The New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark has received a $20 million gift from the Leon and Toby Cooperman Family Foundation toward construction of a multipurpose education and community center, the New York Times reports.

The largest individual gift ever to the performing arts center, which opened in 1997, will fund a new space, to be named the Cooperman Family Education and Community Center, and expanded educational programming. In 2018, NJPAC served a hundred thousand students and families through its arts education programs; arts training in film, theater, poetry, jazz, dance, and hip-hop; and community engagement programs in a variety of genres. NJPAC president and CEO John Schreiber said the new building would enable the center to create more programming for older adults and offer space to local arts nonprofits for rehearsals, performances, meetings, and exhibitions. NJPAC also is looking to integrate counseling and wellness programs — including nutrition, mindfulness, and culinary arts — into its services for students and families.

"We've been talking about a new home for our education programs and more broadly for our other community programs for a couple of years," Schreiber told the Times. "We have a robust arts training program that's operating now in a building that's not a twenty-first-century facility." 

NJPAC hopes to break ground on the building by the summer of 2021. The first step in that process will be a series of community meetings. "We're going to hold them in all five wards of Newark, and we'll talk about what's happening now, what's working and what's missing, and how this can be additive," said Schreiber. "We're going to be good listeners."