$90,000 In Organizational Investment Grants Awarded To 10 Cambridge Nonprofits
Ten Cambridge cultural organizations have been awarded $90,000 in Organizational Investment Grants by Cambridge Arts and the City of Cambridge. The nonprofits are music, theater, dance and exhibition venues and community art centers. They offer teaching, professional development, and live music and dance and theater. The funding program provides $9,000 grants to each nonprofit to support operational costs, sustainability, and resiliency for local cultural organizations that benefit Cambridge residents.
This year’s recipients are:
• Cambridge Community Center
• Central Square Theater
• Club Passim
• Community Art Center
• The Dance Complex
• The Foundry
• Global Arts Live
• José Mateo Ballet Theatre
• Multicultural Arts Center
• Shelter Music
(Full organization descriptions see below.)
This is the fifth year Cambridge Arts has awarded Organizational Investment Grants, which began as part of Cambridge Arts’ covid relief efforts. In addition to funding individual cultural projects, like most Cambridge Arts grants, our Organizational Investment Grants offer our largest financial grants to local organizations to support their work as an organization and strengthen their positive impact on the community.
Creating a distinct funding category for organizations also helps individual artists by increasing the funding opportunities overall and reducing the need to compete for funding with larger and often more well-resourced organizations.
Overall Cambridge Arts and the City are distributing more than $300,000 to more than 60 artists, cultural organizations and grant reviewers via grants and stipends this year through three funding opportunities offered by Cambridge Arts: Organizational Investment Grants, Art for Social Justice Grants, and Local Cultural Council Project Grants.
Each year, the City of Cambridge contributes substantial funding to support local artists, cultural workers, and arts organizations through the Cambridge Arts Grant Program. This support is coupled with funding received through the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s statewide Local Cultural Council Program.
Cambridge Arts’ Organizational Investment Grants are awarded on an annual cycle, with the due date to apply usually in mid-October of each year.
2025 Cambridge Arts Organizational Investment Grant Winners:
Cambridge Community Center
Grant Award: $9,000.00
The Cambridge Community Center (CCC) has been a central pillar in the Cambridge community since 1929, offering programs that alleviate systemic inequities and provide vital resources to under-resourced populations. The mission of the CCC is to meet the evolving needs of youth, families, and seniors in the community, with a special emphasis on those from historically marginalized backgrounds. Through innovative programs in education, human services, and the arts, the CCC fosters community engagement and personal development.
Located in the heart of Cambridge, CCC offers year-round programming that ranges from its flagship youth development initiatives like The Hip Hop Transformation (THHT), which empowers youth aged 12-25 through hip-hop and multimedia storytelling, to community outreach efforts like food pantries and senior services. In recent years, the CCC has expanded its impact, collaborating with both Cambridge and Boston Public Schools, providing youth employment opportunities, and engaging in regional arts and cultural events. With a commitment to fostering creativity, leadership, and social equity, CCC remains a trusted community resource for multiple generations.
Central Square Theater
Grant Award: $9,000.00
Central Square Theater (CST), is dedicated to the exploration of social justice, science and gender politics through theater and education. Award-winning productions, the Catalyst Collaborative@ MIT Science Theater Initiative, and youth development programming, enable CST to create theater where points of view are heard, perspective shifts, and change can happen.
Founded in 2008, Central Square Theater, the oldest female-led theater in New England, upholds the values and theatrical excellence of its origin companies, Underground Railway Theater and The Nora.
CST is rooted in our values that creative collaboration is the key to increasing diversity and growing the next generation of theater audiences. The Front Porch Arts Collective (The Porch) began as CST’s first resident theater and worked closely with CST staff, shared our resources and even met our most trusted funders. This 5-year pilot program has served as a model in the greater Boston theater community and has helped to raise up a new professional Black theater company. Continued authentic partnership has served to meet shared goals for both organizations and to sow the seeds for a new way to contribute to a better resourced sector that helps to make theater a more welcoming and equitable industry. CST threads this creative collaboration through all our programming.
