Operating as an experimental philanthropy lab we play with programming and let it evolve over time. Some programs are part of our annual work and some are pilots and experiments. Through grantmaking, innovative programming and dynamic collaborations, Kindle Project fosters a nexus of extraordinary, creative ideas and cultivators to imagine and inspire change.
Carousel Awards
This call is open both to individual U.S. taxpayers or organizations with 501c3 status or a fiscal sponsor. The winning submission for each month will receive $1000 in award money! Another experiment in power-shifting we are excited to take on!
Keep up to date with Carousel here.
10 Year Celebration Flow Funds
To continue flipping the power and seeding ideas and solutions we are launched our 10 Year Celebration Flow Fund by giving Flow Funds to 10 Kindle Project culture-making grantees and awardees. Each Flow Funder will receive an honoring grant or award and a Flow Fund to recommend be reallocated to groups of their choice.
What is Flow Funding? Scroll down to find out.
To read about who are 10 Year Flow Funders are click here.
Slow Fuse Flow Fund
In its first year of three, Slow Fuse is activating a new cohort of New Mexico-based Flow Funders made up entirely of women. This program was born in response to the NewMexicoWomen.Org report, The Heart of Gender Justice in New Mexico: Intersectionality, Economic Security, and Health Equity.
We are seeking to strengthen the gender justice movement and efforts in New Mexico while addressing power dynamics inherent to traditional philanthropy. Additionally, we will be documenting our progress along the way and creating a Flow Funding guide to share with the philanthropic community. We are thrilled to be taking our passions around democratized philanthropy, gender justice and community-building into this program!
To learn more about Slow Fuse click here.
SpiderWeave Flow Fund
The SpiderWeave Flow Fund has been created with a spirit of curiosity, openness and an attitude of joy for the unexpected. Our 2017 cohort decided to expand the circle and each nominate one new Flow Funder to join the SpiderWeave mix. Our SpiderWeaving crew has doubled in size and remains a cohort of all women!
SpiderWeave is about deep collaboration and relationship building. It’s the basics of what makes Kindle who we are. We are thrilled to be diving into this web of Flow Funding with new and curious partners.
Learn more about how SpiderWeave works here.
Makers Muse Awards
The award supports artists with a gift to uplift their work in the various stages of process.
Kindle Project is interested in artists that are questioning, confronting, exploring, framing or reframing:
- Perceptions of identity
- Worldviews and collective consciousness
- Individual and social conditioning
- Relationships between nature, culture, and technology
- The consensus of what is beautiful and what is ugly
- The institutionalization of who can experience art and how it is experienced
- Political frameworks and authority
- The definition of what art is
- Sensuality
Each year we award up to seven recipients. Awards are made through nomination, by invitation only, and dispersed in early Autumn. Due to our limited staff capacity, we are unable to respond to unsolicited funding requests. Makers Muse Awards are made possible through the Kindle Project LLC.
To read more about the Makers Muse Program click here.
Kindle Project Fund
We support the rabble-rousers, the renegades, the risk-takers. We direct our funding and support to people and projects taking meaningful risks and approaching their work with creativity, innovation, resiliency, collaboration, humor, and courage.
We seek out people and projects—often at pivotal times contextually, organizationally, or personally—working towards one or more of the following goals:
- Solutions leading to systemic change
- Creating alternatives to structural collapse
- Transforming conflict
- Challenging outmoded systems and frameworks
- Holding, practicing and integrating the wisdom of traditional knowledge
- Educating outside of mainstream paradigms
- Creating small projects with a big impact
- Fostering generosity
Kindle Project is a fiscally sponsored project of the Common Counsel Foundation. Our programming is structured through the Kindle Project Fund of the Common Counsel Foundation and the Kindle Project LLC.
Proposal Submission Process
Grants are solicited and awarded by invitation only. Due to our limited staff capacity, we are unable to respond to unsolicited grant requests. The application process is structured with our grantee partners on a case-by-case basis.
To learn about the Kindle Project Fund click here.
Flow Funding
We’ve noticed that, all too often, the same philanthropic actors make funding decisions and that, all too often, funding is directed to similar, or even the very same, recipients. Flow Funding seeks to break open the often predictable patterns of decision-making in funding to allow for the democratization of funding-power and resources to reach unlikely and unusual places.
Past Programs
Boomerang — 2016, 2017
What would it look like if artists could help shape the distribution of philanthropic dollars? Boomerang seeks to shed light upon and creatively catalyze unseen opportunities by widening who influences philanthropic resources.
With the Boomerang Flow Fund, we welcomed our outrageous and courageous Makers Muse Artist Award recipients to recommend an organization or project of their choice to receive a grant from Kindle Project.
See the 2016 Boomerang grantees here.
See the 2017 Boomerang grantees here.
Film — 2008 – current, with a focus on Film in 2015
For us it’s always been important to support those people and projects that are making beautiful and even controversial dents in public conversation and policy. Documentary makers of all kinds have a specific insight into the stories that need telling.
In 2015 we were thrilled to continue our legacy of funding films to focus our entire grantmaking dockets on the broad world of documentary film in all its creative and possible permutations.
We’ve always been passionate about and committed to film and media and have supported several groundbreaking feature films over the years. See all our film grantees here.
Indie Philanthropy Initiative — 2012-2016
A Kindle Project initiated program!
From 2012-2016 we launched and incubated the Indie Philanthropy Initiative to allow for a creative disruption to the status quo of funding. We created the Indie Philanthropy Initiative to help break open and widen the funding space to give power and voice to a broader, more diverse array of innovators. Indie Philanthropy looks closely not just at what gets funded, but also who makes decisions and how funding is done. In 2016 the Initiative spun off from Kindle Project and became its own independent project. We are proud to continue to support the Initiative as a key ally and Core Partner.
Get involved with the initiative here.
Solutions Laboratory — 2013
An intensive and experimental program aimed at proactively sourcing and nurturing ideas for creative solutions and alternatives to complex problems that was piloted in 2013.
We invited our community in Northern New Mexico, across all sectors, generations and fields to share ideas in their earliest stages of creativity in order to empower our collective shifting of narratives in the face of a changing climate. Seven cohort members were selected from roughly 40 submissions, reflecting early-stage, place-based ideas serving Northern New Mexico. For this pilot program, we diversified our decision-making process by extending our jury beyond the Kindle Project staff to include Kindle’s Steering Committee, a current grantee, and a facilitator who helped design and lead the cohort meetings. The program was a great success, culminating with a public storytelling event in Santa Fe.
To read more about the Solutions Laboratory program click here.
