Great Barrington — The last time Aston Magna gave a performance in Great Barrington, you might have noticed something on their website that you hadn’t seen before. It’s easy to miss:
Card to Culture: $2
But it’s been there for years. You may have seen a similar offer on the websites of the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Shakespeare and Company, the Berkshire Theatre Group, or any number of other Berkshire arts institutions.
The Card to Culture program allows Massachusetts residents eligible for benefits from the Department of Transitional Assistance to receive free or discounted admission to museums, concert performances, and other cultural programming.
The savings are significant.
Admission at MASS MoCA is $2 for cardholders, compared with the regular $29 admission fee for adults. The Clark Art Institute offers free admission to cardholders year-round (as they do for everyone January through March). The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center offers four free tickets to movies or HD broadcasts per EBT cardholder. (Outside presenting organizations may offer their own discounts to events held at the Mahaiwe.)
Berkshire Theatre Group (BTG) offers EBT cardholders two tickets to any BTG-produced show at the rate of $5.00 each, with all ticketing fees waived. (This page describes all of BTG’s various discounts.) EBT cardholders are admitted free to the Norman Rockwell Museum.
Made possible through a partnership between the Mass Cultural Council and the Department of Transitional Assistance, Card to Culture launched in the summer of 2017, a time when one in eight Massachusetts residents qualified for the program. In 2023, the ratio is one in seven. In its first 18 months, the program provided 258,431 lower-income people with free or discounted admission to cultural attractions, and over a period of five years, more than 300 arts and cultural organizations have provided more than 780,000 free or discounted admissions.
Massachusetts was a natural place for the concept of Card to Culture to take root because so many arts organizations have access as one of their top priorities. In fact, the whole idea started in 2012 when the Boston Children’s Museum contacted the Department of Transitional Assistance to advertise its existing discounts.
Mass Cultural Council keeps a list here of participating arts organizations throughout Massachusetts, but it can be a pain to navigate. What we need is a simple list of Berkshire County arts organizations that participate in the Card to Culture Program. So I made one:
- Aston Magna Music Festival
- Barrington Stage Company
- Berkshire Art Center
- Berkshire Botanical Garden
- Berkshire County Historical Society at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead
- Berkshire Museum
- Berkshire Pulse
- Berkshire Theatre Group
- Boardman Street Collective
- [Chester Theatre Company
- Chesterwood
- Clark Art Institute
- Community Access to the Arts (CATA)
- Eggtooth Productions
- Flying Cloud Institute
- Hancock Shaker Village
- Images Cinema
- Jacob’s Pillow
- Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center
- MASS MoCA
- Naumkeag — The Trustees
- Norman Rockwell Museum
- Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary — Mass Audubon
- Shakespeare & Company, Inc.
- Tanglewood/Boston Symphony Orchestra
- The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home
- The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College
- Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum
- WAM Theatre
- Williamstown Theatre Festival
Use the above links to find more information about a specific organization’s discounts. But keep in mind that the list keeps growing. Organizations have the opportunity to sign up for the Card to Culture program each quarter. Also, it’s a good idea to ask about an EBT discount even if you don’t see it advertised, because many organizations—in Massachusetts and elsewhere—offer one without getting on anyone’s official list. New York State has its own version of the EBT discount program. So does Connecticut.
