2025 The Little Venue That Could Grant Program

ABOUT

IndieSpace is excited to offer The Little Venue That Could Grant Program for the second time! Funded with the generous support of the Howard Gilman Foundation, The Little Venue That Could Grant Program was created to provide unrestricted general operating support to New York City based indie theater, dance, and multidisciplinary performance venues with expense budgets under $500,000. Due to size, fiscal structure, staffing arrangements, and unconventional leasing and ownership structures, these homes for artists are often excluded from city, state, and federal funding and may not meet financial thresholds to get significant support from private foundations. Despite this historical absence of consistent financial support and the growing affordability crisis in NYC, small-budget indie theater, dance, and multidisciplinary venues continue to play a critical role in the creative ecosystem by providing artists with affordable performance and presenting space.

Selected grantees will receive:

• Unrestricted grants of $10,000 per year, for two years, 2025-2026, which can be used to pay staff, rent, utilities, debt, or whatever your venue deems appropriate to help keep your doors open and thrive. 
• Professional Development services, valued at $5,000, which must be used for professional development services within the two years of the grant period. Recipients will receive a menu of offerings from which to choose after they are awarded the grant. 
• Automatic inclusion in IndieSpace’s FREE Advisory and Consulting program, providing access to experts and information throughout the lifetime of your space operation. 

Additionally, in order to acknowledge the labor of writing and submitting an application, IndieSpace has allotted a total of $5,000 to be split and distributed to each organization that submits an eligible and complete application. The total amount each applicant will receive will be determined once all eligible and complete applications have been counted.

Grantees will be required to participate in a short interim interview with IndieSpace staff at the one year mark in order to receive the second year of funding. An optional post-grant survey will be distributed to grantees at the end of the second year of the grant to learn about their experiences and needs for the future, and to help us gather information about why a program like this matters. 

Eligibility:

You are eligible to apply for this grant if:

• Your entity is an indie theater, dance, or multidisciplinary venue with a performance space 
• Your venue has at least one space with less than 99 seats
• Your venue has been in operation for at least two years, including 2025
• Your organization’s expense budget is $500k or LESS in your last completed fiscal year i.e. July 2023-June 2024 or Jan 2024-Dec 2024.
• Your venue is open and is in active use
• Your venue is rented or owned with a signed lease, license agreement, or deed. Please reach out to discuss if you have a non-traditional agreement with your landlord.
• Your venue is located within the 5 boroughs of New York City
• Your venue is a 501c3, fiscally sponsored by a 501c3, an S Corp, B Corp, LLC, or LLP
• Your venue IS NOT a direct annual Howard Gilman Foundation grantee. Current direct, annual Howard Gilman Foundation grantees are not eligible for this grant. If you are a recipient of other regrants funded by Howard Gilman Foundation, that is fine. If you have questions about your eligibility please contact your Howard Gilman Foundation program officer or hello@indiespace.org for more information. Venues who have received funding from IndieSpace through any of our other funding programs are still eligible to apply.
• Your venue IS NOT a previous recipient of The Little Venue That Could Grant. 

The application opens on Monday, July 7, 2025 at 9:00 a.m. and closes on Tuesday, September 2 at 11:59 p.m. We estimate the application will take about 1- 2 hours for you to complete. You are welcome to use the information you have already prepared for other applications to significantly reduce the time needed for completion! There is no character or word count minimum or maximum for any of the questions. We have made suggestions on the length to help guide your writing, but you are not required to meet those suggested word counts. Bullet points are welcome, as long as they answer the questions. Applicants who submit very long responses will not be favored over shorter, more concise answers; however, the Artist Committee reviewing your application will not be doing any research or additional information pulling to vet your application. So while concise is totally fine, do be sure to give enough information for the committee to properly review and score your application. We will not be evaluating the quality of your grammar, writing, or formatting. If it is helpful to you, we have created a sample application which you can review here. 

The Little Venue That Could will be using a weighted lottery system to determine grantees. Throughout the application, we will note what questions will add weight or not, which weights are determined just by information in the application, and which will be read and reviewed by a committee to determine weight. The lowest weight an application can have is 1, and the highest weight an application can have is 15. Priority in weights will be given to venues who are located in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island; venues whose NEA funding was withdrawn or terminated; venues who were established by, for and are serving historically excluded artists; and who demonstrate values driven work through community impact, board and staff diversity and accessibility. ALL eligible applicants will be entered into the lottery, regardless of weight distribution. To ensure each discipline is represented in the recipient pool, IndieSpace reserves the right to award the grant to the top scorer in theater, dance, and multidisciplinary. 

You can submit your application in writing directly on Submittable, or if needed, an IndieSpace staff member can take your application orally over the phone or via a Zoom meeting. Closed Captioning and/or ASL interpretation can be made available for Zoom application intake if requested in advance. To sign up for phone or Zoom application intake, please email hello@indiespace.org. Applications can also be submitted during any of the open house events detailed below. 

Have questions? Two virtual open houses and one in-person open house will be held for you to learn more about the process and to ask questions. For details and to sign up, please visit indiespace.org/venue-grant