Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

Art-Reach students and staff in Art Gallery at City Hall with artist Ben Volta The past year the Philadelphia Cultural Fund (the vehicle through which the City distributes funding through a competitive peer process) for the first time ever allocated a portion of the funding to go into a new "Arts for Youth" project grant program. This new grant program, which I encouraged, allowed a group of exemplary projects using the arts to address critical challenges facing our youth to be supported. Given that the process for the next round of grants for this year will be launched soon (at a significantly reduced funding level, due to budget cuts), and that City Council is now holding budget hearings, it seemed like an opportune time to highlight one of the projects supported in 2010 Art-Reach is an organization devoted to "enriching lives by connecting underserved audiences to cultural experiences so that they may benefit from and enjoy the transformative power of the ar...

Philadelphia has traditionally (at least for the last couple of decades) provided all its grant funding of the arts through the Philadelphia Cultural Fund - an independent 501c3 funded by the City - as general operating support. This year, the Cultural Fund's Board agreed to allocate a portion of its grant funds - $350,000 out of $3.2 million - to for the first time make project support grants, specifically grants for arts programming targeted to Philadelphia's youth. Today we announced the first recipients of this new project grants program – the Youth Arts Enrichment Grants – created to support projects that use the arts to enrich the lives of young people both in and outside of school. The inaugural round of grants, totaling $357,700, was awarded to nine youth-focused organizations. [Photo at left from a ceramics class at West Park Cultural Center, one of the grantees] The extra $7,700 available for grant-making was made possible by City employees who made payro...