Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#325: David Holmes (Educational Programming Manager at Candid) (pt. 1 of 2)
This week on the podcast is part one of our interview with David Holmes. He’s an Educational Programming Manager at Candid, where he helps nonprofits and individuals find funding. He also coordinates national trainings and educational programming for the Midwest region.
David returned to Candid in 2015 from a position as Senior Consultant at Grants Plus, writing grants and doing research for a variety of large and small nonprofit clients. In his initial nine-year tenure with Foundation Center, Dave served in various roles including Regional Training Specialist, Interim Director of Foundation Center – Cleveland, and the Director of Capacity and Leadership Development.
If you’ve ever wanted to write a grant, learn where you can find information about grants, or learn more about the grant writing process, you won’t want to miss our interview with David! https://candid.org
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise and.
Nick Petrella:I'm Nick Petrella. David Holmes is joining us today to talk about artist grants and grant writing. He's an educational programming manager at Candid, where he helps nonprofits and individuals find funding. He also coordinates national trainings and educational programming for the Midwest region. David returned to Candid in 2015 from a position as senior consultant at Grants Plus, writing grants and doing research for a variety of large and small non-profit clients. In his initial nine-year tenure with Candid, formerly Foundation Center, david served in various roles, including regional training specialist, interim director of Foundation Center Cleveland and the director of capacity and leadership development. Early in his career, david served as a program officer for the Stocker Foundation in Lorain, ohio, and as the director of grants and prospect research at Notre Dame College in South Euclid, ohio. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh, an MA from Villanova University and an MLIS from Kent State University. Thanks for coming on the podcast, dave. You're welcome. Good to be here. Let's begin by having you tell us in more detail what Candid is and what you do there.
David Holmes:Sure, candid is a national nonprofit. It's made up of two other nonprofits. Six years ago they got together and combined to make Candid. One of them was Foundation Center. Foundation Center has been around since the 50s collecting information on private grants and funding, working with nonprofits and other individuals to raise money and teaching classes like that. That's where I started at Foundation Center, and the idea of Foundation Center was to provide information for nonprofits to connect to funders. Guidestar, which is the other partner that formed Candid, was created to collect information on nonprofits and mainly their audience was grantmakers people that are giving money away. So GuideStar still exists as GuideStarorg, which is part of Candid. Guidestarorg lists every nonprofit in the United States as the IRS recognizes them, and it's used by donor advised fund managers and individual donors Facebook other large places to collect information on nonprofits and share it out again, and what we do together is try to share all the data on where money comes from, where it goes and why it matters, how you can connect to it.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, and do you have to be a member to access that information?
David Holmes:No, it's free. It's free. You can go to candidorg. There's a lot of free information available on that website, particularly our Candid Learning section. If you want to access our database called the Foundation Directory, that is not free, you would have to subscribe to it, but you can get it freely at over 1,800 locations throughout the United States and Mexico. These are just partners of ours, usually public libraries that have free access to it and with trained people that can help you out and get connected. It's great.
Andy Heise:Yeah, and I always encourage my students to go to the Kansas City Public Library and work with the work with the. I think they have a business services person there that can kind of help them navigate that to see what's out there. What are, you know? Nonprofits, foundations grant opportunities that exist within our community nonprofits, foundations, grant opportunities that exist within our community.
David Holmes:Yep, it's in nearly every large city, I think, and we try if we can to get every branch of the public library in that city to be a member as well.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, excellent.
Andy Heise:So you've worked with both individuals and organizations over the years in terms of grant making and that sort of thing. Have you seen a tipping point moment when artists start to consistently land grants or feel that they built a sustainable career around their funded work?
