Seattle Opera Selected for $360K Wallace Foundation Grant

Seattle Opera has been selected for the New York-based Wallace Foundation's Building Audiences for Sustainability effort.

This is the first year of a new, six-year, $52-million initiative aimed at developing practical insights into how performing arts organizations can successfully expand their audiences, Wallace announced today.

The foundation's generous $360,000 grant to Seattle Opera will fund the first learning cycle (which lasts from now until June 2016) allowing the company to test and develop strategies to increase attendance in the millennial and baby boomer generations. Seattle Opera will experiment with the process of creating a production's concept and design, as well as the communications and engagement activities that support what's happening on the stage.

"Our previous work with The Wallace Foundation provided us with seminal research showing us the great potential of the millennial and baby boomer generations to engage with culture more deeply," said Kelly Tweeddale, Executive Director of Seattle Opera. "This is an important part of Seattle Opera and General Director Aidan Lang's vision to put community at the center of our work."

Seattle Opera, along with 25 other American arts organizations noted for artistic excellence, were selected by Wallace for the Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative. Two other Puget Sound companies, Seattle Symphony and Pacific Northwest Ballet, were also selected.

The Seattle Symphony's Wallace grant of $385,000 will be used to study the tastes, preferences, and motivations of Seattle's rapidly growing population of new, urban cultural consumers. The Symphony will build on its new concert series, which was launched to develop modes of interaction with its audience, and explore ways to grow this important group of attendees.

PNB's grant of $565,000 will be used to test the efficacy of creative involvement and cultural associations with new work to generate a greater affinity among the millennial audience. PNB will build on a highly successful program that has previously engaged teen and young adult audiences.

All Wallace grant recipients include a spectrum of artistic disciplines, from dance and opera companies to orchestras, theaters, and multidisciplinary arts institutions. Each organization will design and implement programs to attract new audiences while retaining current ones, measuring whether and how this contributes to their overall financial sustainability. The selected partners will receive financial and technical support from the foundation to develop, implement, analyze, and learn from their audience-building work. The evidence gathered from Seattle Opera's work will be documented and analyzed by a Wallace-commissioned independent team of researchers, providing valuable insights, ideas, and information for the entire field.

"The arts are essential on both a personal level, providing us with experiences that open us to new perspectives, and on a community level, helping us to find common ground," said Will Miller, President of The Wallace Foundation. "However, attracting and engaging new audiences is challenging for arts organizations because, even as the number of arts groups has grown, national rates of participation in the arts have declined. Arts education has waned, and competition for ways to spend leisure time has increased. We are confident that the 26 organizations selected from a pool of more than 300 identified by arts leaders nationwide will provide new insights that will benefit the field at large, bringing the arts to a broader, more diverse group of people."

Seattle Opera's funding from Wallace will be provided for at least two consecutive "learning cycles," each lasting roughly a year. First, Seattle Opera will be granted the $360,000 award to develop and implement a new audience-building program (first cycle). Then the company will use the results to implement a second cycle of programs. Seattle Opera will also receive funding for audience research to inform the work.

The 2014/15 Season in honor of Speight Jenkins.

Seattle Opera is a leading opera company, recognized both in the United States and around the world. The company is committed to advancing the cultural life in the Pacific Northwest with performances of the highest caliber, and through innovative education and community programs that take opera far beyond the McCaw Hall stage. Each year, more than 95,000 people attend Seattle Opera performances and the company's programs serve more than 65,000 people of all ages. Seattle Opera is especially known for its acclaimed works in the Richard Wagner canon, and has created an "international attraction" in its presentation of Wagner's epic Ring, according to The New York Times.

Based in New York City, The Wallace Foundation is an independent national philanthropy dedicated to fostering improvements in learning and enrichment for disadvantaged children and the vitality of the arts for everyone. It seeks to catalyze broad impact by supporting the development, testing, and sharing of new solutions and effective practices. At www.wallacefoundation.org, the Foundation maintains an online library about what it has learned, including knowledge from its current efforts aimed at: strengthening education leadership to improve student achievement, helping selected cities make good afterschool programs available to more children, expanding arts learning opportunities for children and teens, providing high-quality summer learning programs to disadvantaged children and enriching and expanding the school day in ways that benefit students, and helping arts organizations build their audiences.

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