By Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk
The Wege Foundation has awarded the Grand Rapids Symphony a four-year grant worth more than $1 million to enhance initiatives in diversity, equity and inclusion to engage a broader audience and share live orchestral music with everyone in its community.
With help from the Wege Foundation, the Grand Rapids Symphony is creating a 21st century orchestra to serve a 21st century audience that’s made up, not just of classical music lovers, but of the entirecommunity.
Money will add new positions, create new concerts and events, and develop new educational opportunities alongside the Grand Rapids Symphony’s Gateway to Music, a matrix of 17 education and access programs that already reach 86,000 children, students and adults across 13 counties in West Michigan.
Music is supposed to be for everyone, and that includes music presented by symphony orchestras, according to Grand Rapids Symphony Music Director Marcelo Lehninger.
“Sometime people feel they don’t belong,” Lehninger said. “But I have a passion and a mission to reach the hearts and souls of everyone in this community. We’re trying to show them that, yes, they do belong.Hopefully, they’ll understand that it’s their orchestra, too.”
The Wege Foundation’s total package of $1.1 million over four years will nurture the Grand Rapids Symphony by weaving diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives into all of the orchestra’s activities.
“A symphony orchestra in the 21st century has become a service organization,” Lehninger said. “We’rehere not only to entertain our audience but also to serve our community.
Thanks to the Wege Foundation, the Grand Rapids Symphony will expand opportunities for more people to engage with orchestral music.
“The Wege Foundation is pleased to support the Symphony in enhancing the diversity of itsprogramming, musicians and staff, as well as the inclusivity of its outreach,” said Wege Foundation President Mark Van Putten. “By transforming itself the Symphony can help transform West Michiganin enduring ways that reach beyond the performing arts.”
President Peter M. Perez called the Wege Foundation grant “truly transformational.”
“In the past, a symphony orchestra’s goal was to perform great works of classical music. Today, theGrand Rapids Symphony aspires, not just to play music for the community, but to make music together with its community,” Perez said. “Truly serving our entire community means we have to genuinely and faithfully be a reflection of everyone in the community.”
Past successes in collaborating with community partners include the Grand Rapids Symphony’sSymphony with Soul concert, launched in 2002, and Celebration of Soul dinner and awards ceremony, which has fostered connections between the orchestra and West Michigan’s African-American community for more than a dozen years.
Though the Grand Rapids Symphony touches the lives of 200,000 attendees per year, many more in West Michigan have never experienced great orchestral music performed live.
“The Grand Rapids Symphony is a community resource that provides a venue for all community members to enjoy the art of the symphony and to come together as a community to do so. This grant willprovide the resources to make it happen,” said Paul Doyle, founder and CEO of Inclusive Performance Strategies, which develops and implements progressive organizational transformation.
Three years ago, the Grand Rapids Symphony launched Symphony Scorecard to open its concert hall doors to a wider audience by providing free tickets to those with financial challenges or economic barriers. Since 2015, the program launched with funding from the Daniel and Pamella DeVos Foundation has supplied more than 8,000 free tickets to members of the community who receive financial assistance from the state or to the families of men and women serving in the U.S. Military on active, reserve or guard duty.
Opening doors and extending an invitation can be life changing, said Doyle, who grew up in Brooklyn and was introduced to classical music by his grandmother, who originally was from Trinidad. Doyle was in third grade when he attended his first concert in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, where the Grand Rapids Symphony recently performed. Doyle later played French horn through high school.
“Our community in Grand Rapids is growing. It’s exploding. But how do we make sure that everyone feels a part of it?” Doyle said. “We know the ‘why.’ This is working on the ‘how.’
Thanks to the Wege grant, the symphony’s next steps will be to take the orchestra out of the concert hall and into the neighborhood with a series of concerts and engagement events both large and small that foster authentic artistic and cultural expression by diverse communities within the larger community.
Community concerts begin in July with a free, outdoor concert in John Ball Park. Associate conductor John Varineau will lead a program of light classical music, featuring local special guests, at 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 21 in the park on the West Side of downtown Grand Rapids adjacent to John Ball Zoo. Future concerts will be held in familiar venues in other neighborhoods in the city.
Planning is underway to develop a series of neighborhood events that later will merge into a centralized major event, similar to Grand Rapids Symphony’s wildly successful LiveArts, which drew more than 7,000 people to the Van Andel Arena in 2015 for an evening of multicultural, multi-genre entertainment.
But the Wege grant also will transform the orchestra from within through new positions in the organization. Funds will establish:
A Community Engagement position on staff to develop, manage and coordinate all Grand RapidsSymphony activities to serve an audience that’s growing more diverse every day.
A Musician Fellow who will perform with the Grand Rapids Symphony. During the two-year fellowship, the musician will be mentored by GRS musicians and gain practical experience toward launching a career as a professional musician.
The Wege Grant also will fund the expansion of the Grand Rapids Symphony’s successful Mosaic Scholarship program, a mentoring program for African-American and Latino music students, created with funding by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Teens ages 13 to 18 are provided with musical instruments and private lessons with GRS musicians along with opportunities to perform and to attend concerts. A new component, Mosaic Music Majors, will collaborate with music students of color in local universities and colleges to mentor, advise and develop the skills and talents of musicians of color seeking to become professional musicians.
Over the next four years, the Wege grant will be a game changer for the Grand Rapids Symphony, according to Associate Conductor John Varineau, who just completed his 33rd season on staff with the Grand Rapids Symphony.
“It’s going to change the way we ‘do business’ and the way we approach all of our already outstandingartistic products. Without compromising our lofty artistic vision, and without sacrificing our dedication to the best in our symphonic heritage, I am confident that, with the help of the Wege Foundation, the GrandRapids Symphony is going to look and sound differently,” Varineau said. “In just a few short years, howand what we present will be even more representative of the entire Grand Rapids community so thateveryone will be able to truthfully call us ‘our Grand Rapids Symphony.’”
The challenge is to create and sustain intentional relationship building so that the wider community notonly participates in Grand Rapids Symphony’s activities, it also sees that it plays a role in supporting and providing for the orchestra.
“The key to this work is continuous commitment and effort. It’s about progressive improvement, not postponed perfection,” Doyle said. “I think we have the opportunity to create a best-practice model. For Grand Rapids to be on the front end of enhancing quality of life and community, I think is very cool.”
In the end, the goal is to have an orchestra in Grand Rapids that’s of the community, by the communityand for the community.
“The Grand Rapids Symphony is your symphony, and it’s my symphony,” Perez said. “And by workingtogether, we can make it our symphony.”
