Become a Founding Member of the Athenaeum.
At the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, we are committed to thoughtfully and joyfully engaging the community, creating and promoting beauty in its diversity of forms, and inspiring people to seek answers to life’s deepest questions.
Our donors are visionaries, men and women who believe that this initiative will bear fruit over many decades to come, playing a central role in the artistic and civic life of Chicago and beyond.
The Athenaeum Center is committed to bringing more art and more beauty into the world because we think these things make human life richer. Beauty moves the whole human person, connects us with others who are sharing the experience, and brings us to greater knowledge of reality.
Beauty is the visible form of the good.
—JPII
Join the Founder’s Club
The Founder’s Club is a limited time, exclusive membership that will continue in perpetuity. The minimum donation to join the Founder’s Club is $5,000 and is only available during our inaugural period. The Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture is a 501(3)c organization. All charitable contributions made are tax deductible.
As a founding member, you will play a pivotal role in building something beautiful for our community and the world.
Membership is open through 2025.
Benefits
scruton circle
$5,000
- Merchandise and concession discounts
- Exclusive Founder’s Club Events
- Founder recognition in perpetuity
Dante Circle
$10,000
- Merchandise and concession discounts
- Exclusive Founder’s Club Events
- Founder recognition in perpetuity
- Free drink tickets at ACTC events
- VIP invitations with artists
Sheen Circle
$25,000
- Merchandise and concession discounts
- Exclusive Founder’s Club Events
- Founder recognition in perpetuity
- Free drink tickets at ACTC events
- VIP invitations with artists
- Support for particular programming
How your support will make a difference
- Directly fund the curation of performances and events that will help people pursue the beautiful, the true, the good, and the interesting.
- Key Restoration & Renovation efforts: we believe that places matter and our space should reflect our mission of inviting people to encounter beauty.
- Improving accessibility
- Help support our operations
Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
—roger scruton
Join a community of people who are living as if it did.
Scruton Circle
Tom and Emily Kelly
Noel and Michele Moore
Lauren and John Paul Mulhern
William and Melanie O’Hara
Dante Circle
Sheen Circle
St. Alphonsus Parish
