Eleven awards further our investments in this region’s creative community
As part of our effort to help foster a thriving cultural community locally, the Foundation recently invested $40,000 in Sacramento’s new cultural plan, and has granted an additional $125,000 to local arts programs and artists throughout the capital area.
Five of the arts programs that received recent grants were awarded as part of our Transforming the Creative Economy Strategic Initiative, which aims to support arts organizations as they innovate, diversify and build board capacity, and develop new audiences to meet the evolving needs of the area’s communities.
“For our creative community to thrive, arts organizations must evolve and move beyond traditional notions of sustainability,” said Niva Flor, Community Impact Officer at the Foundation. “These programs prioritize that sort of evolution, and, in doing so, address on a local level the challenges that arts organizations are encountering nationwide.”
Among the grants awarded through the initiative is one that funds the use of emerging technologies to tell the stories of traditionally underrepresented communities in new ways, and another that will support collaborations between
artists, students, and businesses to develop documentary shorts on the history of Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood.
Altogether, the Foundation granted $93,800 to Fine Arts School in the Pines, Latino Center of Arts and Culture, Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera, Sol Collective, and VITA Academy as part of the Transforming the Creative Economy initiative.
Those awards complement five additional grants given from the Foundation’s Dennis Mangers Fund for Young Performing Artists to improve access to performing arts education for underserved youth – the very sort of training that
Mangers, the Fund’s namesake, was unable to pursue as a child. Those grants, which total $20,800, support an array of opportunities in dance, music, theater, and theater production at Lincoln Theatre Company, Sacramento Mandarins, Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera, Sacramento Theatre Company, and the
Barbershop Harmony Society.
In addition to the ten grants awarded to arts nonprofits, the Foundation recently awarded artist Marianne Bland the inaugural Gloria Burt Sacramento Region Arts Fellowship, through its joint project with the Sacramento Region Arts & Business Council and Blue Line Arts.
Selected from a competitive cohort of area artists, Bland will use the $10,000 award to produce new work through collaborations with local businesses for her project, The Bee Victorious Initiative.
The Fellowship honors Gloria Burt, whose advocacy for local arts invigorated
the capital area’s creative community until her passing earlier this year. “Gloria was a force in the local arts scene for so many years,” said the Foundation’s chief executive, Linda Beech Cutler. “Simply put: there is no better way to celebrate Gloria than to support artists like Marianne, and invest in creating a community where work like hers – work that is innovative, inclusive, and inspirational – will help our region flourish.”