20 Years, One Enduring Belief: Supporting the Arts
Twenty years ago, the E. John Busser Ballet Scholarship began with something remarkably simple: a love of ballet, a desire to honor that love, and the belief that a talented young dancer deserved a little help taking the next step.
There was no global network. No international applicant pool. No roster of corporate partners. No community of former recipients dancing and teaching around the world.
There was simply an opportunity to help a young dancer.
Twenty years later, that idea has become something none of us could have fully imagined in 2006.
As we celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the E. John Busser Ballet Scholarship, we are celebrating much more than a milestone. We are celebrating hundreds of moments when someone chose to believe in a young artist: a scholarship that made another year of training possible, a pair of pointe shoes that arrived when they were needed, an introduction, a word of encouragement, a partner who asked, “How can we help?”, or a former recipient returning to guide the dancers following behind them.
Those moments are the real story of these twenty years.
An Idea Rooted in Love
The Scholarship began with E. John Busser and the influence of his mother, Lillian.
In 2006, John honored that influence by supporting young dancers in the Cleveland area. The first scholarship went to a local dancer recommended by the director of a ballet school. It was modest in scale, but the idea behind it was anything but small: talent and dedication should have an opportunity to flourish, and sometimes a relatively small amount of assistance at exactly the right moment can make an enormous difference.
That principle has never changed.
Almost everything else has.
Built in Cleveland, One Relationship at a Time
The Scholarship’s earliest years were intensely local.
Cleveland’s dance and arts community supplied something even more important than geographic roots: it supplied trust.
Friends volunteered their professional talents. Dance teachers and schools encouraged the effort. Artists, photographers, designers and local supporters contributed what they could. Joshua Busser worked alongside John from the beginning, helping create the organizational foundation necessary for an idea to become a sustainable nonprofit.
Those contributions did not produce dramatic headlines. They produced something much more valuable: credibility, relationships and continuity.
Organizations sometimes describe growth as though it happens in a straight line. Ours did not. There were years when awareness grew slowly. Fundraising was difficult. A small scholarship organization had to demonstrate repeatedly that it was legitimate, serious and committed for the long term.
But each dancer helped became part of the answer.
One scholarship became another. A dancer progressed to the next level of training. A family remembered the support. A teacher told another teacher. The circle gradually widened beyond Cleveland, then beyond Ohio, and eventually beyond the United States.
The Scholarship grew the way many enduring organizations do: through people telling other people, “This matters.”
When the World Stopped, Our World Became Larger
Then came 2020.
The pandemic was devastating for the performing arts. Studios closed. Performances disappeared. Training was disrupted. Young dancers suddenly faced uncertainty unlike anything the ballet community had experienced.
For the Scholarship, however, that difficult period also became an unexpected turning point.
As the ballet world moved online, geography mattered less. Social media created new connections among dancers, families, teachers, schools and organizations that previously might never have encountered one another.
The Scholarship leaned into that opportunity.
Its online community began growing. Dancers far beyond Cleveland became visible to us. Relationships developed with companies willing to provide shoes, dancewear, training tools and other resources. In 2020, the Scholarship awarded more scholarships than it had in any previous year.
What began as a response to extraordinary circumstances permanently changed the trajectory of the program.
The question was no longer simply, “Which dancers can we help here?”
It became, “How many dancers can we reach?”
From Cleveland to Six Continents
The answer today is extraordinary.
By the beginning of our 20th Anniversary year, 93 formal scholarships had been awarded to dancers representing 15 countries and six continents, with our 100th scholarship to be awarded this year.
But those numbers tell only part of the story.
Our recipients have trained at some of the world’s most respected ballet institutions and have gone on to dance with professional companies across the United States and internationally. Others have become teachers and studio owners, pursued collegiate dance, entered trainee and professional-development programs, or found their own place within the broader dance world.
For an organization that began by helping one Cleveland-area dancer, seeing EJB recipients eventually associated with companies and schools across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and Africa is deeply moving.
Yet the accomplishment we value most isn’t having our name connected to prestigious institutions.
