Story at a glance
- Miranda partnered with the Posse Foundation to launch the Posse Arts initiative.
- The program will select diverse groups of students and provide them with full scholarships to partnering arts colleges.
- In 2010, President Obama allocated part of his $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize grant to the Posse Foundation.
Lin-Manuel Miranda announced on Thursday that he would be collaborating with the Posse Foundation on the Posse Arts initiative, which will aim to cultivate the next generation of musicians, artists, dancers and writers.
The Posse Foundation recruits and trains diverse groups of standout students and provides them full scholarships to partnering colleges and universities. A majority of Posse’s scholarship recipients are Black or Latino, coming from low-income housing, and often are the first in their families to attend college. Ninety percent of its scholars receive their diplomas.
The Posse Arts initiative will begin by selecting a group of 10 high school seniors from New York City and send them to the California Institute of the Arts to study in fall 2022.
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“Our goal is to change who is sitting at the table, being in the room where it happens,” Deborah Bial, founder of the Posse Foundation, told the Wall Street Journal of the foundation’s hopes for an impact.
Miranda was inspired to team up with the foundation due to his own deemed “proto Posse experience” while at Wesleyan University.
“Suddenly I had fellow students and really close friends who were all kind of going through the same thing and had the same wealth of cultural references, I wasn’t leaving half of me behind to go to school,” Miranda said. “I had a bunch of like-minded friends who were navigating similar issues and similar cultural dislocations and found strength and solace in each other.”
Miranda went on to state that his goal through the initiative is to help cultivate “new stories, more perspectives. Our culture is richer when you have that.”
As the initiative grows in the future, Posse aims to aid 250 students yearly with scholarships to five partnering arts colleges.
In 2010, President Obama allocated part of his $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize grant to the Posse Foundation.
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