Flexible, unrestricted grants aim to support Jerome-grantee arts organizations serving early-career artists amid mounting financial pressure across the arts sector.
ST. PAUL, MN, September 9, 2026—Jerome Foundation announces the Seeding Innovation Fund, a one-time grant available to current arts organization grantees in Minnesota and New York City—80 arts organizations, whose missions and values align with Jerome Foundation’s focus on supporting early-career artists, received flexible, unrestricted funding.
“We hear loud and clear that organizations are being pushed to do more with less and that resources, time, and tools are stretched thin,” said Eleanor Savage, President of Jerome Foundation. “This funding is an investment in the essential and innovative contributions arts organizations are making to artists and communities and in their ability to persevere.”
According to The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026: What Funders Need to Know report, a majority of nonprofit leaders face severe exhaustion driven by soaring service demands, shrinking foundation grants, dwindling financial reserves, and an atmosphere of fear and stress stemming from political threats to the well-being and safety of their communities, staff, and board. Nonprofit arts leaders—like their counterparts across sectors—are calling for immediate, responsive support to sustain the field’s cultural infrastructure.
In June 2026, Jerome Foundation’s Board of Directors approved $12 million in expanded funding, naming the Seeding Innovation Fund its first priority for responsive support. “Through our depth of connection with arts leaders, we know what is at stake. Our values of creative risk and innovation ask us to be bold in our response,” said Board Chair Lori Pourier. “We believe, and hope, that these funds support organizations’ capacity to keep going and to continue providing critical cultural space and programming that nurtures artists, culture bearers, and communities.”
The Seeding Innovation Fund provides $80,000 grants to Jerome Foundation grantee organizations that maintain physical space, and $40,000 grants to fiscally sponsored or program-focused organizations without a dedicated facility. The funds are unrestricted and may be used for any purpose that sustains an organization’s work. This includes, but is not limited to, general operating support, program support, financial stabilization, leadership transitions, board or community development, technology and infrastructure, capital and facility needs, debt retirement, and creative production.
After authorizing these funds at its June 22 Board meeting, the Foundation was able to distribute the funds to its grantee partners starting August 3. The speed of this process was achieved through a deliberately simple, low-burden process for getting resources into grantees’ hands.
Jerome’s framing of these funds as “seeding innovation” recognizes that innovation can emerge in many ways. It can come from working with existing resources, seeing something familiar in a new way, or venturing into wholly uncharted territory. But innovation requires resources: leaders and their teams need protected time, space for productive friction, and funding that goes beyond bare survival. These are the conditions under which ideas can surface, be tested, cross-pollinate, and ultimately take shape.
Savage encourages fellow philanthropies to interrupt the familiar notes of futility, such as: “We can’t possibly fill the gap left by government cuts,” “Increased grantmaking will jeopardize our perpetuity," “Our board will never approve this,” or any number of other constraints funders use to justify inaction. Along with Jerome board, she urges funders to weigh those justifications against the risk of not acting: an organization closing, a community losing access to the arts, artists leaving the sector, a field’s capacity eroding.
“Focus on action, and find ways to close the hope gap,” said Savage. “Move beyond futility, and move beyond emergency funding, to investing in surviving and thriving arts ecosystems. The response from arts leaders—expressions of solidarity, of feeling valued, trusted, and understood, of having renewed space to breathe and hope—affirms the impact this kind of grantmaking can have in seeding innovation now and into the future.”