Club Passim
Grant Award: $9,000.00
Located in the heart of Harvard Square, Passim’s mission is to provide an opportunity for both artists and audiences to have truly exceptional and interactive live musical experiences. By hosting over 375 shows annually, offering classes through the Passim School of Music and providing artist support through four annual grant programs, Passim is dedicated to creating an environment where the surrounding community and artists at all levels of their career feel welcomed.
As a Cambridge-based cultural organization since 1958 and a nonprofit since 1994, Passim honors the importance of examining the diversity that exists within folk music and our community. Our innovative two-year cohort-based model, The Folk Collective, addresses the challenges faced by underrepresented artists in the folk music industry by providing performance opportunities, mentorship, and a collaborative space, thus enabling them to cultivate sustainable creative careers. Entering its second cohort in 2025, the Folk Collective will continue to empower diverse folk music artists in greater New England to leverage music as a tool for community impact and social change by providing them with a platform to reach new audiences, hone their craft, and amplify their unique voices.
Community Art Center
Grant Award: $9,000.00
Community Art Center's (CAC's) mission is to cultivate an engaged community of youth whose powerful artistic voices transform their lives, neighborhoods, and worlds. Art Center believes in the power of young people, of artistic expression, of taking care of oneself and of one another, and of creating positive change in its home neighborhood and beyond. CAC has been and continues to be a trusted resource for The Port Neighborhood. CAC was founded in 1937 by a group of parents who believed that creativity is central to human evolution. CAC began in the basement of Newtowne Court, one of America's oldest public housing developments, as a way to improve access to education and arts-rich experiences for youth in low-income situations.
The Art Center is a mutual aid organization providing wrap-around services for the Port.
Neighborhood for 88 years. CAC offers year-round childcare services, workforce development, teen programming, and comprehensive support for Port families. The Art Center's commitment to youth development extends beyond curriculum. CAC provides wrap-around services with our on-site Mental Health Clinician and Case Manager through our Port ARISE program. CAC’s Mental Health Clinician and Case Manager provide counseling and early intervention services to its students on a walk-in and referral basis. Families receive personalized support with access to essential family stabilization resources such as food, housing, mental health services, and emergency assistance.
The Dance Complex
Grant Award: $9,000.00
The Dance Complex enables the creation, study, and performance of dance. We sustain artists, audiences, and community through programs that connect and celebrate the wonder and curiosity for movement/dance.
We embrace the widest definition of movement: we include the heritage dances from around the world: dances from Africa, the Middle East, South America, and diaspora nations' evolution live at The DC side by side with new dances made today. These new dances are inspired by the true diversity of age, race, social and economic background of those who study, teach, and perform here, and we embrace the widest definition of dancer: dancing at all levels and for all intents opens our circle to all. We see the stories of these individuals and communities as the source of new dances of inherent communicative power as impactful tools of human empathy.
The Foundry
Grant Award: $9,000.00
The Foundry is a community arts center located at the intersection of East Cambridge and Kendall Square. We unite creatives in underrepresented communities by building an accessible and dynamic environment where everyone can connect, access, and discover across the arts, entrepreneurship, technology, and education. Offering maker spaces, multi-purpose rooms, a dance studio, art studio, performance space, and demonstration kitchen, The Foundry brings STEM and the Arts under one roof for the Cambridge community with its spaces available for reservation and public programming. The Foundry is more than a space for many of our community members, it is the one place where they can bring their whole selves.
The Foundry serves individuals, organizations, and communities with a focus on supporting those with limited financial resources and marginalized backgrounds. The Foundry’s reach extends strongly to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and queer communities. These communities have historically faced systemic barriers in accessing resources and opportunities in the arts. Over 50% of the users fall within our lowest sliding scale bracket, which includes organizations with operating budgets under $50,000 or individuals earning less than $28,200 annually. We actively address this disparity by creating an inclusive and welcoming environment where their voices and artistic contributions are valued and celebrated.
Global Arts Live
Grant Award: $9,000.00
Global Arts Live was founded in 1990 by Maure Aronson under the name World Music Inc. As a recent immigrant from South Africa who missed the music of his home country, Aronson wanted to bring international music to the local Boston community. In 2019, recognizing the need for a new brand that better represented our wide array of programming, we changed our name to Global Arts Live. This powerful brand puts the spotlight on what we value most, the transformative power of live performance to enrich lives, and better reflects our place in today’s globalized world.
