In the wake of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS made the difficult decision to cancel three of its four 2020 grant rounds.

The pandemic has significantly impacted the theater community on Broadway, in New York City theaters and on tour in theaters across the country.

Broadway Cares’ annual fundraising events and initiatives are canceled, postponed or on hold. Our annual six-week in-theater spring fundraising campaign, which drives the grant rounds, was canceled before the completion of the first week of audience appeals. The evaporation of these resources restricts Broadway Cares’ ability to award grants this year.

Fortunately, we were able to complete our Food Service and Meal Delivery grant round in February, just before this pandemic hit. Our grants committee awarded $2.3 million to 135 food service providers in 37 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. The grants serve food pantries, meal delivery organizations, congregate meal programs and more, large and small. This round helps ensure a person who is ill has sufficient and nutritious food, which is essential to the efficacy of medical treatments and basic quality of life.

The Nationally Recognized Service and Public Policy grant round, annually done in April, has been canceled for 2020. This round would have funded organizations that do the advocacy and public policy work that affects organizations at a local or national level to provide direct services funded in other grant categories. In 2019, Broadway Cares awarded $1,157,000 to 49 agencies in this grant round.

The Theater and Entertainment Industry Social Service Agency grant round, also done in April, has been canceled for 2020. Historically, this grant round has provided funds to organizations that provide social services to members of the theatrical community, working most often in collaboration with The Actors Fund. In 2019, Broadway Cares awarded $189,500 to 12 organizations in this limited grant round.

The final grant round, for which applications would have been sent in April and grants awarded in June, also has been canceled for 2020. This round includes services that directly affect the well-being of a client, emergency or short-term financial support, projects focusing on injection drug users who are HIV-infected or at significant risk for HIV infection, and programs ensuring an improved and enriched quality of life. In 2019, Broadway Cares awarded $2,305,500 to 304 social service agencies across the country providing Direct Services, Emergency Assistance Programs, Substance Abuse and Harm Reduction Services and Quality of Life Programs.

For the foreseeable future all of our efforts have shifted to a special online fundraising campaign for our COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Fund.

This fund was created to help The Actors Fund, the employee assistance program of the entertainment industry. This campaign allows us to take care of our theatrical family – onstage, backstage and behind the scenes. Once back at work, we hope they will rejoin our fundraising efforts with an enthusiasm that will revive our National Grants Program. That will allow Broadway Cares to once again provide essential support to organizations across the country in 2021.

 
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS is one of the nation’s largest HIV/AIDS-related grant-making foundations, granting more than $10 million annually and more than $155 million dollars since 1988.

Equity Fights AIDS and Broadway Cares were founded as separate AIDS-related fundraising organizations in 1988. Since their merger in May of 1992, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has had an unparalleled history of fundraising and grant-making in response to the AIDS epidemic.

BC/EFA’s ability to keep pace with the epidemic by continuing to raise millions of dollars year after year is a testament to the ingenuity, resourcefulness and generosity of the American theatre community. More significantly, it is also a testament to the lasting impact the AIDS epidemic has had on the artists and professionals in the theater, dance and classical music industries. It is through their efforts that the majority of this fundraising is achieved.

Funding support has been divided between support for The Actors Fund, the employee assistance program of the entertainment industry, and BC/EFA’s National Grants Program, which assists hundreds of community-based organizations that provide services for people with AIDS and their families at a grassroots community level nationwide.

BC/EFA’s National Grants Program

The ongoing funding support provided through the National Grants Program is an essential component of BC/EFA’s commitment, specifically to people with AIDS outside of the entertainment industry and the organizations that serve them.

BC/EFA’s National Grants Program was conceptualized with two objectives. The first was to responsibly grant funds as quickly as possible so that organizations responding to the AIDS crisis would be able to address the constant state of emergency that people with AIDS faced during the early days of the epidemic.

The second was to spread BC/EFA’s resources to as many organizations throughout the country as possible in order to create an awareness of HIV/AIDS among service providers and to use relatively modest grants made by BC/EFA to leverage greater resources to address the needs of all communities affected by HIV/AIDS.

The HIV epidemic has grown and intensified beyond the gay community, particularly in communities of color, with a high incidence among women and their children, as well as in persons with substance abuse histories.   HIV has always reinforced or created economic hardship. Therefore, BC/EFA saw a need to focus its National Grants Program on direct services such as food programs, support programs for clothing and personal hygiene items, and emergency assistance programs to avoid evictions or loss of health insurance.

At the same time, BC/EFA was compelled to develop funding options that supported the integrity of families and the quality of life of people living with AIDS. Funding became available for family support, including bereavement support, burials for family members, summer camps, recreational and cultural outings and alternative therapies.

BC/EFA also demonstrated its leadership by being among the first to fund needle exchange programs, long before most other funders supported these programs, and even before New York State decriminalized syringe possession.

One Grant Round Per Year Becomes Three

Initially BC/EFA’s National Grants Program committee met once a year to award grants to AIDS service organizations in six categories:  Food Services; Emergency Assistance; Direct Services; One-Time Expense; Substance Abuse and Harm Reduction Services; and Quality of Life Programs.

In March 2002, BC/EFA initiated a second grant round for a small subset of Nationally Recognized AIDS Service Organizations, as well as a number of organizations doing advocacy and public policy work that affects the hundreds of service providers BC/EFA funds. These are organizations whose mission as providers of HIV/AIDS services and/or advocacy is nationally recognized as pivotal within a large geographic area or an area with a particularly high concentration of those living with HIV/AIDS.

BC/EFA serves as a grant making conduit between Broadway audiences (groups that immediately respond to the fundraising appeals made by entertainment professionals) and people living with HIV/AIDS. Consistent with this ideal, our grant making targets direct services. Nothing embodies this concept more than ensuring a person who is sick has a decent meal. In January of 2006, BC/EFA determined to make the Food Service Organizations category its own separate grant round affording the opportunity for a larger award than was available in the overall national grant round awarded every spring.

We heard from both the entertainment community and our donors who said that while they are still deeply concerned about HIV/AIDS, they were also worried about the ability of people homebound with other life threatening diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and chronic hepatitis to receive regularly delivered meals. In the last two years, a number of the largest meal delivery programs have tried expanding their services to include those with other debilitating illnesses.  Because we believe that this expansion of services is a smart, strategic plan, beginning in January 2006, BC/EFA offered those food service and meal delivery programs with expanded missions the opportunity to receive larger grants of up to $35,000.   This not only offers assistance to more people in need, but in doing so encourages increased funding opportunities in a very difficult fundraising climate, thereby ensuring that delivered meals will continue to be provided to people with AIDS for the foreseeable future.

Past Giving

Broadway Cares was created in 1988 specifically to raise funds within the theatre community to be distributed through grants to AIDS service organizations in New York City and across the country.  During the four years from 1988 through the merger of Broadway Cares with Equity Fights AIDS in May 1992, $1,067,000 was granted to 85 AIDS service organizations by a committee made up entirely of theatrical professionals. Following the 1992 merger and through 1996, this same committee granted an additional $4,740,000.

In 1996, the National Grants Committee was refigured to include both AIDS service providers and those in the theatre community active in raising funds for BC/EFA. Since its founding in 1988, BC/EFA has distributed more than $82 million through our National Grants Program.