Philanthropy isn’t so different from theater for Tony Award-winner Brian Stokes Mitchell.

“Life is a collaborative art,” explained Mitchell, one of Broadway’s preeminent leading men for more than two decades and a leader who steered the industry’s support of performing arts professionals as the longtime chair of The Entertainment Community Fund. “It’s about people working together to make something impossible happen.”

And, just as a stage production requires the combined talents of celebrated actors and behind-the-scenes stagehands across professions and socioeconomic statuses, Mitchell finds there are “all kinds of ways” for everyone to lend a helping hand. He brought that message Tuesday to Town & Country’s annual Philanthropy Summit, where fellow stars John Leguizamo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff and Celia Keenan-Bolger emphasized that the current moment asks everyone to donate at least something of their time, talent or treasure.

The lifestyle magazine cast the stakes in stark terms with year-end “giving season” fast approaching: between the Trump administration’s vast cuts to social services grants and recent Bank of America findings that the share of households who give charitably is declining, staff wrote, the onus “is on an ever shrinking number of us.”

Mitchell would know a thing or two about living philanthropically: he brought joy to his New York City neighborhood during the early pandemic shutdowns with simple nightly serenades from his apartment window and became a co-founding member of Black Theatre United when 2020’s racial justice movement brought new attention to Broadway’s lack of diversity.

“Wherever you look, all over the world, everything seems to be going a little bit crazy,” Mitchell said. “People feel very off centered and out of phase, and they’re not able to find their own happy part. And I think the easiest, quickest way to do that is to help others and give to people that are less fortunate.”

Read the full article about funding the theatrical arts by James Pollard at AP News.