When small grants make sense
Small grants bridge a gap between one funding cycle and the next. They let an organisation test something (a new format, a new revenue idea, a new hire) without betting the whole budget on it. And for organisations in genuine crisis, they can be the difference between closing and surviving the month.
Tiny News Collective‘s first year of regranting to small, nascent outlets is a useful data point here. Using a three-year, $750,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, they ran two funds: a Spark Fund (up to $1,000, for professional development) and an Immediate Needs Fund ($5,000, for emerging crises). Across $200,000 distributed to 41 outlets, close to 80% of Immediate Needs recipients said a negative outcome – closing, missing payroll, taking on personal debt – would have happened without the money. Nearly 80% of Spark Fund recipients said they’d gained a skill they used right away. That’s a lot of leverage from grants most institutional funders would consider too small to bother with.
Who’s actually making small grants
The organisations doing this well tend to be regional or thematic specialists rather than large generalist funders. In Southern Africa, the Henry Nxumalo Foundation’s SA|AJP grants run $1,500 to $3,000 for investigative work. Earth Journalism Network offers EUR 1,000 to 2,000 story grants specifically for biodiversity reporting in West Africa. In Latin America, Fundación Gabo and Fundación Avina’s ColaborAcción scholarships have offered US$1,000 for individual investigations and US$3,000 for collaborative ones. These funders know their region or their beat well enough to move fast and take on risk that a larger institutional funder’s due diligence process wouldn’t allow.
Why funders use small grants as entry points
For funders, a small grant is also a low-risk way to start a relationship. A 2026 Peace Direct study of regranting intermediaries found that the funds and networks channelling money to local groups describe exactly this logic: small grants, they said, “help to build confidence on all sides, without needing to take on overwhelming risks.” FRIDA Young Feminist Fund builds this into its structure directly: new grantee partners join for a nine-month to one-year initial period before they can apply for renewal funding of up to four years. The small grant, in both cases, is doing double duty: due diligence for the funder, and a trial run for the organisation deciding whether this is a funder worth building a longer relationship with.
The honest caveat
Small grants take real staff time to chase and report on, proportionally more than large ones do. If you’re applying for a lot of small grants just to patch a structural budget gap, that’s worth naming as a problem, not solving quietly. Small grants are a tool for bridging, testing and stabilising. They are not a substitute for figuring out your core costs.
If you’re weighing whether a specific small grant is worth applying for, the identifying opportunities section of the MediaDev Fundraising Guide is worth a look. And if you’ve got your own view on this, tell us, we’re always curious what’s actually working on the ground.