BLUE MOUNTAIN LAKE, NY—The Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts (ALCA) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant of $295,000 from the New York State Council on
the Arts (NYSCA) for ALCA’s Adirondack (ADK) Quad-County Region Statewide Community Regrants (SCR) Program for fiscal year 2023. The award, which resulted from an application by ALCA staff members in NYSCA’s “Support for Partnerships” category, represents a greater-than-125% increase in the arts center’s current SCR funding of $130,000. In providing the grant, NYSCA approved 100% of ALCA’s request for the additional $165,000.

Along with significantly increasing the amount of money the SCR Program will be able to regrant to arts organizations and artists in Clinton, Essex, Franklin and Hamilton counties, the additional funding enables ALCA to expand its offerings and services to the entire four-county region. In addition to the ongoing grant categories of Community Arts and Arts Education, ALCA’s SCR Program is reviving the Individual Artist grants, which have not been offered in the ADK Quad-County region in approximately a decade. Each grant category lists several criteria on which applications are evaluated—for example, artistic merit, organizational competence, service to the community, and local priorities for SCR funding in Community Arts. In this last one, priorities include projects that address areas of distinct cultural deficiency—e.g., programs for underserved rural communities; and projects that focus on, or represent, aspects of our region’s history or cultural identity/diversity.

With the presence of the Akwesasne community based north of Franklin County in mind, ALCA’s grants program is pleased to add the priority of projects dedicated to Native American and other
indigenous people’s arts, culture and history. All in all, the increase in SCR support means an expansion of both the funding and services ALCA provides to arts organizations and artists in the four-county region, which translates into wider benefits for residents of, and visitors, to the many varied communities within the region, according to Jean-Marie Donohue, Development General Director of ALCA.

“We are grateful to NYSCA for this generous increase, which is a validation of the truly indispensable work ALCA has been doing for all four counties in our service area since at least the mid-2010s,” she said. “We are also excited about the opportunity the increase in funding offers to extend and deepen our service to the abundance of wonderful artists and arts organizations in the region. Although ours is a rural area, the communities we serve range from the City of Plattsburgh to the tiniest hamlets in remote stretches along the Canadian border and in the heart of the Adirondack mountains.”

To learn more the SCR Program, please email the grant coordinator at fred@adirondackarts.org while also visiting adirondackarts.org/grantopportunities/scr.

Photo at top: The Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts in Blue Mountain Lake, NY. Photo provided by Fred Balzac, DEC Grant Coordinator for Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts.