The William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust Awards Grant to Arts Foundation for A+ Schools Program

The William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust has approved a grant to the North Carolina Arts Foundation for $500,000 on behalf of A+ Schools of North Carolina. A+ Schools was created by the Kenan Institute for the Arts in the 1990s and is now a signature program of the North Carolina Arts Council.

The gift supports operational costs of the A+ Schools program, which allows the Arts Foundation to transfer $500,000 to the recently-created A+ Schools endowment administered by the NC Community Foundation. This transfer constitutes a match to a $500,000 private sector challenge grant from Windgate Foundation. The end result is that an additional $1,000,000 will be added to the endowment, bringing its current value to approximately $2.3 million. 

Increasing the A+ Schools endowment is in addition to the Arts Foundation’s success in educating elected leaders about the potential of Windgate Foundation’s investment to increase the state appropriation for A+ Schools. As a result of these efforts, the General Assembly voted to raise the appropriation from $85,000 to $750,000 a year for the 2023-2025 biennium.  In total, $3.8 million in new resources have been delivered to A+ Schools of North Carolina over the past eighteen months.

About the North Carolina Arts Foundation

A charitable non-profit, the North Carolina Arts Foundation is a catalyst for bringing private sector interest and support to arts programs that are statewide and regional in scope. The Arts Foundation’s work is made possible by contributions from thousands of individual donors, with major funding from Windgate Foundation, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, music artist Ben Folds, and the Josephus Daniels Charitable Fund.