On June 24, 2008, the Create a Comic Project (CCP) was awarded a Small Neighborhood Grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (CFGNH). The award will go toward sponsoring the Comic Making Tournament III, the CCP's major annual event where children wield their imaginations to make sequential art masterpieces.

This is the third major award the comic project has won and the second from the CFGNH. The Community Foundation previously awarded the Create a Comic Project with a grant in 2007 to support the Comic Making Tournament II. In February 2008, the Association of Schools of Public Health awarded the CCP a "This is Public Health" Campaign Award to support the project's role in public health education and awareness.

The Comic Making Tournament III is planned to take place in either March or May 2009. Like the previous tournaments, it is aimed at the population of disadvantaged children in New Haven. The tournament hands out prizes that these children would not normally be able to afford, such as art books and supplies, as well as graphic novels and webcomic apparel.

The tournament will feature a number of events for the kids to compete in, such as creating single page comics, multi-page comics, and arranging panels in nonlinear fashion. The tournament, like the comic project, will use two types of templates for its events: blank comics for children to draw their own and those with art but without words for children to provide the dialogue.

The Create a Comic Project is a youth education program that has used comic creation as a means to encourage creative writing and literacy skills among underserved children. Started in a New Haven library in 2006, it has hosted events at locations such as the Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center, Braddock Carnegie Library, and Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. The project has earned tremendous support from the online comic community, with over 80 different webcomics lending their art for use. It is one of the largest multi-comic youth projects of its kind.