FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES | VOLUME 68| July 23, 2026

Today’s Collective Catalyst Cohort Spotlight - Meet Marlon King and Brian Sykes of ISPro Academy!

Beginning today, we’ll be shining a spotlight on each of our cohort members as they move through the year. We’re proud to be sharing each of their stories, giving our readers a window into the amazing work that they’re doing and how to support their efforts.

Marlon King (R) (aka Solitaire) is a Chicago producer, audio engineer, and educator with 10+ years at the intersection of music production, music business, and creative workforce development. He leads ISPro Academy’s curriculum, instruction, and program deployment, teaching hands-on across classrooms and community sites citywide.

Brian Sykes (L) is a Chicago-based music producer, educator, creative entrepreneur, and workforce development professional committed to transforming talent into opportunity. As co-founder of ISPro Academy, he has helped create accessible pathways in audio engineering, music production, music business, branding, and professional development for emerging artists and young adults. 

Performing and producing as 7 METRIX, Brian also leads multidisciplinary projects such as I Heard the City Breathe, which blends music, film, visual art, mentorship, and Chicago storytelling.

Together, Marlon and Brian have built an innovative, hands-on training and mentorship model through their nonprofit ISPro Academy , empowering and educating youth alongside industry professionals.

Founded in 2023, ISPro Academy delivers music production, audio engineering, and music business education to youth and adults ages 14-24, with a mission to demystify the music industry for Chicago's next generation and give them real tools to create, protect, and monetize their work.

Often times, creative young people may not see themselves as “artists” - or if they do, they can’t see a real path towards being able to create art and also sustain themselves financially. As working music professionals themselves, Marlon & Brian have crafted the ISPro Academy curriculum to treat audio engineering and music production as viable trades, providing the necessary guidance and opportunities to make that case. They focus on small, interactive classes and advanced curriculum to ensure their students are industry-ready, pairing practical skills with essential music business education and preparing artists to maximize their potential and protect their work.

To make their program accessible and meet young people where they are, ISPro operates a mobile curriculum model across partner sites on the South and West Sides including Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago West Community Music Center, Navy Pier, and the Museum of Science and Industry. To date, they've served 230+ participants across 24+ programs with 15+ community partners.

See them in action in their video spotlight by the Breakout Foundation on their site, and check them out at yesterday’s Future Ready Summit & Opportunity Expo , raising awareness about opportunities in the music industry for Chicago’s youth.

Find out more about ISPro Academy at isproacademy.org, follow them at @isproacademy and find ways to register for programs, partner and support their work!

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Next up: Join the ISPRo Academy Family on August 1st for their next event!

Experience an unforgettable evening of music, storytelling, and community as ISPro Academy co-founder and acclaimed Chicago artist 7 Metrix (Brian Sykes) brings his powerful multimedia project, I Heard The City Breathe, to the Beverly Arts Center on Saturday, August 1st at 7:30 PM.

More than a concert, this immersive performance is a heartfelt portrait of Chicago—its resilience, its struggles, and its spirit. Through soulful hip-hop, spoken word, and live collaboration, 7 Metrix explores themes of identity, family, hope, and healing while celebrating the voices and experiences that shape our city. Featuring music from the critically praised album alongside special guest performers and creative collaborators including ISPro Academy students, this one-night event transforms the stage into a living celebration of Chicago’s culture, history, and future.

Join us for an inspiring evening that reminds us every city has a heartbeat—and every story deserves to be heard.

Purchase tickets at the link: I Heard The City Breathe: Beverly Art Center, 8/1

Visit the bustlingspaces.com/cohort to learn more about the Collective Catalyst Cohort, and stay tuned to our newsletter and socials as we feature each of these organization’s work and progress!

Funder: Elevated Chicago
Grant Program: Elevating Culture Near Transit
Maximum Grant/Opportunity: TBD (guidelines to be released soon)
Application Opens: August 10th
Funding Area: Multiple Disciplines (Organizations, fiscally sponsored entities)

Elevated Chicago is launching the second round of the Elevating Culture Near Transit RFP to support creative placekeeping in Chicago.

Chicago area organizations are invited to submit proposals that utilize arts and culture as transformative tools to shape place, spark investment, reflect community identity, and engage residents from vision to implementation. Selected projects will advance community vitality and equity through creative, collaborative, and culturally rooted approaches that reflect local ownership and encourage broader connectivity.

