Empowering Community Arts

Community Arts


We view the arts as a key indicator of community health, and a powerful tool for individual expression. Our goals are to stimulate the vitality, effectiveness and growth of community-based arts and to encourage community engagement in cultural experiences, particularly among children.

Our grantmaking priorities currently include:

  • Supporting an arts and cultural community that is strong, diverse and valued by local residents
  • Improving inclusion and access to high-quality arts and cultural experiences and education for under-resourced populations
  • Supporting collaboration and capacity building for arts and culture organizations

Featured Stories

The Diatribe

Public art that contains images of people that look like you and that reflects your lived experience creates a sense of pride, respect, and belonging. The Diatribe’s 49507 Project engaged youth from its arts programming in community listening sessions with residents to gather creative input to understand how they imagine themselves and how they want to see their neighborhoods evolve.
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Ebony Road Players

Ebony Road Players’ Story2Stage Fall Intensive engaged a creative and dynamic group of middle schoolers in community arts. The young actors came together on Saturday mornings to learn about theatre, storytelling and performance under the direction of artist, entertainer and writer Darius Colquitt.
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SiTE:LAB

Take one incredibly creative artist who sees the promise of engaging the community through art in a vacant building. Add a multitude of partners, volunteers, and artists and you begin to see how Paul Amenta of SiTE:LAB has created unusual art installations that welcome tens of thousands of visitors from all walks of life every year. Paul and an ever-changing crew of volunteers have organized more than 30 temporary art exhibits over the past decade, all housed in underutilized buildings in and around downtown Grand Rapids.
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WMCAT

More than 140 students at West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology (WMCAT) are learning how to apply their creative skills to change the world. At the heart of WMCAT’s Teen Arts + Tech Program is using creativity to empower high school kids to affect change in their own communities.
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Crooked Tree Arts Center

When a meeting was held in the basement of the Petoskey Library one cold winter evening for people “interested in the arts,” attendance was thin. Exactly seven local residents and one member of the Michigan Council for the Arts showed up. But the seeds took root. More than 40 years later, executive director Liz Ahrens describes the resulting Crooked Tree Arts Center as a true community art center with multilayered financial and volunteer support, more than 2,000 members and twelve full-time staff.
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Vogue Theatre

The hub of community entertainment in small towns has often been a theater hosting everything from talent shows and traveling vaudeville to opera productions and movies. The Vogue Theatre, which opened in the pretty riverside town of Manistee in 1938, was one such place. Amid blocks of ornate 19th century Victorian buildings, its Art Deco design and huge size made it a standout. It was ultramodern, luxurious and high tech by 1930s standards, and for decades, it was a busy place. But for lack of a strategy to keep it going, the Vogue closed in 2005 as the economy spiraled downward and businesses moved away.
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Grants Awarded

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