art all day trolley
ArtWorks was one of eight Trenton organizations to receive a grant from the Trenton Arts Fund.

Eight organizations have been awarded a total of $25,000 in grants by the Trenton Arts Fund at the Princeton Area Community Foundation. The organizations that received funding are working to make the arts more accessible to the Trenton community.

John Hatch and husband David Henderson, residents of Mill Hill and developers in the city, created the Trenton Arts Fund in 2018 to support arts, culture, and history organizations because they believe that the arts help cities thrive.

A seven-person grants committee, whose members live locally and have a background in the arts, reviewed and evaluated all applications and recommended funding eight finalists.

“Our goal was to support emerging and established arts, culture, and history organizations in Trenton as they reopen and emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Hatch said. “We also wanted to support and recognize those organizations that focus on our young people in the city.  The Trenton Arts Fund received many excellent applications, and we are thrilled to support these eight organizations that are doing extraordinary work in Trenton, bringing the arts to all corners of the city.”

This is the second and largest round of grants made by the fund. Grants were awarded to:

  • Artworks Trenton to help rebuild youth and teen art education programming for the benefit of Trenton’s diverse communities
  • Passage Theatre Company in Trenton to support the in-school residency and subsequent production of “Junior High #2: The Hedgepeth-Williams Story”
  • St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Trenton for artistic and mentoring personnel to develop and produce “The Sermon, a Pray on Words from 1770,” a live public presentation drawn from an original manuscript from 1770 
  • Trenton Children’s Chorus for its satellite program: Choral Music at International Charter School of Trenton
  • Trenton Circus Squad for its service-learning program
  • Trenton Museum Society for the Trenton Forward: Youth and Arts Together program
  • Trenton Music Makers for its Open Strings: Amplifying Youth Voice and Storytelling through Collective Composition program

A separate award was made to the James R Halsey Foundation of the Arts, which is headquartered in Hamilton but works primarily with Trenton students. The nonprofit teaches young people the art of filmmaking, while providing life-skills training, received an operating support grant.