Grants of up to $7,000 now available for upcoming batches of RC

Thanks to the generosity of our alumni community, we are delighted to announce that we are again offering living expense grants of up to $7,000 to people from groups that are underrepresented in programming, for all of our upcoming batches.

Eligibility

Our grants are available to people who identify as women (cis or trans), trans*, genderqueer, non-binary, Black, Latino/a/x, Native American, and/or Pacific Islander. Since the Recurse Center is free for everyone, the grants are intended to be used for living expenses during your batch, and to make RC more accessible to you if you could not otherwise afford to attend.

You may request a grant of up to $7,000 for a 12-week batch, $3,500 for a 6-week batch, or $500 for a one-week mini retreat. Apply here!

A brief history of our grants program

In early 2012, we began offering living expense grants funded by Etsy and other recruiting partners. In 2015, we began funding these grants ourselves, and continued to do so until early 2020. In total, we have disbursed nearly $1.7 million in grants and Fellowships.

Last March, when we closed our space and moved RC online, we prepared for a significant loss of income. RC makes money from recruiting fees, and we expected a major macroeconomic downturn that would severely impact our business. In order to keep RC in operation and avoid layoffs – our main priorities – we cut every expense we could, including our grants program.

Thankfully, not only did our business do much better than we expected it to do in 2020, we also received generous financial support from our alumni community. As a result, we are able to restart our grants program, with grants now being funded entirely by donations from the RC community.

Grants are the best way we’ve found to make attending RC possible for more people from groups that are historically underrepresented in programming. RC is already free, and right now it’s more accessible than ever: while we’re operating online people don’t have to pay for housing in or travel to New York City. Over the past year, we’ve welcomed people from over 100 different cities and nearly every time zone across the globe.

But there are there are still many costs associated with taking time away from work and family obligations: lost wages, childcare, health insurance, and more. And though our gender balance has been better than ever this year (our next batch is over 50% women, trans*, and/or non-binary people) we still have work to do to make RC more racially diverse and consistently gender balanced.

If you’d like to learn more about what participating in RC remotely is like, check out our Virtual RC page! And if you have any questions about applying to RC, email us.