About the JMAC Foundation
Our Mission
The JMAC Foundation supports the practice, study, and transmission of martial arts across generations.
Through travel grants, event support, and assistance for research and writing, the Foundation helps ensure that meaningful training opportunities and cultural knowledge remain accessible to dedicated practitioners.
Our goal is simple: to help the traditions of martial arts remain living practices - experienced, shared, and passed on.
Why This Foundation Exists
Many of the most important experiences in martial arts occur outside regular training: seminars with senior teachers, gatherings that bring communities together, and research that preserves knowledge for future generations.
These opportunities often depend on travel, time, and resources that are not always available to students, organizers, or scholars.
The JMAC Foundation was created to help remove those barriers. By offering thoughtful support where it can make a meaningful difference, the Foundation helps ensure that knowledge continues to circulate and traditions continue to thrive.
What We Support
Student Travel Grants
Helping dedicated students attend seminars, training intensives, and international study opportunities.
Seminar & Event Support
Assisting organizers who bring instructors and practitioners together for meaningful training.
Research & Writing
Supporting authors, translators, historians, and documentarians whose work deepens understanding of martial arts traditions.
Special Projects
Occasional initiatives that contribute to the preservation, study, or responsible evolution of martial arts.
Our Roots at JMAC
The JMAC Foundation arises from the Japanese Martial Arts Center (JMAC), a long-standing dojo based in Ann Arbor.
For decades, JMAC has served as a place of training, study, and community for practitioners of several traditional Japanese martial arts. The Foundation extends that spirit of stewardship beyond the dojo itself, supporting martial arts activity wherever sincere practice and scholarship are taking place.
Stewardship and Values
The Foundation operates according to several guiding principles:
Respect for tradition
Support for sincere practice
Responsible stewardship of resources
Encouragement of scholarship and documentation
Long-term thinking across generations
Support is offered thoughtfully, with the goal of helping individuals and projects that demonstrate dedication, integrity, and meaningful contribution to the martial arts community.
A Living Tradition
Martial arts traditions endure because people continue to practice, teach, and study them.
The JMAC Foundation exists to help sustain those efforts - quietly supporting the people and opportunities that allow knowledge to move forward from one generation to the next.