Collaborative, Main Street Arts, Northern Stage receive grants

The Collaborative  announces that it has received the $1,900 Vermont Mentoring Grant from Mobius, Vermont’s Mentoring Partnership. This award will go toward continuing to improve the mentor program already provided by the Collaborative in Londonderry​.

Programs supporting this grant include the Vermont Department for Children and Families, the A.D. Henderson Foundation, the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children and Mobius. Mobius seeks to support high quality, adult-to-youth mentoring programs in Vermont by providing technical and financial resources to qualified non-profit organizations and schools.

​The Collaborative’s mentor program is school-based for students in grades 3 – 8th at Flood Brook School during afterschool hours of 3-6 p.m. If you are interested in ​learning more about ​becoming a mentor in the Londonderry community, please email mentoring@thecollaborative.us or call 802-824-4200.

Main Street Arts, Cass Morgan receive state arts grants

Main Street Arts recently received an Arts Partnership Grant from the Vermont Arts Council and is collaborating with the recipient of another.

In the three-year partnership, the Vermont Arts Council and MSA will work toward a common outcome: that all people in Vermont have access to the arts and creativity in their lives, education and community.

To that end, MSA will engage with the council and other arts partners in planning and advocacy, participate in activities that support fellow arts organizations by sharing information, strategies, and resources, measure and report the impact of their work, receive an annual operating grant of $5,000-7,000, and receive small stipends for attending required meetings, conferences, and networking events.

In another coup for MSA, actor and board member Cass Morgan has received a Creation Grant from the VAC for the creation of a musical based on the life of artist Charles W. Henry, who painted most of the scenic curtains in the MSA collection at the turn of the 20^th century.

Titled Charles Henry’s Final Curtain, it will be an original vaudeville show tucked inside a musical play, bringing to life itinerant painter and theater artist Henry and his family of performers.

Morgan, who calls Rockingham home, has had a 34-year Broadway career and was a co-writer of the musical “Pump Boys and Dinettes.” She will be working with Sarah Knapp and Steven Alper on the show, which she hopes to premier at MSA in the fall of 2018.

Further information about MSA is available at mainstreetarts.org or on Facebook

 Grant to Northern Stage to aid women artistic directors

The Pussycat Foundation and Northern Stage announce a new program to support women artistic directors in professional theaters across the United States.

The BOLD Theater Women’s Leadership Circle, funded by the Pussycat Foundation and led by Carol Dunne, producing artistic director of Northern Stage of White River Junction, will provide $1.25 million in support for Northern Stage and four other theaters run by women artistic directors during the 2018-2019 season.

Each theater will receive a $250,000 grant. The BOLD Circle’s mission is to create a network of women artistic directors in professional theaters across the United States and empower them to address the issues preventing women from advancing in theater leadership.  The BOLD Circle will offer major support of artistic initiatives focused on women artists and will create a formal mentorship program to train and prepare future women artistic directors to lead, to create, to innovate, and to deepen the impact of theater on American culture.

“My own experiences as a woman artistic director helped inspire this program, and I am so grateful the Pussycat Foundation recognizes the need for major change for women in theater. I became an artistic director at age 42 after acting and directing for many years, and have worked to turn around two theater companies that were running out of resources and time.  In doing so, I never had the budget to join national organizations like LORT or TCG, or hire an assistant, or focus on the development of larger new work like musicals, or even get away to see others’ work because of the incredible pressures of running nonprofit theaters,” says Dunne, who is entering her fifth year at Northern Stage and is also a Senior Lecturer in Theater at Dartmouth College.