If your nonprofit friends look tired, they are. Priorities in big-box philanthropy shift. Funding can evaporate overnight. “DEI” has become a dirty word. Most don’t have a six-figure development department. And gatekeeping is real, especially if you’re outside the demographics philanthropy tends to favor.
In the middle of all that, the Knoxville-based grantmaking organization Waymakers Collective is quietly doing something radical: moving resources into the hands of artists and culture-bearers who know their communities best.
“Funding ebbs and flows,” says Executive Director Joe Tolbert Jr. “Arts organizations of color can be ‘attractive’ one moment and overlooked the next. That instability can put us in a tailspin to constantly adapt to funders’ whims. We’re trying to fight that, to remove the secrecy and invite people into the process so they can be the architects of what benefits our region, because they are the experts of what our region needs.”
Joe became executive director in 2023 after helping shape the Collective’s early programs. Growing up in Knoxville, Joe didn’t see Black folks reflected in the larger narrative of who Appalachia was. Today Joe proudly uses the term “Affrilachian,” insisting that the story of Appalachia is wider, more complex and more beautiful than the clichés would have you believe.
Since 2020, Waymakers Collective has distributed over $1.58M+ across Central Appalachia including Appalachian Ohio, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. In 2025, the second round of its “Appalachian Futurism: Creative Liberation Fund” awarded 35 one-year project grants to individual artists, organizations and cultural workers in the Central Appalachian region, totaling $175,000.
Waymakers uses a community-led nomination process to make sure support goes where it’s needed most, not just to the usual institutions. They ask organizers, artists and cultural leaders who’s missing from the table and then work to bring them in. By removing barriers to entry, such as complicated application processes, Waymakers works to make funding truly accessible. Local beneficiaries have included The Bottom, SpaceCraft, Good Guy Collective, Cattywampus Puppet Council, and individual artists like Jonathan “Courageous” Clark.
Instead of a top-down board, Waymakers invites previous grantees to become voting members with real governance power. Each fall, those members elect an eight-person steering committee, the “AppalCore” (Appalachian Core), that works alongside staff to refine grant processes. “In philanthropy, people love to say ‘trust-based,’” Joe says. “We try to go further and share power and share decisions with the folks most impacted by the work.”
Waymakers also rejects extractive philanthropy—the kind of giving that takes more than it gives back, treating communities as data sources or feel-good stories rather than partners. However, numbers can contain stories as well.
Across the Atlantic last week, Ireland offered a striking example of what a new story about arts funding might look like. The government announced plans to make permanent its landmark Basic Income for the Arts program, paying artists a weekly stipend so they can focus on creating instead of simply surviving. The pilot program proved what many have long known but few have been willing to quantify: when artists thrive, communities thrive. For every €1 invested, the arts returned €1.39, generating €100 million over three years.
That kind of sweeping public investment is unlikely to reach U.S. soil anytime soon. But in its own way, Waymakers Collective is modeling a grassroots version of the same idea. Their no-strings-attached general operating support allows a musician fix a car to get back on tour, rent an artist studio for a few more months, or simply buy time to finish a body of work.
As Joe puts it, “If you support artists in their livelihoods—when they don’t have to worry about bills—they can focus on their art in a deeper way. They can do more, make more of an impact, when they’re not juggling other jobs and all the things that come with just being alive.”
Learn more about Waymakers Collective here.