The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s capital campaign was a well-choreographed project that breathed new life into the organization’s fundraising plan

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

We’re talking fundraising, of course — specifically the five-year capital campaign that brought in $72 million to build a new home for what is perhaps the country’s most beloved dance group, complete with a cozy little endowment.

The original goal for the campaign was $66 million to cover the $54 million price tag for the building and a $12 million endowment. Talking with Bennett Rink, who as director of development at the NYC-based Ailey presided over the campaign, you would think the massive effort was, indeed, a complex pas de deux or other similarly magical component of the dance. He explains it all in painstaking detail, each carefully choreographed phase fused seamlessly to the next in logical progression. And it seems, just as one phase started to perhaps lose a little momentum, something “big” occurred — either by design or happenstance — to move the campaign to the next level.