Grants for Music Education

Entergy’s Open Grants Program focuses on improving communities as a whole. We look for giving opportunities in the areas of arts and culture, education and workforce development, poverty solutions and social services, healthy families, and community improvement.

Arts and Culture

The arts are expressions of ourselves – our heritage, feelings and ideas. To cultivate that, we support a diverse range of locally based visual arts, theater, dance and music institutions. Our long-term goal is to increase the access to contemporary art for a wider public, including children and the financially disadvantaged.

Community Improvement/EnrichmentEntergy supports community-based projects that focus community enrichment and improvement. A few examples include civic affairs, blighted housing improvements, and neighborhood safety. By giving to communities in this way, we actually help them become more self-sufficient.Healthy FamiliesChildren need a good start to grow into healthy, well-adjusted adults. With that in mind, we give to programs that have a direct impact on children educationally and emotionally. We’re also interested in family programs, like those that better prepare parents to balance the demands of work and home. The amount and nature of an organization’s request will determine which type of grant the organization would need to apply for.

NOTE: We initiate most funding opportunities by contacting the organizations and inviting them to submit proposals. Accordingly, unsolicited proposals are only rarely successful. If despite the odds against success, you wish to submit a proposal, you should carefully review what we fund and what we do not fund. 

The Michael J. Connell Foundation is a private foundation. We usually discourage requests for grants because it is our policy to initiate and pursue our own programs in various cultural, environmental, educational and medical programs.  We limit our grants to a relatively small number.  As a consequence, at any one time we tend to focus on three or four narrow program areas. 

In 2013 - 2017 our areas of program focus are: 

• Classical Music  -- its ability to enhance the area cultural experience
• The Environment  -- the maintenance, accessibility and preservation of our public resources
• Education - technology implementation, programs with impact in under served areas and upon minority constituencies and the implementation of modern technologies
• Medicine - allocating limited resources and addressing the needs of underserved constituencies in the Los Angeles Area

In most years we will complete funding in one or more areas of interest and we will seek one or more new areas to focus on in subsequent years.

We frequently look for programs that need funding to test new ideas or concepts, before they can qualify for funding from more traditional or formal resources. We do not confine ourselves to these programs, although they usually represent a majority of the grants we fund. We will occasionally team with other organizations and individuals to fund start-up expenses, but the organization must have already established its tax-exempt status before we will make a grant. 

We fund specific programs as opposed to general expenses. We only fund building or endowment programs for applicants with which we have established relationships, either based on our contacts with the organization or with the persons representing the organization. We will fund capital expenditures, particularly if the purchase is in connection with the implementation of new technologies.

OUR TOWN: Grant Program Description

ProjectsWe encourage applications for artistically excellent projects that:

• Bring new attention to or elevate key community assets and issues, voices of residents, local history, or cultural infrastructure.
• Inject new or additional energy, resources, activity, people, or enthusiasm into a place, community issue, or local economy.
• Envision new possibilities for a community or place - a new future, a new way of overcoming a challenge, or approaching problem-solving.
• Connect communities, people, places, and economic opportunity via physical spaces or new relationships.

The National Endowment for the Arts plans to support a variety of projects across the country in urban, rural, and tribal communities of all sizes.

Project Types

Our Town projects must integrate arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities by advancing local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes. Projects may include activities such as:

Arts Engagement

Artist residency: A program designed to strategically connect artists with the opportunity to bring their creative skill sets to non-arts institutions, including residencies in government offices, businesses, or other institutions.

Arts festivals: Public events that gather people, often in public space or otherwise unexpected places, to showcase talent and exchange culture.

Community co-creation of art: The process of engaging stakeholders to participate or collaborate alongside artists/designers in conceiving, designing, or fabricating a work or works of art.

Performances: Presentations of a live art work (e.g., music, theater, dance, media).

Public art: A work of art that is conceived for a particular place or community, with the intention of being broadly accessible, and often involving community members in the process of developing, selecting, or executing the work.

Temporary public art: A work of art that is conceived for a particular place or community and meant for display over a finite period of time, with the intention of being broadly accessible and often involving community members in developing, selecting, or executing the work.

Cultural Planning

Cultural planning: The process of identifying and leveraging a community's cultural resources and decision-making (e.g., creating a cultural plan, or integrating plans and policies around arts and culture as part of a city master planning process).

