Annie Koyama, a former publisher of alternative comics, is seen in the office of her condo in downtown Toronto, Nov. 1. Over the past 14 years, Koyama has doled out around $700,000 of her own money to support emerging artists with small grants.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
The organizer: Annie Koyama
The pitch: Founding Koyama Provides
The reason: To provide microgrants to artists
Annie Koyama will never forget the day doctors told her she was going to die.
It was back in 2005. She’d been sent home with a brain aneurysm and given a couple of months to live. But she insisted that doctors try a novel surgery.
“I had a risky surgery, and I survived it,” Ms. Koyama, 70, recalled from her home in Toronto.
She’d been working as a documentary filmmaker at the time, but after she recovered from the operation she wanted to support emerging artists. With that in mind, she launched Koyama Press in 2007 which specialized in graphic novels and alternative comics. In addition to running the business, Ms. Koyama used the money she’d made from some shrewd investments to provide small grants to up-and-coming illustrators.
“That sort of grew and I never stopped doing that. But I didn’t talk about it for a long time because I didn’t want to take away anything from publicizing the books that we made,” she said.
She closed the publishing business four years ago but continued offering the grants. “I wanted to make it a more formal thing. So I just changed the name from Koyama Press to Koyama Provides.”
Since then she’s been providing small amounts – usually between $1,500 and $5,000 – to artists in Canada, the United States, Britain and the Caribbean. “What I’m doing is trying to fill the gaps,” she said. “I know how hard it is.”
So far she has distributed more than 150 grants worth around $700,000 in total.
Ms. Koyama decides on each recipient herself and funds everything from her savings. “I don’t do any fundraising,” she said. “I call them microgrants.”
She has no criteria beyond supporting people she believes have talent and there are no rules about how the money is spent. Some artists have used the grants to publish books, cover travel costs, buy supplies, pay rent or even to cover health care costs and child care.
She hopes to set an example and encourage others who have the means to do something similar. “It’s incredibly rewarding. It’s not a lot of money, but it can go far,” she said.