Students participate in JAZZ HOUSE KiDS' Spring 2024 CHiCA Power Residency, an instrumental residency for young female and non-binary musicians in grades 6-12. Photo courtesy of JAZZ HOUSE KiDS.

Based in Montclair, JAZZ HOUSE KiDS offers music education programs for youth in partnership with New Jersey school districts and independently at their New Jersey and New York locations. JAZZ HOUSE KiDS also presents the annual Montclair Jazz Festival, the region’s largest free jazz festival.

JAZZ HOUSE KiDS received a $36,000 grant in FY23 for a strategic planning/assessment project through the Cultural Trust’s Institutional and Financial Stabilization Grants for Arts Organizations program.

Strategic planning and assessment are key elements of an organization’s long-term sustainability. The Cultural Trust supports a wide range of planning and assessment activities through its Institutional and Financial Stabilization grant programs, including broad organizational strategic plans, DEAI plans, climate vulnerability assessments, technology assessments, and more. In particular, planning and assessment projects can provide access to consultants whose specialized expertise and recommendations can uniquely advance organizations’ work.

In their grant application, JAZZ HOUSE KiDS identified an opportunity to increase staff capacity and expertise to support the development of a new major gifts program and the launch their 20th Anniversary Capital Campaign. Their Cultural Trust grant allowed them to hire a consultant to lead planning efforts for the capital campaign, assess and advise on their major gifts strategy, and provide additional support and staff training related to development in areas including board engagement and outreach.

JAZZ HOUSE KiDS called the consultant’s role in launching the capital campaign “instrumental” and more broadly described the project as transformational: “This project dramatically improved JAZZ HOUSE KiDS’ financial, operational and institutional stability and advancement,” they wrote in their grant report.

While JAZZ HOUSE KiDS’ grant project lasted one year, the knowledge and tools gained through the project will continue to serve the organization far beyond the grant period. In the short term, the project contributed significantly to the capital campaign’s success and directly resulted in several multi-year gifts. In the long term, it produced a strategy for securing major gifts well into the future, allowed JAZZ HOUSE KiDS to continuously invest in its infrastructure, and achieved the increased staff capacity and expertise that was envisioned in the grant application. Staff described the Cultural Trust grant as “a gift that keeps on giving; it taught us to fish, so to speak, and has set us up for continued fundraising success.”

Learn more about JAZZ HOUSE KiDS: https://jazzhousekids.org/

From left, JAZZ HOUSE KiDS Associate Director of Development & Corporate Relations Lauren Grigoryev, Cultural Trust Executive Director Izzy Kasdin, and Jazz House Founder and President Melissa Walker pose for a photo in August 2023 on the campus of Montclair State University, which hosts JAZZ HOUSE KiDS’ Summer Workshop. Photo by Cultural Trust staff