Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy: $100,000 to support the renovation of an existing building, located at 2228 N. Vel R. Phillips Ave., which will increase the amount of space they have to educate students in grades nine through 12.
Legal Action of Wisconsin: $150,000 to hire an additional lawyer to increase Legal Action's capacity to provide free legal services to prevent evictions, improve housing conditions, and improve long-term housing security in Milwaukee County.
Urban Economic Development Association of Wisconsin: $150,000 to support the recently launched Milwaukee Rental Housing Resource Center, a comprehensive referral network connecting people to resources, education and services that help prevent eviction.
African American Leadership Alliance MKE: $25,000 to, along with the Foundation and the Hispanic Collaborative, to coordinate the data measurement of disparate racial equity commitments in the city of Milwaukee.
Audio & Braille Literacy Enhancement: $20,000to support the need to increase staff to compensate for the loss of volunteers due to COVID‐ 19 and the increased demand for both audio and braille services. These services are especially critical now when so many virtual learning opportunities are inaccessible to blind students
Autism Society of Southeastern Wisconsin: $25,000to support expanded social media support groups in both English and Spanish, resulting in an additional 400 families served.
City Year: $50,000to provide operating support for 120 City Year Corps members serving approximately 8,000 MPS students, in grades third through grades nine.
Civic Music Association of Milwaukee: $25,000to provide two educational and performance‐oriented programs for greater Milwaukee area youth: The Private Lesson Program and The High School Competition and Showcase Recital program. The Private Lesson Program offers students from low‐to‐middle income families the opportunity to receive up to three annual scholarships to study with CMA teachers. This program alleviates financial barriers to private musical study, which is often cost‐prohibitive. Through the High School Competition and Showcase Recital program, students participate in workshops and masterclasses, can perform in recitals, receive critiques from distinguished judges and may access additional scholarships.
Easterseals Southeast Wisconsin: $50,000to support operating expenses, which is primarily focused on eliminating barriers and providing support for individuals with special needs.
Epic Center Community Organization: $25,000to bring vitality, community connection, and pride to the Cesar Chavez Drive area by creating permanent concrete and ceramic art forms as street borders. La Familia de Arte's art apprentices (all from the neighborhood) will design, create, and install 1,000 glazed ceramic tiles onto 10 concrete bollards/rectangular posts that carry messages of love and hope inscribed by neighbors on the soft, prefired tiles. The art will honor the "Heroes of the Pandemic," those who have made the area strong and vital, such as health and essential workers, parents, teachers, and children. A fiesta will take place upon completion, as COVID‐19 allows, to celebrate the community engagement of the project. Participating artists' and community members' responses to the project will be captured in videorecorded interviews to take place at the inscribing and installation events
Family Promise of Ozaukee County: $25,000to support the general operations of the emergency shelter.
Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin: $43,500to support the distribution of food to low income, food insecure older adults in Lindsay Heights for 12 months.
God Touch Milwaukee: $15,000to support a residential program for men recovering from substance abuse and criminal justice involved men.
Good Friend: $25,000to support the agency’s general operating expenses to create autism awareness, teach acceptance of differences, and foster empathy for individuals on the autism spectrum
Guest House of Milwaukee: $35,000to support operational support for the emergency shelter.
Havenwoods Economic Development Corporation: $35,000to support the housing director's salary to grow the organization’s homeownership programs to include financial wellness and the Employer Assisted Homeownership program and to offer more homeownership classes and financial wellness training to the community.
Heartland Housing: $25,000for supportive services at Maskani Place, an affordable supportive housing program in the Harambee neighborhood.
Hispanic Collaborative: $25,000 forits co‐leadership and co-convening role in a six month project with the African American Leadership Alliance MKE and the Foundation to coordinate the data measurement of disparate racial equity commitments in the city of Milwaukee
Historic West Bend Theatre: $45,000in operating funds to help sustain the theater during 2021.
