NALC Receives Merger Grant from The Boston Foundation

(April 24, 2006) -- The National Arts & Learning Collaborative (NALC) has received a significant grant from The Boston Foundation (TBF) and an anonymous partner foundation as part of TBF’s Arts Service Organization Funding Initiative. The initiative was designed to strengthen the management capacity of Greater Boston’s arts service organizations, in particular by bringing organizations together that can share common services or functions, thus releasing more time and money to go directly to serve the mission of each organization. In this case, the funding received will enable NALC to continue to support arts education in the Commonwealth by creating a formal alliance between it and the Massachusetts Alliance for Arts Education (MAAE).

“This is the result we hoped to see when we created this funding initiative,” said Paul S. Grogan, President and CEO of the Boston Foundation. “Without compromising either organization’s mission, we now have two groups better able to serve their clients—and everyone comes out ahead.”
NALC and MAAE will collaborate on arts in education needs assessments and programming that will include a spring 2007 conference and an annual Champion Arts Education Award Ceremony. MAAE will move to the NALC office at the Walnut Hill School in Natick and merge some back office systems.
According to NALC and MAAE, the long term benefits of the partnership will be:

• Children who are better prepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century at work, at home, and in the community, due to engagement in sequential, comprehensive arts education.
• An expanded network of individual and organizations fluent in arts in education issues that can be called upon to support arts education policies at the state level.
• An alliance of MAAE and NALC that is adept at building support for and providing arts in education programs in communities across Massachusetts.

According to a report, Arts Service Organizations: A Study of Impact and Capacity, completed by The Boston Foundation, Boston’s arts sector is relatively underserved by arts service organizations, despite an increasing recognition of the need for their services and a parallel movement among arts service organizations to enhance their offerings and their own internal management. The programs and services that these agencies offer are of good quality. However, because of the service organizations’ own limitations, the services are often not at a depth or scale that meets the needs of the market.
For more information on The Boston Foundation Arts Service Organization Funding Initiative, go to:
www.tbf.org.
For more information on NALC, go to: www.artslearning.org. NALC is a non-profit 501(c)3 with a mission to "transform schools by providing students with opportunities to learn in and through the arts."