What stories are the ones being told that don’t get heard? Which are the stories whose narratives propel us into imagination and action? Who are the storytellers whose messages are so powerful and thought of as too risky to have a warranted spotlight on them? What perspectives do they have that we don’t always get the chance to see?

These are the questions we’ve always asked ourselves at Kindle, but ones we reflected on a deeper, more detailed level during our year of focusing our funding on documentary film. We’ve always been passionate and committed to documentary and have supported several groundbreaking feature films over the years.

Echoing the fluid and somewhat unpredictable movement of a boomerang, this program releases an opportunity, allowing unlikely and unusual partners and projects to return with unexpected, vibrant and tenacious outcomes for everyone involved.

With the Boomerang Flow Fund, we welcome our outrageous and courageous Makers Muse Artist Award recipients to the experiment with an invitation to recommend an organization or project of their choice to receive a grant from Kindle Project.

With Boomerang we are asking and beginning to answer some important questions:

• What unusual projects, creators and ideas would be supported if our grantees and awardees had input and leadership with funding decisions?
• How could being involved grantmaking processes help to embolden the artists themselves?
• What ripple effect might all of this have?

Follow along as we announce our 2016 Makers Muse Artists, our first cohort of the Boomerang program, this September.

Makers Muse Awards are made possible through the Kindle Project LLC.

Kindle Project is interested in artists that are questioning, confronting, exploring, framing or reframing:

• Perceptions of identity
• Worldviews and the collective conscious
• 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
• Sensuality

Working in traditional and experimental modes to:

• Subvert advertisement pollution and mass media
• Expose inequality and injustice
• Make art accessible and interactive
• Entice whimsy and play
• Spread laughter
• Engage otherwise sleepwalking audiences
• Push the envelope of existentialist inquiry

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.

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

Our funding is relationship-based, which means that we tailor our engagement based on grantees’ true needs and big dreams, and our best offerings.

• We honor and support creative or informal organizational and project structures.
• We fund individuals, independent projects, and informal groups as well as formal 501c3 nonprofit organizations.
• We talk with our grantees over the course of the year, exploring other ways Kindle Project might assist them in carrying out their work.
• We welcome feedback and learn from our grantees, inviting suggestions for how we can do our work better.

Our grantmaking programs fall under two separate structures:

The Kindle Project Fund of the Common Counsel Foundation

• Grants to Tax-Exempt Organizations
• Solutions Laboratory
• Flow Funds

Kindle Project LLC

• Awards to Individuals
• Makers Muse Awards
• Flow Funds
• Solutions Laboratory

Kindle Project is a fiscally sponsored project of the Common Counsel Foundation.

As of 2012, all of our grants to organizations are funded through the Kindle Project Fund of the Common Counsel Foundation.

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.

Grant Cycle Timeline

Spring Cycle
Proposals due: March 31
Grants dispersed: By early May
Reports due: March 1 of the following year

Fall Cycle
Proposals due: October 31
Grants dispersed: Early December
Reports due: October 1 of the following year

Flow Funding, an approach  developed by Marion Rockefeller Weber, empowers individuals with funds they can reallocate to the communities, organizations and individuals of their choice. This builds autonomy, trust and ultimately makes room for redistribution of decision-making power.

This core piece of our programming has enabled Kindle Project funds to reach interest areas and communities that were not otherwise on our radar since 2008.

Kindle Project gives gifts to individuals who demonstrate dedication, passion, courage, and leadership in their work and communities.

Awards to Individuals are made possible through the Kindle Project LLC.

From 2014-2016 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.

www.indiephilanthropy.org

Get involved with the initiative here.

For the initial Solutions Laboratory pilot, Kindle Project was seeking to shift the narrative in Northern New Mexican communities related to our shared future in the face of a changing climate. We invited our community; across all sectors, generations and fields to share ideas in their earliest stages of creativity in order to empower our collective impact towards creating a more vital future.

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 is helping to design and lead the cohort meetings. The diverse perspectives of a cross section of decision-makers from the Kindle Project family who are active members of the Northern New Mexico community allowed for rich conversations and a robust selection process.

To read more about the Solutions Laboratory program click here.

In 2012, Kindle Project partnered with Capricious Magazine to internationally solicit and select water-themed photos for their 13th issue.

Three photographers were chosen for the Kindle Project Photography Awards from hundreds of submissions. The winning photographs embodied Capricious’ high aesthetic standard and expressed one of the central missions of Kindle Project: bringing about awareness and change through art.

Kindle Project Photography Awards are made possible through the Kindle Project LLC.