A New Home for Variety New York
Dear Friends,
I write to you today from an office piled high with boxes, with empty bookshelves and walls stripped bare of children’s pictures and artwork. It is one of the last days at 505 8th Ave — Variety’s home for the past seven years. Variety New York is moving downtown to 55 Broad Street! While this is exciting for our team here at Variety, I think it is even more exciting for our grantees and the broader youth and arts community.
The space we work in not only defines where we work, but how we work. Variety’s new home will allow us increased flexibility, transparency and collaboration as a funder and a partner to the grassroots groups we support. Gone are the days when we needed to cram 25 people in a conference room meant for 8. We will no longer be restricted from hosting public briefings on our grantees work and outcomes due to space limitations. And, perhaps most importantly, there will be no more walls or doors to separate our team from each other or from the grantees that visit regularly for updates, brainstorming sessions and training.
Variety’s new 2500 square foot space is the embodiment of what we have been striving to do as an equal partner in the effort to expand transformative arts programs for youth. This new, very flexible space will allow us the opportunity to host more capacity building and training programs, not just for our grantees, but for the many other grassroots arts organizations in the tri-state area. In future newsletters stayed tuned for information about our brand new resources center, “office hours” for walk in consultation on organizational development issues, brown bag lunches, funders briefings, and more.
Our new space will allow us to truly be a foundation with an open door policy. . . literally.
We look forward to welcoming many of you to our new space in the new year!
Sincerely,
Jessica