Many innate inclinations, talents, artistic endowments remain dormant.
Consider your artistic talent.
For instance, it gave the Goodman Theater in Chicago $1.5 million in 2001 to establish a $3 million endowment to support artistic development, said Roche Schulfer, the theater's executive director.
There are students who come to Shakespeare from exceptional backgrounds with parents who continually explain the world to them, rich life-experiences, precocious intellectual endowment, wide reading, artistic temperament, or the perception of someone twice their age.
Still, stars like country singers Keith Urban and Wynonna Judd, both of whom performed that night, don't rely on the NEA for their survival; they were there, in part, to underscore the central role of the endowment in the artistic endeavors of nonprofits, museums, schools, local governments and other noncommercial organizations.
Ford then chose 28 groups, three to four in each category, and invited them to apply for the grants, which are supposed to be used for operating endowments, working capital, endowed funds for artistic programs or other permanent capital requirements.
The company took $17.5 million from the endowment in the fall, said George R. Steel, the artistic director and general manager, with the approval of the New York State attorney general's office, which regulates nonprofit organizations.
Westhab of Elmsford, which provides housing for the homeless in Westchester, received $30,000 - its first endowment grant - to help develop the artistic skills of children at the Coachman Family Center in White Plains and the Westhab Family Center in Greenburgh.
The center will use $8 million of the donation for a maintenance endowment and $3 million for immediate capital needs and artistic development, Mr. Norman said.
"Our goals are to continue to develop our artistic programme under Matthew's leadership, to continue with our outreach work, to establish an endowment fun and then to redevelop our historic building after the bicentenary".