David Holmes:I'm not sure I thought about this earlier, because oftentimes when I talk about people getting into grants, nonprofits or individual funders, what works best is consistency. Is is knowing how to find the different things that you need to apply for and making sure that you turn in reports and you submit things on time. So the tipping point is usually when somebody finally realizes that this is the consistent way to do it so that I can make sure I will get the money. Sometimes it's like, well, I don't want to think about that anymore. It was so much work, but you have to turn in a report in a couple of months or you have to file something so that you can be eligible again, and it's tiresome a lot of the time, but it's worth it if you can be consistent.
Andy Heise:Yeah time, but it's worth it if you can be consistent. Yeah, so just having that process or understanding the process and actually following through, and deadlines are real deadlines when it comes to these sorts of grant making organizations as well.
David Holmes:Yeah, and it's like you can come up with a great excuse Like this is why my paper was laid. I can do this, but you know it doesn't really work all that.
Andy Heise:well, my dog ate my grant report.
David Holmes:Yeah, yeah exactly.
Nick Petrella:So, dave, you have a pretty interesting gig, and I'm wondering what made you decide to pursue a career that focuses on helping nonprofits and individuals find funding.
David Holmes:Well, I actually started out. I was majoring in English literature from the 19th century, which is not like a great connection to grant writing or anything like that. But I did get involved in working with a nonprofit in DC when I first started out and started to learn what different nonprofits did, and I liked the idea of translating you know part of what I always love the phrase only connect from EM Forster and the idea that you can connect people of different pursuits to what they need. And mostly what I do is translate what grantmakers do into English so that people that want to get money from them or want to connect to them can understand what they're going for. And I want to make it so that anybody could do it.
David Holmes:It shouldn't be something that's just for a privileged few. It shouldn't be somebody, someone. It shouldn't be something that you can get only when you pay somebody a lot of money to do it for you. It should be something you're able to, anybody's able to do, and that excites me and I love to see every. I teach very similar things all the time, but I love to see new people get excited and realize that this is not maybe as hard as they thought it was going to be.
Andy Heise:That's great. So you know, in all those grant making organizations they have missions that they're trying to fulfill right through these grant programs, realizing that they can't do all of it themselves. So they're going to provide grant funding to other people that can can't do all of it themselves, so they're going to provide grant funding to other people that can help further the mission of that organization. So what you're saying is you just kind of help translate what is that mission, what are they trying to achieve and how?
David Holmes:does that happen? It's not somebody sitting up there with like a big pile of money just sitting in judgment of you whether you're good enough to get the money. It's. You can do work for me. You can help me out. You can make change in the community Like I want to see, so I'm going to support you. They really want to give the money away. So that's part of the message I try to communicate.
Andy Heise:And in a lot of cases they they have to give the money away.
David Holmes:Oh yeah yeah. Private foundations have to give 5% of their assets every year, so if they don't, they get penalized pretty severely. So you're making their job possible. You're making them adhere to what they're supposed to do so.
Nick Petrella:you do have to, I guess, prompt people to have a paradigm shift, artists to understand that. Yeah, I mean it's anybody that's coming in.
David Holmes:I mean, there's also the opposite, where you think, well, it's just so easy. I mean, my friend down the street got this great big grant. Why can't I get that great big grant? And I'm like, well, your friend won like a grant that's ours, only one awarded in the entire country. It's going to be a little bit difficult for you to get that. Why don't we think about what you could get? And it's that kind of translation too. Yeah.
Andy Heise:And I think we kind of talked about this already a little bit. But from your viewpoint, what does a sustainable, grant-funded career in the arts actually look like, and are there common patterns that you see in how artists successfully balance grant income with, you know, other income that they have?
David Holmes:Yeah, yeah, I would say that if you try to rely solely on grants, it's going to be tough. We say that to nonprofits too. I mean, I don't you know, if you're a nonprofit arts organization, just getting grants is not going to carry you through, because grants are unreliable, and we see that with private foundations when the stock market goes down, we see it with federal. Depending on what changes there might be, it changes a lot. So just trying to rely on one source is really difficult.
