Grants

In August 2025, to mark five years of Rafunaama, we launched our first artist grant: a small, trust-based initiative built on a simple belief that the most important textile art being made in South Asia today is often being made by people who have never received funding, and may never have been told their work matters enough to support.

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We offer seed grants to artists and collectives working with textile art to heal, repair, and connect communities. We prioritise those at the margins of the art world: people without gallery representation, without institutional backing, without access to the circuits where funding usually flows. We ask for vision and intention, not portfolios or credentials.

 

Our grantmaking is co-designed with artists and facilitators who have faced these same systems themselves. We are learning as we go, asking hard questions about who benefits and how, and trying to build something that does not reproduce the extractive models we are working against.