Cultural district planning: The process of convening stakeholders to identify a specific geography with unique potential for community and/or economic development based on cultural assets (e.g., through designation, branding, policy, plans, or other means).

Creative asset mapping: The process of identifying the people, places, physical infrastructure, institutions, and customs that hold meaningful aesthetics, historical, and/or economic value that make a place unique.

Public art planning: The process of developing community-wide strategies and/or policies that guide and support commissioning, installing, and maintaining works of public art and/or temporary public art.

Design

Artist/designer-facilitated community planning: Artists/designers leading or partnering in the creative processes of visioning, and for solutions to community issues.

Design of artist space: Design processes to support the creation of dedicated spaces for artists to live and/or to produce, exhibit, or sell their work.

Design of cultural facilities: Design processes to support the creation of a dedicated building or space for creating and/or showcasing arts and culture.

Public space design: The process of designing elements of public infrastructure, or spaces where people congregate (e.g., parks, plazas, landscapes, neighborhoods, districts, infrastructure, and artist-produced elements of streetscapes).

Artist and Creative Industry Support

Creative business development: Programs or services that support entrepreneurs and businesses in the creative industries, or help cultivate strong infrastructure for establishing and developing creative businesses.

Professional artist development: Programs or services that support artists professionally, such as through skill development or accessing markets and capital.

Strengthening Communities

Through Our Town projects, the National Endowment for the Arts Endowment intends to achieve the following objective: Strengthening Communities: Provide opportunities for the arts to be integrated into the fabric of community life.

Our Town project outcomes may include:

Economic Change: Economic improvements of individuals, institutions, or the community including local business growth, job creation/labor force participation, professional development/training, prevention of displacement, in-migration, and tourism.

Physical Change: Physical improvements that occur to the built and natural environment including beautification and/or enhancement of physical environment, new construction, and redevelopment (including arts, culture, and public space).

Social Change: Improvements to social relationships, civic engagement and community empowerment, and/or amplifying community identity including civic engagement, collective efficacy, social capital, social cohesion, and community attachment.

Systems Change: Improvements to community capacity to sustain the integration of arts, culture, and design into strategies for advancing local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes including, for example: establishment of new and lasting cross-sector partnerships; shifts in institutional structure, practices or policies; replication or scaling of innovative project models; establishment of training programs; or dissemination of informational resources to support the creative placemaking field. 

The applications are reviewed regularly and accepted through the deadline above for the current year.

About

The Robert & Toni Bader Charitable Foundation was created in 2010 to provide philanthropic support to help make the world a better place. Based in Indianapolis, Indiana, our mission is to help further Jewish ideals in the areas of education, science and the arts. 

Since our beginning, we’ve funded projects from New York to California, Michigan to Florida. We have helped teachers educate, helped children learn, helped feed the hungry, helped people earn a living, helped provide work for the unemployed, and helped find new ways to treat illness and improve quality of life. If you are engaged in any of these activities, let us hear from you.

Our logo, the Tree of Life, is a universal symbol of growth and re-growth, providing benefits to the present and future. The circle represents unity and continuity within our communities and our lives.

Guidelines

The Robert & Toni Bader Charitable Foundation (rtbcf) was created to help achieve the Jewish Ideals of improving the world through Science, Education and the Arts.

We do not have minimum or maximum grant amounts. Grants are made based on our evaluation of your project, the number of grants we are considering, and the amount of funds we have to distribute.

The foundation, as stated in its bylaws, will make contributions to qualified exempt organizations under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code for, but not limited to, the following purposes: 

• literacy
• Jewish education
• nationwide recycling programs
• alternative energy
• classical musical education
• public radio & television
• museums
• wildlife conservation
• theater
• music education
• HIV/AIDS research
• Hemophilia research
• food for the hungry

NOTE: Applicants for music grants will be asked to submit a sample of their music with their Letter of Intent form. 

Sparkplug Foundation Grant

Education

Sparkplug funds projects to educate or support communities, including but not limited to school-age students, that move beyond traditional classroom instruction. In keeping with our justice-oriented framework, we fund education projects that engage excluded students in new ways, projects that restore knowledge that has been marginalized through racism or colonialism, and projects that rebuild community and collective problem-solving.