David Holmes:I mean, I think the most successful entrepreneurial artist I know has made connections to grants when it makes sense to awards some teaching and selling, access to their art and selling to companies selling, just in general. It's a balance and what you have to try to do if you're a non-profit or an individual artist is find a funding mix that you can sustain, knowing that grants, for example, require reporting or require a little bit of attention, and they also limit what you can spend your money on a lot of the time. So is there a way you can get unrestricted money? You know, and it might not be always the same, but you get more consistent about it and that's that's what makes you the most successful at it.
Andy Heise:Yeah, and we're going to talk about that tension a little bit here in just a second. Nick, were you? Did you have a follow-up on that?
Nick Petrella:Yeah, I was just going to say well, it's probably a risk mitigation too. If you have different revenue streams and grants is one of them, something dries up some other opportunity yeah.
David Holmes:If you just relying on one, like, oh, I've always gotten this grant, they give it to me every year. I mean I just hear that and I go, oh no, Because I mean foundations don't, they're consistent. A lot of private foundations are very slow to change. But then something will happen, or something will stimulate them, or their board will change and they will say, well, we're going to do it differently now. Or they'll say one year well, we've been giving you this grant for a lot of times. We're going to give you a break this year. And I'm like, oh, a break. You mean you're not going to give me money, that's. That doesn't sound quite as good from the hearer as from what they say.
Andy Heise:So yeah, yeah, Be responsive. And you, you referenced the stock market performance and I just want to kind of help our listeners understand that connection. Here we are at 2025, a lot of uncertainty in the stock market, given things that are happening with our economy. Can you just unpack that relationship between the stock market and a foundation's ability to give grants?
David Holmes:Sure, the money that foundations have to give away is invested. It's an endowment fund, and that's the way private foundations are set up. Somebody, or a couple of people put a large amount of money into investments, and the earnings from those investments are what they use to make the grants. That's how they can keep doing it year after year, because the principle isn't really touched, it's just the earnings. But if the stock market goes down, there may not be earnings or there may be many fewer earnings, and that's why you see, when there's an economic downturn, that grant levels will go down too, just because the foundation doesn't want to make themselves bankrupt. They don't want to take that principal money. They want to. Just because the foundation doesn't want to make themselves bankrupt. They don't want to take that principal money, they want to just use the earnings.
David Holmes:Things also change when there's crisis, though. When COVID hit, for example, there was a definite change in funders deciding. Well, you know, it looks like this theater is not going to be getting the money that it needs from income from ticket buyers. What can we do to help them? And they will reach out a little bit more. Sometimes they have a cushion, sometimes they don't.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, so where should artists go to look for funders?
David Holmes:Wow. I would love to say that all you need to do is go to Candid. You just go to one of our partners, go use Foundation Directory and you can look up every potential source of funding. But that's not true. Candid, the Foundation Directory, which is one of our tools, which is something you can subscribe to, but I encourage people to use it for free at our partner libraries. If you're going to use that, it's going to find you potential grants, even as an individual, even as a nonprofit. You can sort the way that you look at the material, and there are over 300,000 grant makers in there, so it's a large database. However, state government funding, local government funding, special awards that are maybe just being released by private places those are not all in there.
David Holmes:At Candid, we have a section of our Candid Learning that's called our Knowledge Base, which is our list of answers to questions, and one of the questions we get asked is how do I find funding as an individual artist? And it links. It has some basic information, but it also links to a dozen or more places new york foundation for the arts, local arts agencies, uh, pen. If you're a writer, there's a lot of different things listed there and the best advice I would give is to sign up for any time you can get requests for proposal lists or anybody who's saying local arts information, your state arts agency, your local city arts agency, if you have one. Those are the places where you definitely want to be connected to, because they can help you, they can move you forward and give you a lot of places to look at. Yeah, I wish you could look at one, but you got to look at about 100.
Nick Petrella:Well, but certainly starting at Candid would be a good thing to do. Yeah absolutely.
