Located in the historic 18th & Vine district of Kansas City, Missouri, the American Jazz Museum is the caretaker of this diverse community’s rich cultural heritage, showcasing the life works of jazz greats Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and hosting visitors from all over the world. As the only museum in the world solely focused on the preservation, exhibition and advancement of jazz, the American Jazz Museum is dedicated to public service and collaborative efforts to expand the influence, awareness and appreciation of jazz to audiences within Kansas City and worldwide.
In recognition of leadership and excellence, the Francis Family Foundation awarded the American Jazz Museum a grant for $20,000, allowing this outstanding organization the flexibility to apply the funding toward general operating support. Since 2001, the Foundation has provided the American Jazz Museum with eight grants totaling $121,000. In its golden age, the Kansas City jazz scene was a thriving force of unique music, including Kansas City’s signature swing. The American Jazz museum is a vital landmark dedicated to preserving the spirit, diversity, commerce, culture and entertainment of this bustling historic community. www.americanjazzmuseum.com
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For the second straight year, the Francis Family Foundation continued its support for the Kansas City Chalk and Walk Festival with a Small Arts Grant Fund grant of $2,000. The Chalk and Walk Festival presents an annual multicultural and multigenerational street art festival showcasing hundreds of professional, student and amateur artists, who, on their knees, will create impressive chalk “paintings” on sponsored brick canvases on the streets of downtown Kansas City, Missouri, near Crown Center Square. Grant monies will help pay for general operating support to assist in the purchase of supplies, as well as educational outreach with other non-profit partners to help fill the gap left by cuts to arts programs in schools. www.kcchalkandwalk.org
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The Francis Resource Center was created by Penn Valley Community College, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and the Francis Family Foundation in 1989 to provide community-based training services for child care providers. Today, the Francis Resource Center offers continuing education training in English and Spanish that addresses a variety of needs, learning styles and levels, including the wildly successful Strengths-Based Coaching™ program, which has become a training model distributed all over the United States, and most recently in Australia. General operating support totaling nearly $630,000 for the Francis Resource Center and the salary of the Executive Director of the Francis Institute for Child and Youth Development was provided by the Francis Family Foundation in 2010. The Francis Resource Center is part of the FICYD, which is housed in a state-of-the-art, 36,000-square-foot facility on the Penn Valley campus. Since 1989, the Foundation has awarded FICYD more than $18 million, including a $5 million grant to build the facility. francis.mcckc.edu
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