As Stephen Salisbury reports in the Inquirer, and which we couldn’t tell you about until now, the first awards from the PNC Arts Alive project were handed out today. It’s the first year of a five-year, $5 million project to enhance the arts community in the Philadelphia region, and we got support!

Basically, PNC Bank is funding organizations who are making the arts more accessible. The Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe is doing this through our Festival 2.0 plan, which is bringing you things like this blog, an heavily enhanced Facebook presence, a Twitter feed, and more. We’re hoping to bringing younger audiences into the fold, like those folks who are going to tweet about our opening nights.

If you work or volunteer in the arts, you know that in this ongoing recession, the philanthropic landscape has been, well, getting difficult. So many thanks to PNC for stepping up their support for arts in the region, and congrats to all the grantees!

–Nicholas Gilewicz