Announced at Image Expo 2016, the Creators for Creators grant is a non-profit initiative whose goal is to “encourage, support, and promote original works through grants and education.”

The program is a combination of financial backing and mentorship. The grant gives $30,000 to a single cartoonist or a wrister/artist duo to support their creation of original work of between sixty-four and one hundred pages over a single year.

The mentorship mentioned will be beyond creation and will cover all aspects of the comic-creating experience to help create a firm foundation when it comes to the creative, business, legal, and financial aspects of the business.

The first winner was announced at Emerald City Comicon, M. Dean who submitted a work called I Am Young.

Since college I’ve been tossing around short stories about young people from a long time ago in my head and I went through various titles to find one that could both tie these short stories but remain universal. Ultimately, I want to tell stories about the foibles of youth, the mistakes and nuances, the people, places, and things that feel important. I realized a title like I Am Young reveals both naïveté and an acknowledgement that everyone grows older and changes. These stories take place beginning in the mid-century, go throughout the remaining 20th-century and end in the 2000s. By the end all the characters that were seen as teens would be middle aged or older, they have changed as the world has changed. And we as individuals and the world around us continues to.