Applications for the Ruth and Vaughn Jaenike Access to the Arts Fund are being accepted at this time. The deadline to apply is on Friday, Feb. 12.

The fund is being admitted by Doudna Fine Arts Center for the College of Arts & Humanities at Eastern. Applications will be reviewed by a committee made up of the head chairs of art, music and theater at Doudna, plus Dwight Vaught, Michael Watts and Rachael Barden.

The grant has existed for 15 years and is awarded every semester. Applicants enrolled in a fall program are asked to apply again in the fall.

Vaught, the assistant dean college of arts and humanities, said that the applications will be reviewed by a committee to see if they meet all the qualifications.

“It has to have something with an artistic format,” Vaught said. “The whole idea is to get people interested in and attending arts events.”

The grant is for schools outside of Eastern, in counties such as Coles, Cumberland, Edgar, Clark, Shelby, Effingham, Douglas and Moultrie.

“If the support from this grant goes out into the community, that’s what its designed to do, and it gets more people recognizing what’s going on artistically and helps support those programs, then it’s met its goal,” Vaught said.

Dan Crews, the administrative assistant for the Doudna Fine Arts Center, said that this grant is aimed at helping schools along with their artistic productions, not for buying supplies.

“A lot of times some artists they will look at a way to fund their program sometimes it’s either buy supplies or sometimes equipment and that’s not what this particular grant is designed for,” Crews said. “This is a way for us to help those art organizations that are away from campus and it different communities.”

Crews said this grant is not for individual artists but for organizations putting on performances that need a little help with costumes, design or makeup.

Vaught said that the money is aimed at helping the performance directly.

“If their application says, ‘We’re going to sell tickets, we’re going to have a dessert fundraiser and we’re going to have t-shirts that people can buy and we need to buy music’, that doesn’t really apply because it’s not directly related to the artistic production,” Vaught said. “But if they say we want money to hire somebody to come in as a guest director or a guest choreographer or something like that, that’s directly related to putting on the artistic production and those are the kinds of things that the Jaenike arts grant will help.”

The deadline to apply is Feb. 12 at 5:00 p.m. Notifications on the decision of the grant will be sent out through email by the week of Feb. 19.

Students who are interested in or have questions about applying can email Vaught for more details.

Liz Dowell can be reached by 581-2812 or ehdowell@eiu.edu