Hope Network: $4,500to provide 60 single and expectant mothers with layettes for their newborns, which will include a portable crib and handmade quilt, and other items such as baby shampoo & body wash, baby wipes, gentle detergent for delicate clothes, a diaper bag, thermometer, diapers, diaper cream, nursing pillow, formula, bottles, sterilizing equipment, diaper bin, small nightlight, clothing and bedding.
Islands of Brilliance: $50,000 to support operating expenses incurred from expanding the distance learning model of the program due to COVID‐19.
Kids from Wisconsin: $10,000to help sustain the organization so it can continue to provide and to expand the reach of its two signature programs, "Realize Your Dream," experiential programming based in performing arts; and "Music in Me," a comprehensive music residency program based on WI Standards for Music, designed for MPS elementary schools (grades 3‐5) that do not offer music in the curriculum, including Craig Montessori Elementary School.
Ko-Thi Dance Company: $45,000to expand Ko‐Thi's educational offerings to include supplemental video‐based curriculum for use as either a stand-alone or hybrid programming model to supplement its existing in‐person curriculum.
Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council: $50,000to support staff salary to operate and implement the Fair Lender Program activities. The program addresses Milwaukee's racial wealth gap in homeownership by working to ensure that all creditworthy borrowers have equal access to fairly priced credit. FLP activities increase homeownership, combat discrimination and fraud in the home lending market, and prevent mortgage rescue scams and predatory lending.
Milwaukee Center for Independence: $50,000 to provide critical support for children with special needs in the agency’s medical day program.
Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity: $50,000to support critical interior and exterior home repairs for low-income homeowners.
Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design: $50,000 to helpincrease and retain diverse faculty through the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Fellows Program. The AICAD Fellows Program was founded in 2015 to enable outstanding graduate alumni from historically underrepresented communities to build professional experience at the highest levels of art and design education, thereby increasing faculty racial diversity. MIAD President Jeff Morin has committed to filling vacant teaching positions at MIAD with AICAD Fellows for the next three years, one of only two colleges hiring new AICAD Fellows this year. While this project period covers two semesters of the AICAD program, in total MIAD will hire four fellows in 2020‐21, five fellows in 2021‐22, and an additional five fellows in 2022‐23.
Near West Side Partners: $50,000 to create an outdoor gallery of murals onVliet Street, which can function as a public field trip, to honor the lives of individuals from the past and present who have been catalysts for social change. Six murals will be completed in this phase of the project that will depict the social, cultural, and historical significance of People of Color in the City of Milwaukee and specifically within this West Side neighborhood. Lead artist Brad Bernard will work with a team of artists of color to engage the community in the development of the mural content. Partner organizations on the project are Our Next Generation, Milwaukee High School of the Arts, ArtWorks for Milwaukee, and Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Youth from these organizations will help in the execution phase of the project. Other project goals are to increase the salability of neighborhood vacant properties by reducing blight and galvanizing community groups, and to stimulate the creative economy by paying fair wages to artists.
Next Door Foundation: $2,000to support Next Door's facilitation of focus groups with 50 early childhood educators to ask their opinion on affordable housing for providers of early childhood education.
Optimist Theatre: $25,000 foroperating funds to allow Optimist to continue with its virtual programming while preparing for what it hopes to be its diversely cast production of "Romeo and Juliet" on the Marcus Center's Peck Pavilion stage, free to the public, during summer 2021. If this is not possible due to public health guidelines related to COVID‐19, it has contingency programming plans in place so it may continue to bring Shakespeare to people of all ages without economic obstacles.
Portal Inc.: $19,000 to support repair and replacement of the broken plumbing system.
Project Return: $50,000 for general operating support
Radio Milwaukee: $50,000for operating funds that will help Radio Milwaukee sustain itself through the remaining months of COVID‐19 impact and then build back to more familiar levels of programming and staff resources.
Raising the Bar: $16,000to fund general technology upgrades to support 500 youth.
