Foundation Gifts
Pivotal support for SAB’s students and programs
Foundation gifts enable SAB to provide world-class ballet training and launch new initiatives that impact our students and the field of ballet.
SAB’s work to train more than 800 ballet dancers each year would not be possible without foundation support. The School is deeply grateful to our 25+ foundation donors whose gifts and grants help us to:
- Fund activities and operations that compose SAB’s preeminent ballet training experience, from studio instruction led by an incomparable faculty to performance opportunities, holistic health and wellness support, and superb training facilities with an onsite Residence Hall at Lincoln Center;
- Provide scholarships for nearly one-third of SAB’s students who rely on financial aid toward tuition, housing, pointe shoes, and supplies in order to train at the School;
- Develop, implement, and sustain important initiatives that support diversity, equity, and inclusion in ballet such as free Beauty of Ballet lecture-demonstrations and Community Auditions across New York City that draw diverse populations to SAB and a National Visiting Fellows Program that strengthens regional training through professional development to teachers and grants to their studios; and
- Enhance students’ artistic development through programs such as a Female Choreography Project to encourage more female voices in a male-dominated field and a Capstone Program to provide guidance and services for SAB’s auditioning students and help them secure placement at professional ballet companies.
For more information about foundation giving, please contact Meredith Lee, Senior Director of Institutional Relations and Gift Operations, at 212-769-6620 or mlee@sab.org.
Contact Institutional Giving Team
“Are choreographers born or made? At the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, we can’t help with the first variable but can with the second. Giving opportunities to young women, who have traditionally been excluded from the ranks of ballet choreography, is our mission. Through our funding at SAB, we aim to give advance female dancers opportunities, mentoring, class time, eager dancers, optimal music, and rehearsal space. We give them the chance to be scared and have fun, to experiment and perhaps fail, because then learning, and individual style and excellence, come. We aim with SAB to give young women hope and a vision of what they can become.”
Alex Sanger, Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation
All photos on this page by Rosalie O’Connor