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For Tony Award winner Brian Stokes Mitchell, philanthropy isn’t much different from theater.
,life is a collaborative art,” explained Mitchell, one of the leading figures of Broadway for more than two decades and a leader who pioneered the industry’s support of performing arts professionals as the longtime president of the Entertainment Community Fund. “It’s about people working together to make something impossible happen.”
And, just as a stage production requires the combined talents of distinguished actors and behind-the-scenes stagehands from different professions and socio-economic statuses, Mitchell feels there are “all kinds of ways” for everyone to lend a helping hand. He brought that message to Town & Country’s annual Philanthropy Summit on Tuesday, where fellow stars John Leguizamo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff and Celia Keenan-Bolger emphasized that the current moment calls on everyone to donate at least some of their time, talent or treasure.
Lifestyle magazine has put the stakes in stark terms as the year-end “season of giving” rapidly approaches: Amid deep cuts to social services funding by the Trump administration and recent Bank of America findings that the share of families giving is declining, the staff wrote, the responsibility lies “on an ever-dwindling number of us.”
Mitchell would know a thing or two about living a charitable life: It brought him joy new york downtown neighborhood during the early pandemic with simple nightly serenades from her apartment window and became a co-founding member of Black Theater United when the racial justice movement of 2020 drew new attention to Broadway’s lack of diversity.
“Everywhere you look, all over the world, everything is going a little bit crazy,” Mitchell said. ,People They feel too centered and phaseless, and they are not able to find their own happy part. And I think the easiest, fastest way to do that is to help others and donate to those who are less fortunate.”
The summit highlighted the responsibility of business to reduce stress during such uncertain times for the nonprofit sector. A panel of corporate philanthropists told the audience at Hearst Tower that companies are uniquely positioned to unite employees and consumers around charitable causes through workplace programs and point-of-sale nonprofit partnerships.
Shortly after the 2008 financial crisis brought the world into recession, Carol Hamilton led L’Oréal’s luxury brands to raise millions of dollars for UNICEF’s safe water efforts. Now, after retiring as L’Oréal’s U.S. acquisitions president, she said she’s uniting her former beauty industry colleagues to support a new UNICEF initiative that empowers girls to shape national policies and tackle issues like gender-based violence.
Hamilton said this is an example of the “force multiplier” of corporate donations. At Napa Valley conferences and book launches, she said she has sparked the interest of other cosmetics leaders who trust L’Oréal’s legitimacy when it comes to philanthropy.
“I feel like there’s more willingness to support the work that I’m doing because it feels like it has strength and credibility,” Hamilton said. “I didn’t just leave L’Oréal and say, ‘Oh, I want to be philanthropic. It seems like a cool thing to do.'”
The summit also elevated Harlem’s National Black Theater as a model of responsible public-private commitments to once-disinvested communities. National Black Theater CEO Sed Lythcott is redeveloping historic 125th Street into a multidisciplinary cultural arts center that he hopes will become the nation’s premier destination for Black storytelling. The 21-storey facility, which is set to have its first performances in 2027, will provide both a theater complex and affordable housing for artists.
Lythcott’s project partner is Dasha Zhukova Niarchos, founder of a real estate development company called Re and wife of Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III. Speaking on Tuesday, both women stressed that development should protect culture rather than displace it. They plan to do this by building an ecosystem where black artists can live, work, and serve the surrounding community.
The National Black Theatre’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham” premieres in 2022 broadwayLythcott said, proving the importance of diverse stories in Midtown Manhattan’s prestigious theater district. With her theater company’s new home in Harlem just $14 million away from reaching its fundraising goal, she hopes to show that philanthropy and business can work together to “do good by doing good.”
Lythcott said, “There is no community, no neighborhood, no wealth without an underlying sense of belonging and survival.” “Arts and culture really hold your hand and become a north star of how we connect with each other – across generations, across economic backgrounds, across ethnicities.”
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits is supported through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.