David Holmes:The nice thing about Candid's data is that we look it over, we make sure it's updated, we try to keep it accurate and we know that there are consistent funders in there. So there are foundations that give year after year and you will be able to find them. We also track requests for proposals RFPs a lot of times will be for individuals as well as organizations and you can get on the list to see those. But that's just one place. Definitely, you know it's not the only place.
Nick Petrella:The 300,000 entities or grants that you said you follow? Are any of them international?
David Holmes:Yeah, some of them are located internationally and they will give anywhere and we track as much as we can Foundation funding with that investment in the structure that I was talking about earlier. That's consistent to the United States. Other countries have different laws about how their grantmakers work. If we can make sense of it and collect that information, we'll add it to our database. And definitely we add grantmakers that are located here that give internationally. There's a lot of those, so there's more of those than maybe people realize and you can search when you get into the database. You can search by where you're serving, so that can be a city, it can be a country, it can be a region, all of those different things.
Andy Heise:You made one other important distinction in that last response, and that has to do with individual grants versus organizational grants. Can you talk about that a little bit?
David Holmes:Yeah, one of the problems. I mean it would be lovely if all of this money was available to anybody who wanted it. But the way the law is written for private foundations is that they have to make sure they give for charitable purposes. That's a restriction on what they do. So most of them, or many of them, decide that means well, I'll only give to somebody who's a registered charity, a 501c3. And that's good if you are a nonprofit, because that's the standard way. You become a nonprofit, because that's, you know, the standard way. You become a nonprofit and you can connect up with a lot of foundations who won't find any restriction to give to you.
David Holmes:But there are many, many funders that say but I won't give just to individuals because their job, if they do that, is to follow up with you to make sure you're spending it the right way, and that means a lot of paperwork and a lot of extra work that they don't have the time for.
David Holmes:There are, of course, national funders that don't mind doing that will give directly. And if you are going to get a grant as an individual, being an artist or being a student are the two things that almost guarantee that you're going to be getting you would more likely get that kind of money. But it's easier to get money as a part of a nonprofit or a partner with a nonprofit. And I won't go into the idea of fiscal sponsorship, but I know there's a lot of grant opportunities that involve. You know well, you have to partner as an individual artist, you have to partner with an established organization and nonprofit. And that's essentially what fiscal sponsorship is is finding a nonprofit that wants to support you. You write an S for the money and it comes to them and they give it to you, right.
Andy Heise:Yeah, yeah, so we alluded to this earlier as well, but grants can be highly competitive. How should artists, um individuals or organizations think about competition when they're pursuing funding? Is it, is it about standing out from the crowd? Is it about fitting the mission, even you know specifically, or is it something else altogether?
David Holmes:Oh, it's above all, it's about fitting the mission as you said earlier you're talking about. These funders want somebody to carry out their work for them. If you are a good fit for them, that is the number one thing that they're going to look at. I think it's not healthy to pay attention to the competition too much, other than to say, sort of the way that you would look at the lottery, like what are the odds? Am I going to win this One in 60 million? Or something like that. But when you see awards out there, if you think, well, I need to make sure that I make fun of this other person so that I get this money.
David Holmes:Competition that way is not what you want. You want to be very clear about what you're going to do and how it's going to help the mission of the grantmaker. The giver, even very basic awards will say this is what we care about, this is what we value. And if you can show that value clearly, don't worry about what other people are showing. You're going to do much better. If you can show that value clearly, don't worry about what other people are showing. You're going to do much better if you can be very clear about what you're going to do and how it matches up with that need. I think that probably is better to think about than competition. I'm a big fan of collaboration rather than competition yeah, that's good. And hearing about other things from other people yeah, and I think you see that a lot in the. Collaboration rather than competition yeah, that's good.
Andy Heise:And hearing about other things from other people yeah, and I think you see that a lot in the non nonprofit world I mean, that's it's competition is just looks a little different and smells a little different than in the for profit profit world.
