By Adam Swift
The Revere Cultural Council approved the award of almost $44,000 in Massachusetts Cultural Council grants to 24 organizations and events at its December meeting last week.
Some of the successful applicants ranged from Revere Beach Pride, an African storytelling program for elementary school students, a hip hop chair dance program for senior citizens, and a trip to the State House for Whalen School students.
Cultural Council Chair Rocky Graziano said there were 51 applicants for the grants this year, an increase of 11 from last year. Even with narrowing the recipients from 51 to 24, the council had to make tough choices and award only partial amounts of many of the grant requests because of the number of applicants and the limited state funds, Graziano said.
“The benefit of having a council that is truly indebted to the community and wants to see the cultural representation of Revere grow is that by doing the outreach, we are going to have more applications than we had, year over year,” he said. “We were up 11 applications year over year, which was a percentage of about 25 percent.”
The total in grant funds that was requested last year was about $100,000, Graziano said. This year, the total amount requested was over $200,000.
“There is absolutely no way we can approve all of those with a budget of $44,600, so there are going to be projects that are declined, not because they are not important, special, or well-written applications,” said Graziano. “It is simply because we do have to make some really critical decisions, and that is the hard part about being on this council.”
The cultural council passed through a number of applications at its November meeting, with each member rating the applications on a scale of one to five.
At the December meeting, the council made its final decision on a handful of applications that were on the “maybe” list, eventually approving at least partial funding for an annual Ramadan Iftar dinner, the hip-hop chair dance program, and the Whalen School State House trip.
There is a 15-day appeal period for the denied applications, with the final applications due to the state by the middle of January.
“The council has done a great job of outreach this year,” said Graziano. “We had a lot of new applications that are getting approved for the first time, we had some returning applications. I want to recognize the team here, in a very short period of time, because we all got together in July.
“So I want to recognize the work that we have done, which is incredible.”
Cultural Council member Joe Heafitz agreed that it was hard work to narrow the applications down.
“These are all great proposals, … we just can’t accept every single one of them, we do not have the funds for them,” he said. “Those that go forward, we do wish you well, we do expect some reports on how they did go.”
