Launching November 18, 2026
The A to Z
Fund

Small grants that help Maine artists, musicians, writers, and poets get their work made. Studio time. Materials. A residency. The weeks it takes to finish something.

Grant Range
$500 – $2,000

Deliberately small, deliberately specific, and deliberately about finishing. Held and administered through Indigo Arts Alliance.

Applications open after launch
What The Money Does
Start it. Continue it. Complete it.

Three kinds of moment where a few hundred dollars changes the outcome.

Start It

The first month of studio time. The canvas and the stretchers. The thing that never begins because beginning costs money.

Continue It

The residency you were accepted to but can’t afford the weeks away for. The mixing session that keeps getting pushed.

Complete It

The manuscript that needs three uninterrupted weeks. The record that’s ninety percent finished and has been for two years.

These are the projects that stall — not for lack of talent, but for want of a few hundred dollars at the wrong moment. The A to Z Fund is not a relief fund and not a housing program. That work matters and other organizations do it well. This fund exists for one thing: getting the work made.

An artist painting live at an A Thousand WordZ event
Jack Eastgate painting live, Oakland 2010 — he had never done it before that night
Why This Is A Business Question
The arts are infrastructure

Not an amenity. Measured, documented, and load-bearing.

$86M

generated by Portland’s nonprofit arts organizations in 2022

1,872

jobs supported in Portland by those organizations

$20.7M

returned in local, state and federal government revenue

16,000+

Maine jobs in arts and cultural production

$764.9M

in worker income across the state

$151.7B

the national nonprofit arts and culture sector

Sources: Creative Portland, Arts & Economic Prosperity (2022 data) · U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Maine · Americans for the Arts

Visitors don’t come to Portland for the parking. They come for the galleries, the music, the food, the sense that something is being made here. That feeling is produced by working artists — and those artists are being priced out of the city that depends on them.

When an artist leaves Portland, the restaurant loses a regular, the shop loses foot traffic, and the city loses a piece of the identity that draws everyone else. Keeping artists here isn’t charity. It’s maintenance on the thing your customers came for.