It is knowing that, somewhere along a dancer’s path, we were able to say: We see your potential. Keep going.
That has always been the point.
A Scholarship Became a Community
Perhaps the most important change over twenty years is also the hardest to measure.
We learned that financial assistance is only one kind of support a young dancer needs.
Ballet is demanding in ways that can be difficult for people outside the profession to fully understand. Young dancers spend years pursuing an intensely competitive career, often making significant personal and financial sacrifices long before they know whether a professional opportunity will arrive.
So our definition of “scholarship” has expanded.
The dancers who have passed through the program have increasingly become what we affectionately call the EJB Family. Former recipients stay in touch. We follow careers, celebrate contracts and performances, and watch young students become professionals and teachers.
In our 20th Anniversary year, that idea has taken another important step forward through a mentorship initiative connecting current recipients with former EJB Scholarship recipients who have gone on to professional careers.
That feels especially meaningful.
A dancer who once received encouragement from this program can now turn around and offer experience, perspective and encouragement to someone standing where they once stood.
Twenty years after John helped that first young dancer, the support is beginning to travel from one generation of EJB recipients to the next.
That may ultimately become one of the Scholarship’s most important legacies.
Partners Who Chose to Invest in Potential
The Scholarship has also evolved because others have chosen to join us.
Over the years, ballet schools and training programs have helped us identify and support talented dancers. Relationships have extended to respected institutions in the United States and abroad. Corporate partners have increasingly provided the practical things dancers use every day—dancewear, shoes, training tools and other resources that supplement the financial assistance of a scholarship.
Our 20th Anniversary demonstrates just how far that collaborative model has come.
For 2026, fifteen corporate sponsors have joined the celebration, helping us provide our 20th Anniversary recipients with not only our largest scholarship awards to date, but packages of products and resources valued at more than $2,500 per dancer.
That generosity represents something larger than merchandise.
Each partner is making the same decision John made twenty years ago: to invest in a dancer before anyone knows exactly where that dancer’s journey will lead.
We think there is something powerful about that.
The 100th Scholarship Is Not a Finish Line
There is wonderful symbolism in awarding our 100th scholarship during our 20th Anniversary year.
But we do not see 100 as a finish line.
We see a young dancer standing at the barre.
We see a parent wondering how to pay for the next year of training.
We see a teenager leaving home for a pre-professional program.
We see a trainee trying to make the difficult financial transition from student to professional.
We see former recipients with years of hard-earned experience that can help the dancers coming behind them.
And we see a ballet community that, when given the opportunity, repeatedly demonstrates its willingness to help its own.
Dancers training in more than 20 countries applied during our 20th Anniversary cycle, the largest application pool (330+) in the Scholarship’s history.
That tells us something important: there is considerably more work to do.
The Next Twenty Years
Our ambitions for the future are larger because the community around us is larger.
We want to award more scholarships and increase the financial assistance we can provide. We want to deepen the mentorship network connecting EJB recipients across generations and borders. We want to build more partnerships that provide dancers with the practical resources they need to train.
And, over time, we hope to extend our support further into the difficult transition between advanced training and the first years of a professional career—when many talented dancers discover that earning the opportunity to dance professionally does not necessarily mean they can yet afford to do it.
The next chapter of the E. John Busser Ballet Scholarship will be about more than growing a scholarship fund.
It will be about building a stronger network around young dancers.
Twenty years ago, none of us could have predicted that an effort begun in Cleveland would someday reach dancers across six continents. We cannot predict exactly where the next twenty years will take us either.
But we know what will guide us there.
The same belief that started everything in 2006:
Talent deserves to be seen. Potential deserves to be encouraged. And sometimes, helping a young artist take one more step can change the direction of an entire life.
To every dancer who trusted us with your dream; every parent and teacher who trusted us with a young artist; every donor who gave what they could; every business that became a partner; every adjudicator who gave their expertise; every friend who helped when this was still a very small Cleveland scholarship; and every recipient who has carried a little piece of EJB into the wider dance world:
Thank you.
You built these twenty years with us.
Now, together, let’s see what the next twenty can become.