Grant awards expand Entrepreneurship Center programming
The College of Music’s Entrepreneurship Center for Music (ECM) will expand its programming this year with several key grants from across campus: ARoser Visiting Artist Grant; aDiversity, Equity and Inclusion Impact Grant from Leadership Support and Programming; and the renewal of anA-Lab grant from the Center for Leadership.
The Impact and A-Lab grants are both helping to fundLeading Through Dissonance, the ECM’s leadership series that focuses on how musicians can respond thoughtfully and ethically to challenges impacting today’s 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.
Interim ECM Director Marilyn Brock says the A-Lab grant, awarded for the first time last year, allows her to accommodate student needs. “It's wound up being a great opportunity because it gives me flexibility to develop this new series based on patterns I’m seeing in feedback from students including the topics they want to talk about,” she explains, also noting her observation of broader patterns among arts organizations “where 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.”