Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center just got a $2.5 million gift. Here’s how it celebrated
The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts is commemorating a multi-million dollar gift by honoring a longtime staff member.
Downtown Miami’s Arsht Center announced it received a $2.5 million gift from the Green Family Foundation Trust, a Miami-based philanthropic group, to support the center’s arts and education programming on Friday. The foundation trust pledged to match up to $2 million raised for the Arsht’s endowment fund from Miami’s philanthropic community.
”The Arsht Center has a longstanding commitment to connecting many parts of our community to the arts,” said foundation president Kimberly Green. “With this gift to the Center’s endowment, we hope to contribute to the long-term stability and continued access to the arts provided by the Center.”
Established in 1991 by former United States Ambassador to Singapore Steven Green and his wife Dorothea, the Green Family Foundation Trust supports social programs, HIV/AIDS prevention and education, community outreach and access to the arts. The foundation also operates the Green Space, an arts gallery space in Miami.
In light of the gift, the Arsht Center also announced the recipient of its first endowed chair position called the Dorothea Green Chair of Education and Community Engagement, the first title of its kind at a performing arts center.
In academia, an endowed chair position is one of the highest honors proffered to an accomplished professor. At the Arsht Center, that honor is bestowed onto Vice President of Education and Community Engagement, Jairo Ontiveros.
“I’m super honored and humbled by it,” Ontiveros said. “It’s a celebration of the work that the Green Family Foundation Trust and the Arsht Center have done and will continue to do.”
Born in Mexico and raised in North Texas, Ontiveros graduated with degrees in theater, dance and Latin-American studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
He came to Miami to join the Arsht Center, where he supervises the center’s education programs that reach more than 80,000 K-12 students and adults a year. Among those programs are the center’s AileyCamp Miami, an award-winning summer camp for at-risk middle school students with the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, a teen mental health progam, a jazz program for high school students and a residency program that installs artists into public schools to teach art to students with disabilities.
He serves on the Green Space Miami Advisory Committee and volunteers for The Miami Herald’s Silver Knight Awards. He is a 2014 South Florida Business Journal 40 Under 40 Honoree and received the 2016 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award.
Ontiveros, who has worked at the Arsht Center for over a decade, said the $2.5 million gift helps ensure the center has the financial stability to continue its programming in the future. The endowed chair position represents the role performing arts centers play in serving the community beyond entertainment, Ontiveros said. He noted that all of the Arsht Center’s education and community engagement programs are free to the public and Miami-Dade schoolchildren.
Financially supporting arts education doesn’t just help organizations like the Arsht Center, Ontiveros said. It helps children express themselves and helps community members connect with each other.
“Science and law, those are all noble careers, but the arts exists to provide beauty in this world,” he said. “And everybody deserves to be part of that.”
This story was produced with financial support from individuals and Berkowitz Contemporary Arts in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.