We're especially interested in supporting critical and investigative thinking, and projects that address race, gender, and class disparities in education. We do fund community-based education and social justice curriculum development, For example, we have funded the development and sharing of curriculum that explores connections between Palestine and the US/Mexico border region to teach students to think critically about the impact of militarized border zones on youth, families and the environment.

Some examples of education projects that we have funded in the past include:

• A program using digital tools to educate consumers on how they can support farmworkers rights.
• A youth-led education campaign exposing and opposing militarization in their community.
• A digital platform to preserve the archives of a local black community. 
• A year-long program bringing together social and environmental justice organizers to train new organizers and develop joint community projects.

Community Organizing

Sparkplug funds work by members of a community for their community -- work that aims to create justice by making systemic change and/or shifting power. Or in other words, we fund projects that are created, run by, and meet the needs of people with shared lived experience who face the same types of oppression, discrimination, violence, or barriers, who live in the same area, or who have a shared vision and aspirations for the future.

Some other examples of community organizing that we have funded in the past include:

• A farmworker-led campaign against deportations and for access to drivers licenses for undocumented people.
• Training community members as housing organizers as part of a campaign to build their leadership capacity and win local housing justice.
• Support to frontline communities in energy democracy organizing.
• A COVID-19 related mutual aid and advocacy project by and for people experiencing homelessness.

Music

Recognizing the critical importance of music in bringing communities together and building collective creativity, Sparkplug supports emerging musicians in developing new work, sharing existing work with a wider community through events or media, bringing together musicians to collaborate on creating or performing pieces, or facilitating new workshops that bring music to oppressed communities. 

Some examples of music projects that we have funded in the past include:

• A music and other media production of a multi-ethnic Ottoman world, drawing on the stories and songs of Sephardic women.
• Commissioned compositions and the production of CDs in selected genres.
• The development of a musical program, using historical materials, memorializing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911.
• A multi-media, semi-staged performance based on the life and poetry of the celebrated Italian Renaissance poet, Torquato Tasso.

Amount

We consider grant applications for amounts from $1,000 to $20,000. Most grants are in the $10,000 to $15,000 range.

McGraw Foundation, headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, makes annual grants to not-for-profit organizations.  The primary focus is education at all levels, with an emphasis on higher education in the fields of science and environment.  In addition, grants are made to social service agencies, emphasizing those dealing with children.  The Foundation also occasionally makes grants in the areas of health, medical research and the arts.  

Grant requests are suggested to be within a range of $2,500 (or less) to $15,000. Grant recipients and amounts will be determined by several criteria. Naturally, availability of funds is a key factor.

The Foundation will occasionally make large grants ($50,000 or more) to support unusually promising efforts in any of its areas of interest. Innovative research, special education, and/or other activities will be considered if the Foundation's support would assist an effort or a project in making a significant impact benefiting mankind.

Areas of Focus

Education: Higher

The Foundation has been a pioneer in support of environmental education at the highest level by establishing three chaired professorships. 

Education: Elementary & Special

McGraw Foundation supports a wide array of organizations that focus on assisting the education and advancement of children as well as adults. McGraw Foundation also makes grants to elementary schools and organizations involved in all areas of special needs education. Funding in this arena has encompassed many organizations that provide services such as after-school tutoring, special education, and adult literacy.

Human Services

Since 1949, McGraw Foundation has been concerned with helping people in need. While the emphasis is on organizations serving children, funding also extends to people of all ages.

Children's issues such as these have been supported throughout the years:

• child welfare
• foster care and adoption
• family counseling
• enriching summer camps
• crisis intervention

Funding for quality-of-life issues for people of all ages has included:

• developmental disabilities
• health clinics
• domestic violence
• housing and homelessness
• job training and continued support
• seniors needs

Health & Medical 

Since its inception, McGraw Foundation has made grants in the health and medical fields.  Health and medical funding has included:

• specific medical research
• rehabilitation
• support programs for patients and their families
• medical attention for people without health insurance
• palliative care and hospice organizations

Civic & Cultural

Complimenting it's main focus on education and the environment, McGraw Foundation has supported some of Chicago's distinctive cultural and arts organizations.

Areas of interest include zoological societies' animal conservation, public communication, musical organizations, and civic organizations' promotion of science and the general welfare of society.