Tonia Wellons, President & CEO of The Community Foundation, presents the 2022 Arts Champion Award to Mardell Moffett, Executive Director of the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation

The Greater Washington Community Foundation is proud to recognize The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation with the 2022 Arts Champion Award, in recognition of its outstanding commitment to helping arts organizations adapt and respond to the pandemic.

The Foundation, which is celebrating 75 years of supporting organizations in the Greater Washington area, has long been a bedrock for the arts, making major contributions and annual general operating support grants that have transformed and sustained many of the region’s leading institutions – large and small – including The Washington Ballet, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Levine Music, The Kennedy Center, Signature Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Dance Place, Dance Institute of Washington, Imagination Stage, Wolf Trap, Sitar Arts Center, Young Playwrights’ Theater, Washington Performing Arts, and hundreds of others. The Foundation has provided consistent support for the region's arts and culture organizations for decades. Since 2000 alone, it has provided more than $110 million in support to 218 arts and culture organizations across the region.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Cafritz Foundation was among the first to recognize the devastating impact that it would have on the region. Within weeks, they approved a $1 million grant to The Community Foundation’s COVID-19 Response Fund – one of the largest single contributions to the fund -- at a time when uncertainty surrounding the pandemic was at its height.

Not content to stop there, in May 2020, The Cafritz Foundation commissioned a study to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small local arts and culture organizations.

The results were sobering. More than a third of study participants had already laid off staff – and most were considering making additional cuts. With infrastructure and resources already scarce, small arts organizations were struggling to make the transition to online and digital programming.

A month later, the Cafritz Foundation made a lead grant of $500,000 to launch Arts Forward Fund – a collaborative partnership with The Community Foundation and more than a dozen other individual and institutional contributors, and followed up with a second grant of $400,000 in 2021. Since October 2020, the fund has distributed more than $2.7 million in grants to 100+ organizations, providing essential resources to help them continue their work during the pandemic.

The Fund also provided support for organizations responding to the national movement for racial justice, sparked by the murder of George Floyd in July 2020. More than 60 percent of grant recipients were BIPOC-led or predominantly BIPOC-serving organizations.

Thanks to this equity emphasis, Arts Forward Fund received recognition from prominent organizations and philanthropists – including MacKenzie Scott, who made a $1 million grant to the fund in June 2021.

“The contributions of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation gave life to the arts in Greater Washington, at a time when it was most desperately needed,” President & CEO Tonia Wellons said. “We are proud to acknowledge them as a Champion of the Arts.”

The Community Foundation presented The 2022 Arts Champion Award at a private event at the Warner Theatre on November 30, 2022.