The Los Angeles-based Japanese American National Museum announced Friday that it has been awarded a four-year, $5.5 million grant from the Ford Foundation.

“We are deeply grateful for this support that will help JANM meet its most urgent and immediate needs and help to stabilize the museum during this time of great uncertainty,” said Ann Burroughs, the museum’s president and CEO.

“We are indebted to the generosity of this group of funders, and particularly to Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, whose visionary leadership is effectively changing the inequity in grant making that has historically overlooked organizations that represent America’s rich cultural diversity,” Burroughs said. “This has become starkly apparent as the impact of closures and reduced revenue places the future of so many arts and cultural organizations at risk, especially those that do not have the benefit of generations of wealth backing them.”

The museum — which is in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles — is among 20 organizations that received grants ranging from $1 million to $6 million under the “America’s Cultural Treasures” initiative to bolster the organizations’ general operating budgets to help them navigate through the coronavirus pandemic.

“These organizations represent the very highest ideals of artistic excellence and are truly America’s cultural treasures,” the Ford Foundation’s president said.

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