Pittsburgh's Heinz Endowments shifts arts funding priorities — WESA article

90.5 WESA | By Bill O'Driscoll

Published May 19, 2026 at 5:32 AM EDT

The Heinz Endowments, one of Pittsburgh’s largest foundations, is moving away from funding individual artists, shows and exhibits and toward strengthening the sector overall, the group announced Tuesday.

“We needed to evolve because the field here needs to evolve sooner than later,” said Jasmin DeForrest, the Endowments’ managing director of arts and culture. “And based on our history, based on our legacy, I felt that the Heinz Endowments was best equipped to be able to take this approach.”

Over the past decade, the Endowments said, it had granted some $186 million to more than 280 arts groups and programs of all sizes. This year, it expects to distribute $14 million in arts and culture grants. But the funds will be portioned under new criteria.

“Instead of thinking about a one-time program or really focusing on a one-time exhibit or an individual artist exhibit … we're thinking wider, through a wider lens on how are these organizations or these individual artists partnering?” she said. “How are they collaborating with each other? How are they affecting and impacting and creating a sense of belonging on communities and residents in Pittsburgh in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region?”

As the foundation’s arts and culture web page now puts it, “We do not fund one-time projects; programming without systems, infrastructure, or community impact strategy; or requests that benefit a single organization without advancing the broader arts and culture ecosystem.”

In recent years, the wide roster of groups funded by the Endowments ranges from the Carnegie Museums, Heinz History Center and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Attack Theater, the Bach Choir and City Theatre. It is also a major funder of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the region’s major arts advocate.

Programming cited on the Heinz website as fitting its new strategy includes: public programs at the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s work “commissioning and producing original theater, music, dance and multimedia works that represent the kaleidoscope of diversity of our region”; and Tech25, a Carrick-based nonprofit that provides tuition-free and low-cost education in entertainment technology. It also cited Pittsburgh Glass Center and collaborative programming at Silver Eye Center for Photography.

DeForrest said the Endowments’ strategy change was spurred in part by how groups continue to strain to find audiences in a post-pandemic era of social media and streaming content. Many nonprofit arts groups, DeForrest said, are struggling to survive. Add in an aging base in arts donors, and the fact that many communities feel the arts are inaccessible to them.

“This is a big shift for us and we understand that there's going to be a little bit of disruption,” DeForrest said. “But we are also hoping that there's going to be a lot of excitement because this is a focus on what the field needs and what we believe that the field needs in this moment.”

In an interview, DeForrest repeatedly noted that Pittsburgh has about 500 arts and culture groups, and suggested the resources to support them all might no longer exist.

In the year that two venerable theater companies, Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Pittsburgh CLO, announced they would merge, DeForrest said the Endowments’ new “shared resources” rubric might include mergers.

“That definitely is something that we are interested in, whether if it's mergers — and I think, quite honestly, there should be conversations happening around should some organizations actually, celebratory sunset [choose to close],” she said.

“I don't believe in forced collaboration,” she added. “I don't believe in things that are forced, but things that can come together naturally. … How can some of these services, these performances be streamlined in a way that works for the public who want to engage in what they're offering?”

Original article here