Based in Central Square, Global Arts Live’s mission is to bring inspiring music and dance from all corners of the world to stages across Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. By putting the spotlight on exceptional artists and reflecting the diverse and vibrant community that is Boston, we aspire to transcend borders, cultivate community, and enrich lives.
Since 1990, Global Arts Live has presented 800+ artists from 110+ countries, debuted 225+ artists for greater Boston audiences, premiered 145+ contemporary dance works, commissioned 4 dance works, and inspired over 1 million audience members.
We are currently partnering with BioMed Realty to build and operate a new performing arts center in Kendall Square to launch 2026. This new venue, 585 Arts, will give us a permanent home in Cambridge and allow us to expand our programming and community engagement activities.
José Mateo Ballet Theatre
Grant Award: $9,000.00
Ballet Theatre of Boston, Inc., d/b/a José Mateo Ballet Theatre (JMBT) is a vibrant community of artists, art educators, students, audience members, and partner organizations working at the intersection of artistic excellence, innovation and social change. Cuban-born choreographer José Mateo founded JMBT in 1986 with a professional company and a single-studio school. Through his visionary leadership, we have expanded to a school with campuses in Cambridge and Dorchester, Dance for World Community with an annual free festival, and Historic Site Management of the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, where JMBT houses its administrative offices, studios, and performance space at The Sanctuary Theatre.
The mission of José Mateo Ballet Theatre is to: Create new ballets of excellence that are stimulating and culturally relevant to diverse audiences, Create an innovative approach to ballet training that welcomes diversity and ensures unanimous participation and achievement by all students, create sustainable, inclusive and engaging outreach programs that make ballet accessible to participants of all racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds, Reposition the role of dance in our culture and expand its purpose in the education of youth and enrichment of community locally and beyond.
Multicultural Arts Center
Grant Award: $9,000.00
The Multicultural Arts Center is a non-profit corporation founded in 1978 as an arts center focused on helping diverse populations better understand one another. In 1985 we moved into our home at 41 Second Street in East Cambridge. Since our founding, we have worked to bring the arts to the people of Cambridge, to provide opportunities for artists of diverse backgrounds, particularly artists of color, and to be a standard bearer of the arts in our community.
Our mission is to present multicultural visual and performing arts programs to educate the community about diversity, and to make our facility available to artists or groups that might not otherwise have access to a professionally equipped facility or the cultural mainstream.
In recent years, we have expanded our program from our visual and performing arts seasons to include a community artists program, in which we provide rehearsal, workshop, and practice space for artists in the community to refine and share their crafts. In summer 2024 we commenced an annual artist in residency program to provide an emerging artist with rehearsal space, a stipend, professional development and mentorship, which culminated in a public showcase to engage the community-at-large and develop the artist’s audience base. We look forward to continuing this exciting new program for years to come.
Shelter Music
Grant Award: $9,000.00
Shelter Music Boston presents classical chamber music concerts, of the highest artistic standards, in homeless shelters and other sheltering environments. Our goal is to promote community, creative interaction, respect, and therapeutic benefit. We believe all people deserve access to the dignity, creativity, and passion of classical music whether they have a home or not.
Shelter Music Boston (SMB) was founded in 2010 by professional violinist Julie Leven to address a complete lack of access to live classical music and its known healing benefits for individuals who are homeless and marginalized in other significant ways. What started with two musicians performing at two homeless shelters has led to nearly 80 professional musicians on SMB’s roster delivering 90 concerts for more than 1,400 audience members at 8 partner sites annually, including our Children’s Program, performing more than 800 concert programs since its founding. SMB’s programs occur throughout Greater Boston, including two Cambridge sites – HRI’s Putnam Square Apartments and CASPAR Emergency Shelter. While there are other programs that provide music education or performances in shelters or for underserved communities, there is no other organization in Greater Boston that uses classical music as a social service with the same consistency or professional standards.
