Winding Wednesday in Indianapolis, Indiana, one of 96 Walking Together grantees, is a grassroots group that provides space for Chin artists to practice backstrap weaving and basketry traditions.
From beadwork and blues to weaving and canoe building, 15 Midwestern grantees are receiving Walking Together support to sustain living cultural traditions rooted in community.
A total of $3.34 million has been awarded to 96 grantees, including 15 grantees from the Midwest. Organizations will each receive a $50,000 grant. Individuals will each receive $15,000.
This pilot program awards significant nonmatching grants to traditional artists, practitioners, nonprofits, local and Tribal governments, and community organizations and knowledge keepers that demonstrate a deep commitment to sustaining folklife rooted in community.
15
Midwestern organizations and individuals have recieved Walking Together grants
$540k
Total amount of Walking Together grants made in the Midwest
“Supporting folklife means directly supporting the intrinsic role art plays in everyday life.”
Juan Souki, Executive Director of Mid Atlantic Arts
Walking Together support will allow AfriWell Hub to expand our folklife programming, deepen community partnerships, and elevate African cultural traditions through storytelling, music, dance, and intergenerational learning.
$50,000
Sylvia Brown
(Individual)
Meskwaki Settlement, IA
Sac and Fox Beadwork, Regalia Making
Walking Together funds will help increase our supply base and ensure generations to come can keep making traditional clothing for their tribe
Walking Together funding will help Chicago Blues Revival form a Blues Engagement Council that can help guide the organization’s work and keep it connected to residents of the Bronzeville community that is the cradle of Chicago blues. This group will include senior citizens who regularly attend our Silver Fox Pop-Up Series, younger residents invested in Bronzeville’s cultural life, and working Blues musicians from across Chicago.
In the next three years, I hope to solidify and share the legacy of my folklife practice from the past 35 years, while creating new materials for younger generations.
Walking Together support will help us expand needed workshops to include traditional dance and music, traditional headdresses, and jewelry, while allowing us to offer stable, more frequent, and diverse workshops such as weaving, basket-making, cooking, and storytelling. More importantly, it will help us reach more youth, creating intergenerational bridges that ensure cultural knowledge is not lost but carried forward, ensuring that cultural heritage remains a living, evolving part of community life in Indiana.
Walking Together will transform KCA’s ability to address our most critical need: capacity building for our organization – including fair compensation for the artists, educators, and staff who keep our traditions alive.
$50,000
Ronald Paquin
(Individual)
St. Ignace, MI
Chippewa Canoe Building, Other Craft
Walking Together will play a critical role in my ability to access the natural materials I need, help me bring environmental issues relating to availability of materials to light, and host a hands-on gathering of all of my apprentices and Michigan tribal cultural divisions to share stories and knowledge.
$15,000
Penny Kagigebi
(Individual)
Detroit Lakes, MN
Anishinaabe Quillwork
With Walking Together support, I will increase my Woodland porcupine quillwork and birchbark basketry skills, amplify public exposure to these endangered artforms, and create more options for beginner and advanced learners. Storytelling, ceremony, land relationship, and Anishinaabe Queer Two-Spirit cultural knowledge will continue to be shared through these venues and more.
Walking Together funds will be used to increase our Indigenous cultural arts programming and assist in greater collaboration projects with Bois Forte Anishinaabeg.
Walking Together funding will catalyze preservation initiatives with impact extending far beyond my individual artistic practice. This support will enable the systematic documentation and transmission of buffalo horn artistry – knowledge that exists nowhere else and faces extinction with my generation.
Eagle Butte (Cheyenne River Indian Reservation), SD
Lakota Traditions and Community Health
Walking Together support helps us continue building programs that empower young people, honor cultural values, and create lasting change across our community.
The Walking Together funds will allow me to create professional instructional materials and a complete workshop curriculum for multiple moccasin styles, and to test this work through pilot workshops. This support will strengthen my ability to preserve, teach, and share traditional moccasin-making with the community.
$15,000
About Walking Together
Organizations and individuals deeply engaged in sustaining their community’s traditions receive unrestricted grants through Walking Together, with the aim of supporting their existing work and bolstering community traditions and knowledge into the future.
Walking Together aims to facilitate a robust regional and national support network for traditional arts, support collaborative documentation and marketing services, and address historic precarity and disinvestment in folk arts and culture that communities of color face.
Grant recipients are from all 50 states, DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. All states and jurisdictions have at least one grantee.
More than 2,000 organizations and artists applied for Walking Together funding in 2025. Eligible applicants were reviewed by six review panels—one per region—and selected applicants were invited to a second round of review.
Each region also assembled committees of consultants composed of traditional artists, folklorists, scholars, arts professionals, and advocates as “Working Circles.”
These Working Circle members were involved in every stage of the program, including the development of grant guidelines, outreach to potential applicants, and application review and feedback processes as part of a participatory grantmaking model.
The USRAOs partner with the National Endowment for the Arts, state arts agencies, individuals, and other public and private funders to develop and deliver programs, services, and products that advance arts and creativity.
Together, the USRAOs work to activate and operate national arts initiatives, encourage, and support collaboration across regions, states, and communities, and maximize the coordination of public and private resources invested in arts programs.
In 2024, they invested over $33.6 million across the United States and Jurisdictions, through nearly 3,000 grants that reached more than 1,300 communities.
