The Caribbean Culture Fund (CCF) has crossed a landmark operational threshold by awarding its 100th grant, a milestone leadership says has turned dozens of under-resourced creative concepts into tangible, community-focused projects that would otherwise have likely stalled in early development. “One hundred grants is a milestone for us,” Katharina Ehrmann, CCF Grants Manager, shared in a recent update. “It means that 100 ideas that might otherwise have struggled to get off the ground have been implemented.”
The full portfolio of awarded grants was curated through five distinct targeted proposal streams: Art for Change, Caribbean Collaboration, Migration, Archiving and Memory, and Residencies and Fellowships. The 100 selected projects span a vast spectrum of priority regional issues, from advancing social justice and centering human rights to advancing decolonial memory work, building local environmental resilience, expanding youth engagement in cultural spaces, and supporting sustainable livelihoods for independent creatives.
To ensure fair, context-aware evaluation, the CCF convened independent panels of working creatives and longstanding regional arts advocates for each proposal stream, who collectively reviewed, debated, and scored hundreds of submissions. Raymona Henry-Wynne, Executive Director of St. Lucia’s Cultural Development Foundation and a jury member, noted that the review process offered “an eye-opening glimpse into the vast creative potential of the region” that often flies under the radar of global cultural funding bodies.
The geographic reach of the 100 grants extends across 28 Caribbean countries and territories, with the projects themselves expanding their collective impact to engage communities in 32 total jurisdictions. Puerto Rico leads the region in number of CCF grantees with 14, followed by Haiti with 10, Jamaica with 9, and the Dominican Republic with 8; St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago each claimed 5 grantee spots. Additional grantees are based across more than 20 other island and mainland Caribbean jurisdictions, including Barbados, Curaçao, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, the Bahamas, Guyana, Belize, and the Cayman Islands, among others. Sixty percent of grantees identify as women, 35 percent as men, and 5 percent as non-binary, while 70 projects operate in English, 18 in French, and 12 in Spanish to reflect the region’s full linguistic diversity.
The portfolio also mirrors the extraordinary breadth of Caribbean artistic practice: performing arts leads as the largest category with 18 grantees, followed by multimedia work with 16 and independent film with 14. Supported projects span nearly every creative discipline, including artist residencies, original music production, community-led libraries and archival preservation initiatives, literature and independent publishing, visual arts, photography, design, sculpture, community-focused architecture, and even experimental video game development. Dr. John Hunte, a CCF jury member and Executive Director of the Barbados Dance Project, emphasized that the fund fills a critical visibility gap for regional creators: “The CCF effectively allows us to be seen, heard, and felt. It is a portal to being part of the global conversation.”
As the CCF celebrates its 100-grant milestone, leadership is now conducting a full analysis of its grantmaking data to map unmet demand for cultural funding across the region, and to refine the structure and focus of future proposal calls. For CCF Executive Director Kellie Magnus, hitting the 100-grant mark is not a finish line but a clear marker of how much unmet need remains. Every unfunded application the fund received, she noted, represents a creative with a compelling, community-focused idea that deserves to be taken seriously. The CCF has committed to expanding its work to connect even more Caribbean creatives to critical funding, cross-regional professional networks, and global visibility platforms.
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