Decatur’s BUILD Grant Win: A 2026 Blueprint

The Oakhurst Arts & Culture Center, an aging but well-loved spot in Decatur, Georgia, was staring down a familiar problem in early 2025. Sarah Chen, its executive director, had a $15 million renovation budget staring back at her and a philanthropic well that was running dry. Housed in an old elementary school on East Lake Drive, the center was desperate for major upgrades to its performance hall, art studios, and gathering spaces if it was going to keep serving everyone from kids in theater workshops to local jazz cats. Without that money, its whole future as a community arts hub looked shaky. The big question was, could a federal BUILD grant, the kind usually meant for roads and bridges, be a lifeline for a niche cultural infrastructure project like this?

It was a huge lift, trying to land a federal grant that big for something that wasn’t a highway or a utility. Most people hear BUILD (Better Using Investments to Use Development) grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and immediately think of massive projects like new interchanges or port expansions. But buried in the program’s language are clauses for projects that boost economic development and quality of life, which is a door that can, if you push on it right, open for cultural infrastructure. A lot of smaller organizations just don’t apply, assuming the program isn’t for them.

“We knew it was a long shot,” Chen told me in a recent interview at the center, with the faint sounds of a pottery class humming down the hall. “But our city planning director, Marcus Thorne, he saw an angle. His argument was that better cultural spots pull in tourists, help out the small businesses in Oakhurst village, and in the end juice the whole regional economy. That was the only way we were going to get this done.”

So the City of Decatur, with Thorne leading the charge, applied for the BUILD grant on the center’s behalf. That was a critical move. Federal agencies just feel more comfortable working with city governments that already have all the financial and admin plumbing in place. A 2024 report from the National League of Cities basically confirmed what we see in the field: when local governments and non-profit cultural groups team up, their chances of getting federal money for community projects go way up. The city’s involvement gave the application immediate weight.

Thorne’s team got to work documenting every dime of the center’s economic footprint. They pulled together data on how much local business revenue came from center events, how much visitors spent in Oakhurst, and how many jobs the center’s operations supported. For example, their estimate showed the annual Oakhurst Jazz Festival alone was responsible for over $500,000 in direct spending at restaurants and shops along East Lake Drive and College Avenue. Without that kind of hard data, you’re toast in a competitive federal grant process. It takes the project from being a “nice-to-have” and makes it an economic engine.

The application also hammered the equity and access angle. Oakhurst is gentrifying, but it still has a diverse population, and the center’s free and low-cost programs for underserved kids are a big deal. The renovation plan specifically included making the whole building fully ADA-compliant, which the old structure was definitely not. That focus on inclusivity ticked a major box for the DOT, whose own goals include backing projects that benefit every part of a community. “They’re looking for more than concrete and steel,” Thorne explained. “They want to see the story. How does this project lift people up and create opportunity where there wasn’t any?”

Getting strong letters of support was another huge piece of their strategy. They went out and got endorsements from the Decatur City Commission, the DeKalb County Chamber of Commerce, their state reps, and even the Atlanta Regional Commission, which spoke to the center’s importance for the whole area. These letters showed the grant reviewers this wasn’t just some pet project. This was a real, broad-based community priority. Frankly, without that kind of visible, cross-sectoral support, an application for a project like this is dead on arrival. Grant committees have limited cash. They’re always going to bet on the initiative with the most demonstrable buy-in.

The application’s narrative also had to get creative in explaining how renovating an arts center would, in a way, improve the “transportation network.” Thorne’s team made the case that a safer, more attractive cultural destination would get more people walking and biking around Oakhurst village instead of driving. They even proposed adding better pedestrian paths to the center and working with MARTA to get more people using public transit for events. It’s a subtle link, for sure, but it showed they’d done their homework and were trying to speak the DOT’s language.

The wait was brutal. Chen said it was “months of holding our breath.” The BUILD grant program is a feeding frenzy, with hundreds of applications fighting over a finite pot of money. For the 2025 cycle, there was about $1.5 billion on the table for the whole country. A Reuters report from January 2025 noted that only about 1 in 10 applications actually gets funded, and the big, traditional road-and-bridge projects usually gobble up the lion’s share.

Then the email landed in October 2025. The City of Decatur had been awarded a $10 million BUILD grant for the Oakhurst Arts & Culture Center. The announcement sent a shockwave of relief through City Hall and the center. “It was surreal,” Chen said, a huge smile finally breaking through. “That funding means we can finish the renovations and expand our programming. With these upgrades, this center can serve our community for another fifty years.” The city and a private fundraising campaign, now supercharged by the federal win, will cover the remaining $5 million.

The Oakhurst Arts & Culture Center’s story is a roadmap for other niche cultural infrastructure projects trying to tap into federal funds. It shows that if you do the painstaking planning, get your local government to go to bat for you, and get really good at translating your social and cultural benefits into the language of economic impact, you can win. You have to find the overlap with the grant’s mission. As Thorne put it, you have to “speak the language of the grant program, even if your project’s primary mission seems different. Find the intersections, quantify the impact, and build a coalition of support.”