Theater Mu to receive $161,000 in its first year as part of a Wallace Foundation initiative
The New York Times covered the Wallace Foundation’s new arts initiative, which features a cohort of Theater Mu, Pillsbury House + Theatre, Ragamala Dance Company, and 15 other nonprofits arts organizations of color across the country.
Theater Mu is to receive $161,000 in the first year of its participation in the Wallace Foundation’s new, five-year arts initiative, which involves 18 arts organizations of color from across the United States. The funding is for organizations to develop and pursue a project to address a strategic challenge—which, for Theater Mu, means embarking on the first steps of researching what opening its own theater would look like.
Created as part of the Wallace Foundation’s efforts to foster equitable improvements in the arts, the initiative began with an open call in 2021 to nonprofit arts organizations of color with budgets of $500,000 to $5 million. Over 250 organizations applied across a diverse range of artistic disciplines, geographic locations, and communities served, but Minnesota is well-represented in the final cohort, with Pillsbury House + Theatre and Ragamala Dance Company among the final 18 organizations, as well.
“Theater Mu is honored to be a part of the Wallace Foundation initiative with so many respected organizations,” says Theater Mu Managing Director Anh Thu T. Pham. “As we’re entering our 30th anniversary season, Theater Mu will be working with Wallace to examine how we can be of better service to our communities.”
For the first year of the initiative, Theater Mu will embark alongside the other grantees on planning their individual projects in partnership with Wallace, researchers, consultants, and financial management advisers. Grantees will work with Wallace to define their goals and identify any technical support they might need before beginning four years of project implementation, and they will connect with the whole grantee cohort for shared learning and support. Across the five years, researchers will also document each organization’s work with the aim of developing useful insights about the relationship between community orientation, resilience, and relevance.