The 2026 CWAM mini-grant will open soon for applications. Six grants up to $750 are available each year for museum projects of all kinds, including collections, education kits, programming, building preservation, and more.
The purpose of the CWAM Grants Program is to elevate projects and programs throughout the CWAM region. A small amount of money can mean the difference between adequate lighting and great lighting, sufficient collections storage and appropriate collections storage, basic programming and exceptional programming.
Full details, including eligibility, can be found below or in the 2025 CWAM Grants Guidelines and the 2025 CWAM Grant Application. 2026 guidelines and application coming soon. Please review documents in full before submitting an application.
Important Dates:
November 10, 2026 – Application Opens
December 31, 2026 – Application Deadline
February 5, 2027 – Notifications Sent Out
December 31, 2026 – Final Report Due
Eligibility:
- Organizations can be independent 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations or owned and operated by such organizations or by local government agencies.
- Applicants must be CWAM Institutional Members in good standing. Learn more about institutional membership on the CWAM Membership page.
- Funding is not available for ongoing projects: only those applications addressing new projects with start dates after January 1, 2027 will be considered.
- A financial match is not required.
- All grant recipients are required to submit a final report in the form of an article, with images. Final reports are due on or before December 31, 2027.
- Institutions may only submit one application per year.
Questions about the grant process or institutional membership? Contact Sam Sedoryk, CWAM Grants Chair, through the CWAM contact portal.
Past CWAM Grant Success Stories
Lafayette History Museum – Rehousing Artifact and Archival Collections, 2023
The Lafayette History Museum showcases the history of Lafayette, Colorado through our exhibits, programming, tours, and other activities. Housed in the Lewis Home, an 1890s coal miner’s cottage that is on the National Register of Historic Places, the very walls that make up the museum help tell the story of Lafayette. Although the museum was founded with a focus on coal mining, the scope of our more than 4,000 artifacts ranges beyond that era to tell a broad history of Lafayette.
Although the museum has existed since 1976, its first staff member with museum experience wasn’t hired until 2016. Despite the recent years of professionalization, the Lafayette History Museum, like many small local history museums, is still working to correct decades of work done by untrained volunteers and staff who had the best of intentions but were not always up-to-date on the proper museum procedures. One of the highest priorities has been to rehouse the portions of our collection that have not been stored according to best practices. Our application to the CWAM Grant focused on two main areas with poor storage. In one space, an onsite storage shed, a section of our artifact collection was stored loose on a set of three shelves. The small artifacts were labeled, but did not have any sort of protective barrier between the object and the shelf, were not covered to be shielded from dirt or dust, which is common since the shed does not have a sealed building envelope, and they took up unnecessary space. The second area that needed attention was in an offsite storage room that houses our archival material. There were about twelve boxes of material that were stored in cardboard boxes, clearly recycled from volunteers’ home use, and the acidic cardboard was almost certainly causing damage to the important historical records within.
We used the CWAM funds to purchase archival boxes, tissue paper, and archival folders. The rehousing project was incorporated into our larger ongoing inventory project. As objects on the shelves were inventoried, they were then wrapped in tissue paper and placed into a box, with their new location recorded. This greatly improved their storage condition to protect them from physical damage as well as dust and dirt. Additionally, it drastically increased the amount of storage space available. This has already proved useful as we uncover other improperly stored artifacts during our inventory and now have a place to store them safely.
We are incredibly grateful for CWAM’s support that has allowed us to better preserve the history of Lafayette!
Crimson Dawn Association – New Brochure for Crimson Dawn Park and Museum, 2022
Crimson Dawn Association used the CWAM grant to pay for the design and printing of a new brochure for the Crimson Dawn Park and Museum. We hired local Casper artist, Jessie Bell, to create a whimsical fairy tale map of the park shrines and Neal’s characters. Crimson Dawn Association members worked with Neal Forsling’s granddaughter Laura Bjorkman and Crimson Dawn Storyteller Rebecca Hunt on the content of the brochure. The Crimson Dawn Association will match the CWAN grant by printing 2500 copies of the brochure to be handed out to museum visitors beginning in June 2024.
