Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Cultural Facilities Fund awards $1.1M to support capital projects throughout the city
SEATTLE —The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s (ARTS) expanded Cultural Facilities Fund announced awards to 28 organizations throughout the City. The Fund was expanded from $250,000 to $1.1M in 2018 to better support the needs to preserve cultural space and affordability in our rapidly growing city.
Prior to the Fund opening in 2018, ARTS conducted a Racial Equity Toolkit on the expanded Cultural Facilities Fund lowering barriers for eligibility to ensure that the benefits it creates are shared equitably with communities of color, and helping vulnerable organizations fight growing displacement pressures.
The Cultural Facilities Fund supports capital projects at arts and cultural spaces in Seattle. All organizations funded in the 2018 cycle are establishing or seeking to expand to better serve their communities and preserve their cultural traditions. Awardees include Black & Tan Hall, a cooperatively-owned performing arts and restaurant venue which seeks to maintain Rainier Valley as a destination for cross-cultural arts and education events; Friends of Little Saigon creating a safe space to share and practice Vietnamese arts and culture; United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, which operates Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, a space for the exhibition and performance of Native arts and culture; Eritrean Community in Seattle, an operational agency for refugees and immigrants of Eritrea and East African descents in Seattle; and Coyote Central an organization working with young adolescents to build skills, creative thinking, self-awareness, and social awareness through hands-on projects with professionals in creative fields.
Awardees received between $10,000 and $80,000. The full list of awardees are:
- Amplifier Foundation
- Avole Coffee LLC
- Black & Tan Hall
- Byrd Barr Place
- Chong Wa Benevolent Association
- Community Arts Create
- Coyote Central
- Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association
- Densho
- Detective Cookie Chess Park
- Earl’s Cuts and Styles Inc.
- Ethiopian Community in Seattle
- Eritrean Community in Seattle & Vicinity
- Filipino Community of Seattle
- Freehold Theatre Lab Studio
- Friends of Little Saigon
- Indie Genius Media
- Jack Straw Foundation
- La Sala
- MLK Family Arts Mentoring & Enrichment Community Center
- Multicultural Community Center
- Na’ah Illahee
- Reel Grrls
- Royal Esquire Club
- SEEDArts
- United Indians of All Tribes Foundation
- Vietnamese Cultural Center
- Wing Luke Memorial Foundation
The Cultural Facilities Fund started in 2012 and is designed to support capital projects that improve Seattle’s arts spaces in significant and lasting ways. The fund’s goal is to help Seattle-based organizations build and improve their facilities in ways that will ultimately advance their missions and strengthen Seattle’s cultural scene by creating greater accessibility.
The Cultural Facilities Fund is part of ARTS’ cultural space strategy, which includes the Cultural Space program that preserves, creates and activates Seattle’s cultural square footage. To achieve this goal, ARTS works with artists and cultural organizations to strengthen their role in charting the future of their creative spaces; works with developers and builders to incorporate arts and culture into new projects; and works with property owners to incentivize the preservation and expansion of arts and culture uses.
