Announcing ACMP’s 2026 Workshop/Community Music Grantees

Photo by Claire Stefani: Musicians at the 2025 Chamber Music Conference and Composers’ Forum of the East

ACMP is proud to announce its 2026 Chamber Music Workshop and Community Music grantees.

See a list of of the workshops and community programs ACMP supported this year.

During last year’s strategic planning, the board and staff of ACMP agreed upon substantial changes to our annual competitive grant cycle. We were concerned that we were spreading our limited funding too thin. News of ACMP’s grant program had spread too far and wide, and we were receiving many more worthy applications than we were able to support in a meaningful way.

Upon analysis of our past giving, the board decided to add some eligibility restrictions, including a cap on the applicant’s annual operating budget. Although it was a difficult decision, we also felt the responsibility, as the world’s only foundation supporting adult amateur chamber music, to limit our funding to chamber music programs including adult amateurs, either exclusively or in intergenerational programs combining adult chamber players with youth. With fewer anticipated grant applications, this enabled us to raise the maximum grant request back up to $5000, after having reduced it to $3000 last year.

In our 2026 grant cycle, we awarded $168,000 in grants to 73 chamber music workshops and semester- or year-long programs, with an average grant size of $2301 per grant recipient. This marked a major improvement from 2025, when we had to divide $164,000 between 123 grantees, resulting in an average grant size of $1333.

Grantees were not only able to request a larger award, but overall they received a larger percentage of their request. Of our 73 grantees, 17 received 100% of what they requested; 14 received between 75% and 99%; and 23 received between 50% and 74% . In other words, 74% of this year’s grant recipients were awarded over half of what they requested from ACMP.

This year, we were happy to support 11 brand-new programs, and to give funding to 27 programs who had either not applied or were not funded last year. 85% of this year’s ACMP-funded programs are chamber music workshops; the remaining 15% of our grantees will use ACMP funding to support their semester- or year-long chamber music programs.

Geographically, we gave grants to programs in 10 countries: Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 23% of our grantees are operating programs outside the United States, and 22% of our funding in this program went to these international recipients. ACMP’s support of international chamber music workshops and community programs remains on a par with the demographics of our membership, with 20% of ACMP’s members residing in 53 countries outside the United States.

Within the United States, we supported programs in 31 states: Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Congratulations to all 73 of this year’s grantees, and please keep an eye out for information about all of their programs in ACMP’s Events and Workshops Directory.

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