) and are funded by a portion of the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT). More information about HOT funding is available here.
“Houston’s diverse arts and cultural offerings provide tremendous service to our community, attract visitors and support a strong creative sector.” Necole S. Irvin, City of Houston Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs director.
The competitive grants programs begin with an annual improvement process in January of each year. All aspects of the competitions are updated based on community input and City of Houston goals. The updated competition process is launched each summer. HAA publicly launches each competition through various media channels like social media and a digital newsletter and then conducts several public workshops about the process and how to create a competitive application. Competitions are open to the public for a minimum of one month, during which HAA staff takes meetings and phone calls upon request and answers email questions from potential applicants.
All applications received by the published deadline are reviewed through a two-step process. First, applications are reviewed by HAA staff for objective eligibility criteria. For example, the applicant must be based in the City of Houston and must offer publicly accessible programs during the lapse of the grant period. Second, all eligible applications are scored by panelists, who are experts in the arts and vetted through the HAA Grants Committee of the Board of Directors. Each year, HAA works with approximately 130 panelists, depending on the number of applications that must be read and scored. Panelists, like grantees, cannot be employees or board members of HAA, nor their family members. Panelists must remove themselves from scoring if they have a financial or other meaningful conflict of interest with any application. The competition process is reviewed in full by the Grants Committee of the Board of HAA, voted on and then advanced to the Board of HAA for its review and vote. Once Board review is complete, the results are sent to the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs as a packet of recommended grantees for the City’s approval.
In the second year, the BIPOC boost formula which is a permanent part of the larger grants competitions’ formulas for funding, including the grants programs Support for Organizations (SO), Support for Artists and Creative Individuals (SACI), and Festival Grants (FG) allocation is nearly $1M. This portion of the granting provides an additional boost to organizations and individuals selected through the community-based panel adjudication process used in all grant programs. The formula applies to those applicants who meet BIPOC qualification criteria for their grant program and who have been scored for funding by peer panels. More specifically, successful applicants already awarded through the panel process will benefit from a 45% boost, capped at $20,000, applied to their budget-specific estimated eligible award. The organizational qualification requires organizational applicants meet at least three of five criteria.
To learn about past grantees and stay up to date with current grantees and news related to grants sign up for the Houston Arts Alliance Newsletter.