BBT announces Community Grants and new Artist Encore Awards

Grant-giving charity the Borletti-Buitoni Trust has announced the recipients of its 2025 Community Grants. Alongside the annual grant announcement, the Trust has also revealed details of a new set of Awards designed to support creative initiatives by BBT Artists.

The BBT Artist Encore Awards will complement both the trust’s Community Grants and it’s BBT artist programme, providing an opportunity for the trust to reconnect with its alumni at a later stage in their careers. Each £15,000 award will support a BBT artist alumnus’ efforts to tackle social issues and inequalities through community music projects. 

Ilaria Borletti Buitoni, who founded BBT with her husband Franco Buitoni, said: ‘I notice a growing number of musically trained people, including our young musicians, who are very serious about finding ways to share their talent and skills with disadvantaged sectors of the population for whom participation is not so easy – and they recognise the mutual benefits of doing this. I want to do all I can to encourage and support this exchange of music and the joy that sharing it can bring to everybody concerned.’

The inaugural cohort of BBT Artist Encore Award recipients includes violinist Viviane Hagner who receives the award to support her annual Krzyżowa-Music for All festival in Poland, cellist and composer Alessio Pianelli, who’s My Music Cares initiative brings music to young people aged 11 to 18 in his Sicilian home city of Trapani, and pianist Shai Wosner piano who’s Music Mission brings music to recent immigrants in a New York church, soup kitchen and community hub.

Established in 2019, BBT’s Community Grants offer funding to international charities bringing music to ‘troubled lives’. Responding to requests for longer term support to further develop the projects the trust initially helped to implement, BBT is this year pledging £45,000 over three years to four existing beneficiaries. Kenya’s Art of Music Foundation receives the funding to support the expansion of its flagship Ghetto Classics programme which brings music to children in Korogocho, one of Kenya’s biggest slums, to Khadijah in Mombasa.

In Germany, MitMachMusik Berlin receives £45,000 to support Building Bridges: Around the World in Music, a series of ensemble workshop days and vacation courses aimed at children with refugee status and from low-income families, while in Italy, Fondazione Perugia Musica Classica receives the financial boost for its An Ever Greater Gift project bringing workshops and concerts to diverse under-privileged communities. Netherlands’ Sounds of Change Academy receives support to set up Mantra (Music, Art & Trauma), a new course training musicians and mental health professionals to help people in countries including Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Ukraine to cope with trauma.

BBT Chief Executive, Toby Smith comments: ‘After speaking with a number of BBT Artists already engaged in outreach work and recipients of BBT Community Grants, we know that there is mutual gain and fulfilment to be had. So we then approached more of our alumni interested in this kind of philanthropy and have chosen three pilot projects to support. Our intention is that their success will inspire creative initiatives from more BBT Artists, for which we will seek further financial support to extend BBT funds.’