Revitalize Milwaukee: $50,000to support home repairs and accessibility modifications to keep vulnerable homeowners safe and healthy in their homes.
St. Francis Children’s Center: $50,000to support expenses incurred from learning materials and other necessary infrastructure for delivering high‐quality programs to approximately 700 children with special needs throughout Milwaukee County.
Stillwaters Collective: $35,000 for Makin' Cake, a performance piece written and performed by Milwaukee‐based writer and creative change agent Dasha Kelly Hamilton. The show, which includes multi‐media images and video and features two bakers making cakes on stage, depicts how cake ingredients throughout history have been small items of great privilege. The performance weaves together stories that layer race and class with humanity and history, thereby facilitating discussions about race and income inequality. This grant will support the creation of a documentary film of the performance so that its geographic reach and impact can be greatly expanded. The film will be created as a collaboration with Dasha, 371 Productions and a team balanced in age, ethnicity and gender. Engagements leading up to the film screenings will be coordinated in partnership with civic groups, social justice agencies, campuses and baking clubs and will be bookended with community conversations. Accompanying the film will be a website to share discussion guides, video clips, and a roster of diversity, equity and inclusion resources and trainers.
Summit Players Theatre: $7,500to provide support to present free performances of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale," as well as theatre workshops in summer 2021. The Milwaukee-area performances and workshops will take place at Havenwoods State Forest and Three Bridges Park. The full artistic touring team, including six actors, will be comprised of Milwaukee‐area actors and artists, and the production will be entirely rehearsed in Milwaukee.
Tbey Arts Center: $25,000to support general operations during the transition into hybrid learning programming, necessitated by COVID‐19. Funds will be used to provide supplies, including art kits and dance attire, for youth members who are participating in virtual programming. Funds also will allow TBEY to support staff time, space rental, professional development, maintenance, and the continuation of programming and services.
Teach for America: $50,000to provide operating support for Milwaukee's 100 corps members, currently serving approximately 6,000 of Milwaukee's K‐12 students.
TimeSlips Creative Storytelling: $50,000to address the unmet need of social connection for Milwaukee's isolated older adults, while also providing training opportunities for artists and social service workers who engage with isolated older adults. TimeSlips will work with the Milwaukee County Department on Aging and at least two of its subcontractors, Meals on Wheels/Goodwill, and Vital Voices, to deliver meaningful, creative engagement services. Milwaukee County Department on Aging will provide information about TimeSlip's training and resources to Meals on Wheels, so that it can choose to use TimeSlips resources as part of its deliveries and well‐checks over the six-month project period. Artists will be local and will have worked with TimeSlips' Tele‐Stories project in the summer and fall of 2020. These artists will be prioritized in hiring as they are already trained in TimeSlips methodology and are familiar with the population to be served. TimeSlips will also engage nine Ph.D. students at the University of Wisconsin ‐ Milwaukee to support wellness calls, evaluation, and documentation.
United Community Center: $40,000 to help support distribution of 4,000 meals for older adults.
West Bend Friends of Sculpture: $7,500 to install "The Bird," a sculpture by Shelia Berger, along the newly upgraded section of the West Bend Riverwalk in the West Bend Arts District. The first female artist to have work in the WBFS collection, Berger believes that people of all races, genders, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds can develop increased awareness and concern about environmental issues through public art. The premise underlying WBFS's work is that public art is an inclusive art form, as it is free and accessible to all residents. Berger will participate in an early summer dedication, education and outreach event, in compliance with public health guidelines. WBFS is also working on an education outreach event via Zoom. The city of West Bend will assist with any significant or long‐term maintenance issues, which are not anticipated.
Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts: $25,000to support its operations, including payroll, utilities, insurance, while allowing the museum to pay participating artists. Operating support will allow the nonprofit to fulfill its mission through free or low cost virtual programs.
More than $330,000 invested into area visual arts programming>
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