Working Assumptions Grant

Each year, Working Assumptions offers six grants of $10,000 each. Their funding is unrestricted, allowing recipients complete creative freedom, provided the project is intended for public consumption. Decisions are announced in September, and the grant term is eight months: October 1 to June 1.

About Working Assumptions:
Working Assumptions invites people to observe and reflect on the everyday give-and-take of family and care through visual storytelling, because creating and sharing first-person photo-stories contributes to the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. They work specifically with pictures and words, offering educational programs for high school and college students, supporting visual storytellers through grant programs, and bringing stories to the public through digital platforms and in-person experiences.

What Working Assumptions Funds:
Working Assumptions supports photography and photo-based art projects that explore the everyday give-and-take of family and caregiving. They believe visual storytelling can illuminate the complexities of family life today—fostering compassion and sparking reflection and dialogue around these themes. Working Assumptions welcomes photography-focused proposals across artistic, therapeutic, educational, and research contexts.

They give preference to projects that:

• Are based on first-person narration and/or on long-term, intertwined relationships with the photographic subjects.
• Build on earlier, related work by the applicant.
• Have been initiated prior to the application deadline, to some degree.
• Expand one’s understanding of what family, caregiving, and interdependence look like.

They are also drawn to work that actively visualizes the exchanges and acts of care and family life. Working Assumptions is interested in photography that captures people in motion, in relationships, and in the midst of everyday rituals. While portraiture can be a powerful tool within a broader documentary project, they prioritize work that documents the dynamic, lived texture of family and caregiving over static, portrait-centered approaches.

Please Note: Projects must employ still photography as the central medium for communicating the themes of Working Assumptions. While they value the moving image as a storytelling tool, projects involving film or video are only eligible when the moving image accompanies or is integrated into a photo-based project. Projects that are solely documentary films are not eligible unless they focus thematically on photography of family or care.

How Working Assumptions Defines Family:
While Working Assumptions recognizes that the term “family” is complex and multifaceted, they are interested primarily in two dimensions of family:

• The family/care contexts each of us inherits, and their relationship to the formation of our self-image
• The sustained, interdependent relationships we enter into by choice or circumstance

These two aspects of family often remain in dialogue throughout one’s life, as individuals embrace, reject, and alter elements of each along the way. For Working Assumptions’ purposes, the term refers to the complex web of obligations, responsibilities, rituals, and sentiments that bind together two or more people over time.

For Working Assumptions to view a grouping as family, its members must engage in at least some of the following activities:

• Having a biological or adoptive relationship
• Demonstrating commitment and mutual obligation
• Providing for members’ emotional and physical well-being
• Caregiving
• Spending time together
• Sharing resources
• Sharing memories and histories
• Sharing rituals and values
• Note that the actions listed above need not be simultaneous or continuous, as the give-and-take of family often takes place in unequal measure over long time horizons.

Requirements

This opportunity is for individuals and/or collaborations (not organizations) across multiple disciplines with a focus on visual storytelling and family.

Residency: Applicants must be US citizens (including those residing abroad) or US tax residents authorized to work in the United States. They must also have a US tax ID number or Social Security number, as well as a US bank account.

Age: Applicants must be at least eighteen years old.

Eligibility: Applicants cannot have been employees or grant recipients of Working Assumptions within the last two years.

Application Instructions

Application deadline: June 1, 2026
Use this online portal to apply: https://workingassumptions.grantplatform.com/

Required information:

• Personal details
• Resume/CV
• Examples of current project
• Related past work
• Project description
• Budget outline