The Black Belt Community Foundation awarded $60,000 in grants Saturday to 23 nonprofit organizations at its annual Black Belt Arts Initiative Grants Ceremony.

Groups from 12 different counties, including Dallas, received funding for art projects that benefit their communities.

“Without funding and support from organizations like this, our organization could not exist,” said Ann Thomas with ArtsRevive. “It is so important, and we appreciate the support monetarily but also hearing we are doing a good job and they like what we are doing.”

ArtsRevive and the Selma Art Guild received $3,000 grants.

ArtsRevive’s grant will go toward the third annual Tale Tellin’ in the Schools project in October, which teaches students the art and importance of telling stories through the spoken word.

“We’ve been doing the Tale Tellin’ Festival for 37 years, but recently we started taking the storytellers into the schools,” Thomas said. “This gets another art form into the schools.”

The program started as a festival, but ArtsRevive wanted to make it more accessible for students.

The Selma Art Guild’s grant will go toward its annual Summer Juried Art Show, which is currently on display at the guild’s studio at 508 Selma Avenue.

The show allows local artists to display their work and expose people in the Black Belt to various forms of art.

“It almost wiped us out of our funds to be able to do this show,” said Selma Art Guild President Sally Jordan. “We have funds from donations and artists’ commissions, but this makes it easier for us to go out in the community and do more by having a variety of these art shows.”

Martha Lockett, who serves as a board member for the BBCF, said it was a tall task narrowing down all the requests from the 12 counties the foundation serves.

“We had about $180,000 worth of requests for art grants this year and $60,000 to meet those needs,” Lockett said. “It was very selective. We tried to make sure there was something in every county.”

Lockett said the money is allocated to the BBCF through the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment on the Arts.

Lockett said the foundation also teaches nonprofit organizations about grant writing so they can apply for other grants as well.

“We use these grants as sort of the hook, as a way to start something or to support something that is going on,” Lockett said. “The goal now is to find ways to help sustain the work that is going on by helping these small groups who may not be real proficient at grants sometimes and improve their grant writing capabilities so they can move to other funders to get more consistent support and not look at this as all they can get.”

Felecia Lucky, the president of the BBCF, said art makes an impact on how children learn, and it is important to be able to support organizations in the Black Belt that focus on the arts.

“A lot of children could learn more if they were taught in a different way,” Lucky said.

“So often times, people think of art as sculptures or paintings, but art integration in education is really huge. If you can teach a teacher how to teach trigonometry or geometry through the arts, it could capture a child’s attention.”