A few years back, John Schreiber started asking himself an uncomfortable question.
What happens to NJPAC’s work in the community — the free concerts, the arts education, the programs built on the idea that the arts can improve mental health — if the arts center has a bad year?
“As we know in cities and states, when there’s a budget deficit, the first thing to go is the arts,” Schreiber said. “I wanted to solve for that. And the way to solve for that is to endow this work in social impact, so it is perpetual — whether sunshine or rain.”
How to help
To buy tickets to the NJPAC Spotlight Gala on Oct. 3 or make a contribution to the John Schreiber Social Impact Fund, click here.
Schreiber, who is stepping down as NJPAC’s CEO on July 1, 2027, after 15 years leading the arts center, came up with an idea. It now has a name and a number.
The John Schreiber Social Impact Fund, a $100 million endowment campaign that will be a centerpiece of NJPAC’s Spotlight Gala on Oct. 3 — the same night Schreiber will be honored with the gala’s Founders Award, a fitting capstone to what he’s called his 15 years in Newark.
Leon and Toby Cooperman got the fund started with a $50 million gift last September. NJPAC has since raised the total past $70 million.
Now, as Schreiber prepares to hand off the arts center he helped transform, the fund carrying his name is shaping up to be as much a part of his legacy as any building he’s put up — a bet that the
community work he spent 15 years building doesn’t depend on who’s running NJPAC, or how ticket sales go in any given year.
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For a sense of what that money actually buys, start with the building going up across the street: The Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center.
On the ground floor will be a reading room built for the youngest kids in the building — toddlers, just old enough to fall in love with a book. Down the hall, 12 classrooms are being built for the way people actually learn today, not in 1997, when NJPAC first opened. There will be a black box theater with a full technical grid, so a teenager can learn lighting and sound design and stagecraft, not just how to take a bow.
Upstairs, professional-grade rehearsal studios — space NJPAC will hand to local artists for free, and occasionally rent to the touring company of a Broadway show passing through, just to help pay the bills.
The Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center is aiming to open on NJPAC’s Newark campus in June or July of 2027 — right around the time Schreiber himself walks out the door. It’ll be open five days a week, eight to 10 hours a day, and it will house nearly everything NJPAC does in arts education, community engagement and its arts-and-wellbeing programming, much of it free.
The building alone cost $77 million to build, up from an initial $40 million pre-pandemic estimate. It’s part of a larger $336 million campus expansion that also includes new rental housing, streetscape work and a renovation of NJPAC’s original building — a project Schreiber credits Tim Lizura, NJPAC’s executive vice president of real estate and capital projects, for stitching together the financing.
But a building, on its own, doesn’t guarantee the programs inside it keep running. That’s what the fund is for.
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The idea for the center almost didn’t happen this way at all.
A few years back, Schreiber and his team spent roughly a year investigating something arts centers don’t typically consider: opening a school. Specifically, a K-8 public school where the arts were built into every subject, not offered as an elective.
NJPAC’s leadership traveled the country studying how it might work. What they found was that the curriculum they’d need didn’t really exist yet — someone would have to invent it from scratch
— and running a school, with all its accreditation and logistics, sat well outside anything NJPAC actually knew how to do.
“That was not for us,” Schreiber said.
So, they asked a different question: what could NJPAC build instead that would serve the same goal?
The answer became a community center open to everyone — “mothers and babies to older adults,” in Schreiber’s words — where people could learn, train and be entertained, almost all of it free of charge. When NJPAC master-planned its campus expansion, that education center went at the heart of it.
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Raising money for programs like these has gotten harder, not easier, in recent years. Schreiber doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Federal funding for the arts has been under pressure, and “social impact” programming of the kind NJPAC runs has increasingly become a target for critics who see the words “diversity” or “underserved” as red flags rather than descriptions.
Schreiber said that pressure hasn’t cost NJPAC a single donor.
“No one walked away from us,” he said. “Everyone said, without exception, we believe in the work. We haven’t cowered — and I think that’s given our donor community, our corporate community, confidence that we’re not going anywhere, and we’re not changing the definition of our service. In fact, we’re expanding it.”
He’s quick to note New Jersey’s politics make that easier than it might be elsewhere.
“It certainly helps that we are in a state that is sympathetic to this work,” he said.
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NJPAC’s Spotlight Gala typically raises around $2 million a year on its own. This year’s gala, on Oct. 3, will double as the public unveiling of the John Schreiber Social Impact Fund’s full ask — with Schreiber himself being honored the same night.
He’s aware of how that looks, and he’s leaning into it anyway.
“The team is cleverly using my departure as a catalyst to ask folks to give more,” Schreiber said with a chuckle. “And I hope they do — because most of the money we raise goes right back into the work we do in social impact.”
NJPAC has a little more than $25 million to go before it hits its $100 million goal, with roughly a year left before Schreiber’s departure.
Those interested in contributing to the John Schreiber Social Impact Fund can do so through NJPAC’s website, or by attending the Oct. 3 Spotlight Gala, where Schreiber will accept the Founders Award — and make, by his own admission, one more ask on the way out.
“This is a good bet,” he said. “And I’m happy to beat the bushes in support of it.”