You can view the PDF of their new brochure here.
Brighton City Museum Grant – Japanese American Newspapers, 2022
The Brighton City Museum collects the material culture of the people of Brighton and its environs and preserves it in the public trust for the benefit of present and future generations. We have perhaps a better archival record, than actual artifacts. Of these materials, we possess a dynamic collection of Japanese American Newspaper ranging from 1940s to the late 1950s. These papers were utilized by the Koizuma-Hishinuma family, who had a prosperous farm until the early 2000’s. It is now a historic site within the city.
During the refurbishment of the Bromley/James/Koizuma-Hishnuma farm, in the early to mid-2000’s, restoration and construction crews discovered the floors, walls, and structural weaknesses, had been padded and insulated with Japanese American language newspapers. They had the vision to collect and preserve all of them for the future and now reside in the museum.
Brighton is known for its very large and active Japanese American community who pre-date both World Wars and were exempted from order 9066 which sent other Japanese Americans into internment. Part of our archival collection, and previously scanned with a larger format scanner, the museum lacked a way to scan and make available for researchers from around the country. To date we have had major academic institutions utilize the collection for research more than any of or other archival materials.
The CWAM funds were utilized to purchase a targeted desk top scanner which could target scan sections of the papers. The scanner can also eliminate creases and flaws now characteristic of the documents themselves.
Eventually, the newspapers will be made public online and are currently available in a digital copy by request. We have launched a new initiative with the members of the Brighton Japanese American Association (BJAA) as they celebrate 75 years of community service. The scanning of the newspapers augments our larger goals as an institution of brining the story of Brighton’s Japanese community to the forefront of our museum experience and services. We now have two dedicated Japanese American community volunteers working on our overall collection, scanning, and identifying individuals, families, and businesses within the photos and documents.
In short, the funds have done more than purchase a scanner, but rather, we have been able to integrate the scanner purchased with CWAM funds into our larger goals of telling the story of underserved community histories spring-boarding us towards our larger goals of telling the holistic history of the City of Brighton.
City of Greeley Museums – Greeley Tribune Rehousing, 2021
Our CWAM grant went to purchase archival supplies for rehousing the Greeley Tribune image collection that we received in 2021. The collection as we received it is composed of four filing cabinets of negatives, three filing cabinets of photographs, and seven filing cabinets of newspaper clippings. My biggest concern when this donation was accepted into our collections was that it would linger in poor housing while awaiting processing, potentially for years. Since the grant funded the initial supplies, we were able to budget in some extra hours for a staff member to lead getting the project started in early 2022.
The main type of supply we purchased with the grant was negative sleeves. Due to our need to reuse the negative filing cabinets for their permanent storage, we were limited to the type of sleeves we could use (see below images for drawer details). The 2.5” x 10.25” paper negative sleeves we purchased were cut in half to about 5” long for them to fit in the drawers. We recruited our front desk staff to help with cutting the sleeves. This allowed the lead staff member working on the project to focus on the physical rehousing of the negatives and transferring the information from the original envelops onto the new sleeves. We have already purchased another round of negative sleeves after we used up what was purchased with the grant funds. The initial grant order was crucial in helping us refine our estimate of how many sleeves are needed for each drawer. This information will allow us to budget for the remaining that are needed and not over purchase.
To ensure we don’t lose our initial momentum on this project, the lead staff member has trained another part-time employee on the project to make sure progress continues after the lead’s extra hours for the project end. Two volunteers have recently finished up their current projects and are starting to work on the photograph and clipping filing cabinets. The photographs will be rehoused into cartons purchased through the grant since some of the drawers they are stored in are broken. The clipping filing cabinets are being checked for photographs or negatives that may have been misfiled in them.
We’re incredibly grateful for CWAM’s support of our project that got it started and are looking forward to getting it finished up!
Negative Drawer Before rehousing
Negative Drawer After Rehousing