David Holmes:Yeah, yeah, it's. I would say that that I mean. One of the number one things I say is never talk down about another organization or another artist or another. You know. You may know that they're not as good as you or not as good as what you do, but show that funder what that is, because they may like you both, you know, and it just looks bad. It's like, you know, in a job interview. It's just not. You don't want to talk bad about your previous job, even if it was bad. You know it's doesn't help you.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, absolutely yeah, and even in business that's good too. When you're in this selling, put down your competitor Exactly.
David Holmes:Yeah, it's. That's not the number one, that's not the first thing that people want to see. They want to see what good do you do, and they want to get excited the way you're excited about your art.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, that's great advice. So we have an international audience. We got, at this point, streams in about 100 countries, and so I realize what you're about to say. Maybe you know they vary in effectiveness.
David Holmes:I'm not a lawyer or an accountant.
Nick Petrella:Right right, right right. Would you be able to walk us through the grant writing process for those who may be interested in applying for grants but they might be intimidated about the process or by the process?
David Holmes:Sure, I can give you a basic idea. But one of the things I say when I teach my grant writing classes is it would be nice if they were all the same. And they're not all the same. It kind of depends on who you're approaching. There's still a consistency in the kind of information you're asked for. If you're an individual artist, most of the time you're going to be asked for something like an artist's statement, something very clear about what your purpose is. What are you doing this? For? What mediums do you work in all of these different things. When you're doing a grant proposal for a nonprofit arts organization, you will have to talk about the mission of the organization and what your project is and who it's going to help. And in both cases it's like how many people are you going to reach and how do you know you're going to be making that kind of reach? That is kind of a consistent way, but don't let that kind of get in your way.
David Holmes:My first suggestion when you're starting to identify potential grants that you want to apply for or potential gifts that you see out there, is to get a copy of that and read it through to the end. See what you're going to be responsible for? Are they asking you for things you don't have? Are they requiring something for you that you don't think you can explain? Even before you start writing it, be sure that you can follow the directions, because the easiest way to say no for all of these different givers is when you don't follow their directions or you don't send them everything that they ask for. And that's what they look for. They look for the easy no, because they don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. It's easier to say you didn't follow directions, we can't fund you. So I tell people don't be worried about that.
David Holmes:I've seen some really complicated applications where, but when it gets right down to it, when you look closely at it, it's just they decided to call this your vision for the future rather than your plan. You know they just use words that maybe look unfamiliar, but consistently people want to know what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, how much is it going to cost and why should I care about it? That's the grant I mean. It's not much more than that. That's great. What is it?
Andy Heise:Good, I was going to ask I think you said follow the directions, and that's probably I was going to ask what's the recurring mistake that you see most often applicants do?
David Holmes:Well, sometimes the recurring mistake is just not paying attention to the word limits, the character limits. You're in a hurry, you want to fill out this thing and you say, oh, it says 200 characters and you think that means 200 words and you just cut and paste and you don't look at it and you realize you cut off most of what. There's nothing in there. You know it's. It's simple things like that. It's um, it's not understanding, um, basic guidance for attachments. They can't be in this format, they have to be in that format. It's simple things that really throw people off.
David Holmes:I think the more complicated things are people that are vague, the vaguer you are about what you're going to do. Well, we're going to reach. This is an arts program and everybody can be the audience. Everybody is not an audience. Everybody is not. It's just dream. But what's a real? How can you know who you're really going to reach? Is it going to be people walking by in that area? Is it going to be because you partner with different people in this community? Tell me what you think the real audience is going to be and give it a little thought, rather than just saying, yeah, we really hope to make that work Because that's, a funder wants to know that you're going, you have a plan, not that you just hope for something. Right yeah, vagueness is real bad.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, that was actually a question I was going to ask later, Andy.
