The Levitt Family Foundation marked its 60th anniversary this summer by declaring June the first National Free Outdoor Concerts Month and releasing a public toolkit for producing free outdoor concerts. The toolkit covers programming, operations, marketing and volunteer engagement, and it reflects a model the Foundation has been building for decades.
In 2026, the Foundation says it is supporting more than 100 nonprofits presenting over 1,000 free concerts in more than 100 towns and cities across all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Those events are expected to reach more than one million people and pay more than 4,000 performing artists. At that scale, the Foundation describes the model as a development initiative for civic infrastructure as well as a revenue source for local creatives and communities.
How the funding model works
Free admission does not mean unpaid performance. According to the Foundation, artists performing across the Levitt network are always paid. Local nonprofits control their own bookings, while the national network creates potential routing opportunities for emerging, regional and established acts.
Levitt’s current Music Series grants provide participating nonprofits with matching funds of up to $40,000 annually for three years. In return, each organization presents seven to ten free concerts per year in an accessible, underused outdoor space. The Foundation also supplies contracts, sponsorship templates, production guidance, access to booking expertise and an expenses-paid learning conference.
The grants are intended to help communities build the repetition required for sustained community return. A park, plaza or vacant lot becomes part of community life because people return to it week after week, not because it hosted one successful Saturday. The matching requirement also draws in broader local investment. Up to half of the match can be in-kind, but communities must still assemble support from businesses, donors, municipal departments, foundations and other partners.
Program formats and local impact
- Levitt AMP supports series in small and mid-sized communities, including rural towns and Appalachian and Midwestern Main Streets.
- Levitt VIBE brings concerts to neighborhoods in larger cities where access to live music and arts programming may be limited.
- Levitt BLOC rotates concerts among multiple public spaces, spreading activity across different neighborhoods rather than asking everyone to travel to one central site.
- Permanent Levitt venues in cities like Arlington, Dayton, Denver and Sioux Falls generally present 40 to 50 free concerts annually.
The model is built around the idea that “underserved” does not mean one thing to every community. A town of 2,000 residents may lack touring infrastructure for out-of-town artists, but so can a cut-off neighborhood inside a major music market. A university campus might connect several disparate neighborhoods if activated via public space.
The objective is not always to draw thousands of tourists for one festival weekend. In some cases, the approach is a long-tail plan to generate recurring foot traffic for food vendors, nearby restaurants, Main Street businesses and community organizations over time.
In Middlesboro, Kentucky, the Levitt AMP series turned a vacant gravel lot into a lawn and performance space with a permanent stage and mural. Downtown had only one restaurant and no retail stores during the series’ first season in 2015. It now has additional shops and restaurants, growth that local organizers partly attribute to bringing people downtown for free Thursday-night concerts.
Levitt’s commissioned research in Denver found a similar social effect. The Levitt Pavilion Denver helped fill a gap in the city’s arts landscape, brought different audiences together and created a stronger sense of belonging. The report also cited benefits for musicians through competitive pay, audience development and connections with schools and nonprofits.
State partnerships and displacement concerns
The Tennessee Entertainment Commission has joined Levitt to support six communities, with the partnership expected to generate as many as 180 free concerts over three years. Mississippi is looking to combine state public-art funding with Levitt grants that activate the new installations through annual concert series. The state partnerships are targeted investments that combine arts access, workforce support, tourism, public-space activation and small-business development.
Cultural-policy thinker Roberto Bedoya has warned that creative placemaking can become a tool of “dis-belonging” when arts activity raises the value or profile of a neighborhood without serving the people already living there, a dynamic associated with gentrification. Levitt’s Denver case study report also noted these tensions. The community saw raised tensions around demographic change, ownership over collective memory and barriers to participation for some.
