If you have enjoyed a cultural experience in New Jersey, chances are volunteers helped to make it happen. Across the country, however, volunteerism is down. According to a December 2021 Gallup Poll of 811 adults, the percentage who reported time spent volunteering fell to 56 percent, continuing a downward trend from 65 percent in 2013 to 64 percent in 2017. From ushers to docents to studio...

Frontline Arts connects and builds communities through the socially-engaging arts practices of papermaking and printmaking, namely through Frontline Paper, where veterans make handmade paper from military uniforms. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were called to an additional cause: helping socially-distanced healthcare workers tell their stories from the frontlines. After our Studio...

Dance has saved me, again, and again and again. From my early youth and continuing through my current adulthood, dance has allowed me to go to the depths of my soul offering out to the community the aesthetic that mirrors my humanity. Dance first saved me as a young child, growing up in Brooklyn with multiracial parents in a complex, racially mixed community. My initial experience with ballet, a...

Until around March 13 – as close to the Ides of March as one can get – the nonprofit arts sector in New Jersey had major bragging rights. And it still does. I know you miss arts experiences as we knew them before the quarantine shutdown. The music that lit up the night and made you dance. The anticipation you sensed when you entered a theatre, excited about what you were about to experience on...