Grant awards expand Entrepreneurship Center programming
The College of Music鈥檚 Entrepreneurship Center for Music (ECM) will expand its programming this year with several key grants from across campus: A听Roser Visiting Artist Grant; a听Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Impact Grant from Leadership Support and Programming; and the renewal of an听A-Lab grant from the Center for Leadership.
The Impact and A-Lab grants are both helping to fund听Leading Through Dissonance, the ECM鈥檚 leadership series that focuses on how musicians can respond thoughtfully and ethically to challenges impacting today鈥檚 arts spaces. The series kicked off this spring and, through these grants, will continue through the 2026-27 academic year.
Leading Through Dissonance will have two cohorts this year, one per semester. All participating students receive a stipend for attending, helping to alleviate the financial burden of extra time spent on campus.听
Interim ECM Director Marilyn Brock says the A-Lab grant, awarded for the first time last year, allows her to accommodate student needs. 鈥淚t's wound up being a great opportunity because it gives me flexibility to develop this new series based on patterns I鈥檓 seeing in feedback from students including the topics they want to talk about,鈥 she explains, also noting her observation of broader patterns among arts organizations 鈥渨here they are oftentimes having to figure out what to do when difficult current events have a direct impact on them, and they have to respond.鈥