One continuous pathway into dance.

Westside Los Angeles is diversifying faster than its arts institutions are. Dance is offered as a standalone class in only 13% of U.S. public schools — against 84% for music — and the gap falls hardest on high-poverty schools and communities of color.

The barriers are structural, not personal. Tuition, shoes, and recital fees add up. A subsidized class across town is still inaccessible without a ride. The biggest barrier of all is unfamiliarity.

California Dance Institute has spent years proving that dance belongs in every classroom. Westside School of Ballet has spent 55 years showing what rigorous, joyful training does for a child's future. Separately, each solved half the problem. The Pathways Partnership joins them into one route a child can actually walk.

CDI brings a multi-week residency into public elementary schools during the school day. Every child dances — no audition, no fee, no travel.

Students who light up in the residency are invited into Sunday and summer sessions at Westside School of Ballet — a real studio, real training, and the first taste of what serious dance asks of you.

Dancers ready for the academy receive full scholarships — plus the piece almost every program forgets: transportation, piloted and proven with HopSkipDrive, so no child misses class for lack of a ride.

Each scholarship covers full tuition, attire, shoes, and equipment — plus the transportation piloted with HopSkipDrive, so nothing about the cost or the commute stands between a dancer and the barre.

NSI funded the first two phases of this work — the Exploratory Grant that let CDI and Westside Ballet find out whether a shared pathway was even possible, and the Planning Grant that turned that answer into an MOU, a rubric, a transportation model, and three partner schools.

Patient, unglamorous funding for the planning stage is rare, and it is the reason there is progress to report at all. We are profoundly grateful — NSI believed in this pathway before there was a single scholarship to point to, and that belief is what made everything below possible.

Now we're asking you to help write the next chapter.

Gifts to either organization fund the same pathway: the residency that starts it, the training that sustains it, and the ride that makes both possible.