Andy Heise:Yeah, I know, sorry about that, I stepped all over it.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, that's okay. So I'll pivot it and ask what can we do as grant writers, if we are writing for grants, to avoid those mistakes? Is it better to run the proposal in front of other people who have had grants? How can we avoid that and increase?
David Holmes:the chance for success.
David Holmes:Another big piece of advice I give people is to give it to somebody else to read before you submit it. I would say that you get into something and you get so obsessed about it and you're working on it and you're refining when you're writing, and you can't look at it objectively anymore. You can't say you know, oh my gosh, I spelled this person's name three different ways. But somebody is going to tell you that if they read it, I say give it to somebody that you don't even like. If you're in a non-profit, you don't even work with them. Somebody outside of that, maybe somebody that doesn't know much about art, much about what you do give it to them and say do you understand this? Because the people that are reading it I think people also get the idea. In addition to these people with like giant piles of money, they get the idea that they're all experts in everything. Right, yeah, and they're not. They're not A lot of the time.
David Holmes:These private foundations this is a family sitting around. They get together three times a year to give money out from their family foundation and if they don't understand what they're reading, they're not going to give it. So give it to somebody in your family to read it. You know, think of it, as I'm going to submit this to a giant family reunion and I need to be clear to the people that are attending that family reunion. It's not always like that. There's some really big funders that are really, really knowledgeable, but some of these smaller things, some of the regional things, which have less, that are less competitive, that you might have a really good chance of winning. If you go and it's just totally un-understandable to anybody but you or an artist just like you, then you're probably not going to be able to communicate it, and that's an assumption I had.
Nick Petrella:I just assumed they had people on the board who were specialists in oh yeah, yeah.
David Holmes:I mean, there are places that do that and certainly when they create a grant making panel, you become an expert in a lot of different things because you've talked about if you have something innovative, what if you have something new. Expecting that there is going to be somebody who's up with the same things that you are is not real realistic. It's it's a panel maybe drawn from. Like I listen sometimes and it's a good practice, by the way is to listen to some of the reviews by public awards groups when they talk about different nonprofits or different individuals that are applying for grants. It's very important to listen to the kind of things they say, because each of them often takes it from a different tact. I take it from my knowledge of this kind of art, or I take it from the fact that I was looking at their business plan. I spent a lot of time looking at their budget. There are going to be different things related to that.
Andy Heise:Yeah, so how do you see grant writing fitting into the broader entrepreneurial toolkit for for an artist and individual artists?
David Holmes:I think it. I think it's one stream. I think that I've taught different groups that have come in, and sometimes just different groups of individual artists, and it's hard to say. You know, you've got photographers and you've got writers and you've got other kinds of visual artists, and some of them are, you know, thinking boy, I haven't been able to make any money, I haven't been able to sell this, I haven't been able to sell this. I'm going to just try and get grants and that's going to take care of my problems. Again, I think it's really dangerous to imagine that the grants are going to be the only source of funding. But to be truly entrepreneurial, to be truly understanding of what is another option for you, is to think of all the different ways you could get funding and see are they right for you? I mean, there's a lot of things that are tied to educational related things like, oh, you're going to be an artist in residence and you're going to come in and we're going to give you this money and you're going to do these like 40 classes every week or something. Ridiculously. It's like that's a lot of obligation.
David Holmes:Yeah, think about the things that work would work best for you. Yeah, um, there was. I'm in cleveland and, uh, there was an opportunity at one point. Uh, local governmental agency was giving out money and it was. I think it was something like 75 000 unrestricted. And I wanted to say to people hey, everybody on the street who wants to be an artist, did you see this? Yeah, that's never going to happen to you, right? That's never. That is never going to be offered again. Apply for it. Yeah, because it's only clevelanders that are up. Well, that's, that's something. That's something that I would say if you start thinking, you know, I, I just don't do grant writing, it's just not a possibility you may miss out on something that could help you get further along. So, yeah, think of it as a whole bunch of streams of possibility and, you know, choose the ones that work best for you.
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