Art & Soul Innovations is excited to announce that we have received a $5,000 grant from the Charter Oak Foundation. This grant will help us continue to empower LGBTQ+ leaders and support our Proud Theater program across Wisconsin.
This grant provides support at a critical time during the COVID-19 pandemic. We made the difficult decision to cancel Proud Theater’s 2020 performance season, the culmination of new work from the 2019-20 programming season and our main source of fundraising for the entire season. This decision was hard to make because of the importance of sharing our youth’s powerful stories, and because this performance season would have been our twentieth. This grant will help us to provide training and shared services to our chapters that we may otherwise not be able to fund because of the unanticipated financial impacts of this pandemic.
Charter Oak Foundation is a direct continuation of the lifework of Mary D. Gould, Founder and President of Charter Oak Hospital. This highly successful residential facility, located on ten rural acres outside of Los Angeles, served adolescent girls from high-risk populations, providing them with enhanced life skills and realistic, positive options for turning their lives around.
Charter Oak Foundation strives to support children and teens–especially girls–who are currently in high-risk environments. The Foundation accomplishes this mission through making fairly modest grants to non-profit organizations serving this same population.
The Foundation prefers to make grants to small, relatively new organizations that have not yet secured major funding from other sources.
Art & Soul Innovations is a statewide social justice nonprofit in Wisconsin founded in 2011 with roots going back to 1999 with the start of Proud Theater, our first and largest program. Proud Theater is open to youth ages 13-18 in Green Bay, Madison, and Wausau, features a young adult (18-24) theater company in Madison, and holds performances and events throughout the state.
