Boston arts organizations uneasy over possible loss of federal funding

For many arts organizations in Massachusetts, last week felt like 2020 all over again. But instead of a global pandemic putting events and budgets at risk, it was a vague directive from the new administration in Washington.

On Jan. 27, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to all federal agencies ordering the “immediate freeze of all federal grants, loans, and other financial assistance funds that are related to ‘foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.’”

"Unmoored is not the right word. Whiplash is not the right word,” said Dawn Meredith  Simmons, the co-producing artistic director of the Front Porch Arts Collective. “I feel like I am spinning around and trying to put out fires that are happening and then sort of being preemptive. There’s a lot of fear in the community…It's like somebody shouted fire in a theater and everybody's running, but we need to slow down and stop and walk and listen.”

That order was later rescinded, but President Donald Trump said he plans to push it forward. As of Feb. 3, the U.S. District court judge Loren L. Alikhan continued to block the freeze with a restraining order in part because she said it didn’t appear to have a solid end point or purpose.

In 2024, the Front Porch Arts Collective was granted federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts for the first time, an estimated $130,000 over two years to “fund the development of a new strategic plan to transition the Front Porch Arts Collective into a permanent physical home and become an integral part of cultural place-making in the historically Black neighborhood of Roxbury.”

The organization has received half of the funds, but Simmons is now worried they might not receive the rest. She said their organization and others have been calling the NEA requesting their allocated funds be disbursed sooner. Simmons said it appears like “there has been a run on the NEA, like a run on the banks during the depression.”

“And that's scary because it feels like we're all so scared we're not thinking,” she said.  "This information is coming at us so quickly and it's changing”

Simmons posits as she speaks now, what she is saying could be incorrect in 20 minutes due to how quickly everything is shifting.

MassCreative reported that the New England Foundation for the Arts receives $1.5 million in federal funding from the NEA, while the Mass Cultural Council receives $1.3 million. In the last year, the NEA gave an estimated $6.8 million in direct grants to arts and cultural organizations across Massachusetts, while the National Endowment for the Humanities gave estimated $7.8 million in direct grants to humanities organizations and programs across the Commonwealth.

“It's reminiscent of the early days of COVID, where there was just so much information flying around,” said  Bradley Vernatter, the general director and CEO for Boston Lyric Opera. “And it didn't have context, it wasn't clear, it wasn't fully supported, and it created hysteria and mayhem and confusion that just wasn't constructive all of the time.”

The advocacy group MassCreative held an emergency meeting Jan. 31 with more than 100 artists and arts administrators providing resources and what information they could. MassCreative is committed to holding monthly online Artivist town halls as a virtual organizing space to share updates and learn about calls to action. At the national level, Trump also eliminated the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, something he did during his first term.

This week, local organizations are working on contingency plans including contacting their grant program officers at the National Endowment for the Arts and other funding agencies.

“ We don't want to speculate on what will come,” said Michael Bobbitt, executive director of the Mass Cultural Council. “What I will say is that this should be a call to action for the arts community to organize in their municipalities across the state to make sure that our state and local leaders know how important the arts are, not only to us, but to the people that consume art and culture, but also our federal legislators.”

He said it’s time to show up in the public square, both the art makers and the art consumers to show their numbers and support.

“We went through COVID and realized how much we needed arts and culture,” Bobbitt continued. “Mass Cultural Council has launched the first statewide initiative to support arts prescriptions to show how art can help reduce the cost of healthcare and make people feel better to help them with their loneliness.”

Compounding the prospective loss of federal funding are the Trump administration's attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. In the last five years since the murder of George Floyd, many organizations made these values foundational to their work.

“[ Boston Lyric Opera] serves a wide range of communities, our staff, our audiences, our collaborators, our artists, and it's a diverse group of people, diverse group of communities and perspectives,” Vernatter said. “We've spent particularly the better part of five years really putting new thought to these ideas and what that means for our organization, to ensure that all communities feel welcomed and encouraged and a part of what it is to tell stories through music and drama.”

The organization went through a strategic planning process in 2021 and landed at a place where diversity isn’t separate from their mission; it’s an integral part of the organization's DNA.  Front Porch shares that commitment to embrace all communities.

“It’s really about how we are treating each other like human beings,” Simmons said. “That's a value statement. To take the time to look at everything that you're doing and say, Okay, where is our anti-racist practice? Where is our equity? At the core, is it access? Is it an opportunity? What, what is it that we're really trying to provide that others have been shut out of?”

But language is changing rapidly even on federal funding applications.  Wendy Jehlen is the founder and artistic director of ANIKAYA Dance Theatre, based in Somerville. The organization holds intensive dance workshops and conferences with dancers all around the globe. Recently, while applying for a grant for alumni of the Fulbright program, she received an email from the sponsoring organization.

“I've been writing in my application in the portal,” she said. “And they sent out a message to everyone who had started their application saying that these two categories, which were climate change and refugees/migrants, are no longer going to be considered.” The wording of the other categories had been changed.

So applicants got a warning: alter your application. They also got an extension because applicants have to rewrite their grant proposals to ensure words like diversity aren’t used. Jehlen project is an accessibility-focused dance program in Benin. She works particularly with Deaf people in movement spaces. Her words might change, her project will not.

"We don't need to have things that are called diversity, equity, inclusion,” she said. “We just do the thing – you know, you just keep going.”