This year, we will support projects that:

- Activate public spaces through arts & culture

- Advance equity and community power in urban planning

- Support local creatives & small businesses

- Advance collaborative, community-led efforts

Register for an upcoming information session to find out more:

Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Session #2 (Small grants) | 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.

Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Session #3 | 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m

Previous RFP resources are available here for reference. Updated 2026 application materials will be posted soon.

Funder: Paul Angell Foundation
Grant Program: Envisioning the Future - Holistic Resources for New Work Development (Phase I)
Maximum Grant/Opportunity: up to $150,000 (see guidelines for details)
Application Closes: July 31, 2026
Funding Area: Performing Arts, New Works (Organization)

The Foundation is currently seeking proposals from Chicagoland arts organizations to support new performance work that is created and premiered within our local community.

This pilot grant opportunity provides organizations with holistic resources to create bold new work, across performing arts genres, that speak to the complexities of our time and advances compelling visions of the world they hope to create.

This 2-phase initiative will be the first time that the foundation’s Performing Arts program will fund performing arts organizations beyond theatre and classical music. Other music genres, dance, and multidisciplinary live performance art forms will also be eligible for funding.

Watch the replay of a virtual information session for an overview of the NAP program, or the Ideas Application Workshop replay for a more detailed look:

Information Session | June 16 | Recording

Office Hours until 7/27 (available to applicants with specific questions - 15 min slots) | Office Hours

Contact performingarts@pmangellfamfound.org with additional questions.

Looking for other opportunities? Newsletter giving you “TL:DR” vibes? 😵‍💫

Look back at our Grant Watch posts on instagram, and checking our IG reposts page for recent opportunities!

Grant Tip of the Week 💡-

Check the Grantees List!

There’s a pot of gold at the end of this newsletter!

During Bustling Spaces Grant Clubs, one of our most popular sessions is the Grant Eligibility / Alignment session. People are wondering how you they can tell if a funding opportunity is right for them. What is the funder really asking for? What are they excited about? If everyone is doing amazing work - how can you tell which funders support YOUR type of amazing?

There’s a really simple hack that lots of folks overlook - always check the grantees list to see what types of artists, projects, and organizations made the cut.

More than simply aligning with eligibility and guidelines, sometimes grantee lists reveal patterns than can give you more information as to whether or not an opportunity is both a) accessible to you, and b) right for you.

Head to the bottom of the newsletter to see what type of information you can glean from grantee lists, and how that can actually save you time and effort in your funding search.

STRATEGY & TIPS

Grant Tip of the Week 💡-

Check the Grantees!

We’re actually going to begin by restating a quote from last week’s Grant Tip, coming from Drew Tucker (@itsnotaxylophone) of South Arts.

As Drew states:

“80% of grants that are not competitive is because they don’t understand the funders’ priorities - or they don’t understand how to communicate how their project aligns with those priorities effectively.”

Our eyes get really wide when we see multiple grant opportunities circulating in newsletters, social media posts, forwarded emails, and other communications. The excitement that comes with seeing multiple opportunities - and the overwhelm that comes from having to wade through them, make it hard for us to understand one key truth - not everything we see is going to be something that we are eligible to apply for, and of those things that we’re eligible for, not everything is really going to hit the mark in terms of our work being precisely what they’re looking to fund. In short, as I like to put it - “not all money is *your* money.”

This is a simple principle in theory, but when you’re in the thick of bridging financial gaps to provide vital programs, stretching an already shoestring budget, trying to pay staff, etc. - that truth often doesn’t quite land. When we go after money that’s not our money - we find ourselves on a grantseeking treadmill that never ends, with a low batting average, diminished capacity, and disillusionment.

And when that truth does land, it still doesn’t solve your problem.

“Well where is *MY* money then?!”

(The short answer is - it’s not just in a grant application, but that’s an entirely separate post. More on that later)

When it comes to grant funding, there are many, many ways to find out if a funder is really picking up what you’re putting down (poring over guidelines, attending information sessions and drop-ins, reaching out to the funder via email to ask questions), but one quick hack is to simply ask, “Who’s gotten it before?”

The list of grantees is often a funding instution’s pride and joy - they’re excited about the work they’re supporting and the people they’re partnering with. This is the way they aim to publicly demonstrate that they, too, are doing vital work, and this often helps them to fundraise as well. Their website, social media feeds, e-newsletters, and local press can all be outlets where they’ll share this information, thus making it available to you for research.

