‘Photocrati Fund’ offers $5000 grant for photographers. Photocrati Media, a leading provider of website templates for photographers, announces the 2011 Photocrati Fund – a $5,000 fellowship for a pro or emerging photographer focused on environmental or humanitarian photography.

Powerful imagery awes, inspires and engages people in the world; it incites dialogue and often encourages action. Great photography brings humanity to statistics, faces to tragedy, connections to cultures far away, and life to dying species. Incredible images tell stories that we need to hear. But those stories are expensive and time-consuming to produce.

The Photocrati Fund bridges the gap for one photographer each year by providing a $5,000 photography grant to focus on a month-long environmental or humanitarian photography project. At the completion of the project, the grant winner’s images will be displayed as a photo essay on Photocrati.com.

The Photocrati Fund award winner will be selected by a prestigious panel of some of the world’s best-known environmental and cultural photographers including Steve McCurry and Michael “Nick” Nichols. The grantee will be announced at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in June 2011.

“The Photocrati Fund is important to us because we really believe in the importance and power of photography, but we know that it’s getting harder and harder to produce great photography due to funding limitations,” says Erick Danzer, president of Photocrati Media. “We want to support photographers who have passion and a desire to contribute something positive to the world around them.”

By providing the funds and the space to display the resulting images, Photocrati can serve as a platform for both the winning photographer and an important issue, says Danzer.

The 2011 Photocrati Fund competition will run through April 1, 2011 (11pm GMT). Grant applicants should submit a one-page project statement and bio, along with a link to a coherent, themed, online portfolio of 20-30 images