The things you can infer from reading lists of grantees can be similar to a best fit line in math. Just as the line represents a pattern that can be extrapolated from a limited set of data points, reading these lists sometimes reveal funders’ giving trends that, in turn, can help guide your choices. Beyond (not in place of!) reading guidelines, this can be an even quicker way to see how an institution’s funding priorities are demonstrated in their actual funding decisions.

What exactly can you glean from Grantee Lists? It depends on the funder and the opportunity, but these are a couple of things that you can usually tell up front:

• Organizational Mission Alignment: Funders will usually not only specifically state their own mission, but state what priorities they’re supporting in their partner institutions. That said - looking at prior grantees lists can help elucidate what those priorities look like in action, or help you read between the lines. An opportunity may say that it funds organizations that “increase access to the arts” generally, but what does this actually mean to them? When you see who they fund, what work is being done? Do they favor arts education programs? Are they mostly funding certain artistic disciplines (e.g. performing arts, visual arts, etc.) even though the guidelines don’t state this? What questions might you need to ask the funder to ensure that you’re aligned *before* you put in the work of applying?

• Project types: A funder that supports projects should explicitly state what they fund, but it’s best to see who’s received those funds to get a better sense of what their interpretation looks like. For example - the Creative Capital Award website states that artists receive $50K in unrestricted funds for “the creation of innovative, original, groundbreaking new artistic works.” What exactly do they mean by this? Check out the 2026 Grantees List (and the press release for extra credit) to see what types of projects really raise their eyebrows and open their checkbooks.

• Odds - One of the first things I love to look for is, quite simply, how long the grantees list is (especially with respect to the size / area of the applicant pool). Some awards are very selective - you or your organization can be the absolute best at whatever you do, but if only 5 - 10 people got a grant that’s open nationally, you’re looking at some stiff competition. By contrast, there are nearly 300 DCASE Independent Artist Program Grantees for Chicago Artists in 2026, and they try to prioritize new applicants so as to make sure their funding isn’t redundant. A very rudimentary, theoretically-inexact-yet-accurate-in-practice litmus test I use sometimes is “did multiple friends of yours get it? If so, then possibly, so could you.” The likelihood of this is far greater with a list of area awardees that’s in the 100s.

  This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t go for the competitive awards: just be fully aware of what your odds are so that you can allocate your time and effort accordingly.

• Community / Location alignment - Although location isn’t something you’d necessarily research by looking specifically at the grantees list, I’ve accidentally found out some interesting things by keeping this in mind. Some funders will specifically state that they prioritize specific geographic areas, but sometimes their geographic focus can be more implicit or more flexible. A New York funder may say that their opportunity is open nationally, but the grantees list may reveal that the majority of their recipients are still on the East Coast. Some funders may prioritize certain neighborhoods, but still have recipients that lie outside of certain geographic parameters if they have strong mission-alignment. Who’s received it from the community where you work or live? Look for indicators that can let you know if you might fit - or not. And as always, ask the funder when you’re not certain.

Beyond just skimming a list and drawing some preliminary conclusions, looking at the grantees list can sometimes open up new conversations, and even collaborations. At a former employer, an organization that received funding for a fellowship offered to meet with us to walk us through the process of how we could potentially apply for an expansion of our own residency. Another client checked the grantees list for a funder they were researching and found out that the organization across the hall, with whom they have a longstanding relationship, had received funding from them as well.

If friends, collaborators, or partner organizations know you’re looking for funding they’ve already received, they’ll sometimes offer to talk with you about how they got the funding, walk you through complicated processes, assist with an application, or even connect you with the funder themselves for an introduction. Also, now that they have a deeper understanding that you’re on the search for funding and know what you’re looking for - when new opportunities open that they’re aware of, they might send those straight to you (true story)!

Bear in mind - checking the grantee list isn’t a foolproof method of assessment - some funders have shifts in direction from year to year, may fund different areas or disciplines in specific cycles, or may scrap a program entirely and start a new one (most times, they’ll let you know this is coming before they do), so what happened in a past year doesn’t always carry over.

Even when guidelines do carry over from year to year, ideally, you don’t want to use this in isolation as the sole determinant of whether or not to apply for a grant. But in my experience, checking the grantees list remains one of the quickest ways to give grant seekers an initial sense of when a funding opportunity might be a good one to shoot for - and when it isn’t.

Find out who funds your friends, get back in the game, and get your money.

Happy Funding!