Save the NEH and the NEA!

Alabama gets about $775,000 each year from the NEA, which is then given in grants to other arts organizations, big and small, throughout the state, Head said. Yesterday, the VAC put out a call to action urging supporters to contact their national, state and local reps to register opposition to Trump’s planned cuts. In 2016, they received $300,000 directly from the National Endowment of the Humanities for continuing education curriculum. “Our fear is that even a loss of modest funding will have a ripple effect through local neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods that are least able to afford those losses”. But, as the Times portends, “never before have Republicans, who have proposed eliminating the endowments in the past, been so well-positioned to close the agencies, given their control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and now the president’s fiscal plan”.

“That money provides the validation you need as an organization”, said Malone.

That $957,300 represents 10 percent of its budget, says Wayne Martin, the organization’s executive director.

Trump is the first president to propose closing down the agencies since they were created in 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson, who said it’s crucial for civilized nations to value the arts and humanities. The council depends on the NEH for about 70 percent of its funding.

The NEA and also the National Endowment for the Humanities are eliminated, as is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The answer was no. “We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting”.

“It’s like getting an Academy Award when you get one of these NEH grants”, she said. “Across Wisconsin nearly half a million people listen to WPR a week”.

Per the Washington Post, the proposed Trump budget would cut the full $971 million spent on arts and cultural agencies.

“We’re in the creative economy as we speak”, he said. “There’s too much on the table right now for us to be quiet”.

Though critics of the NEA say it has occasionally funded controversial art projects over the years, the majority of its work has been positive, he said.

The NEH also funds programs for veterans, such as the Warriors-Scholar Project, which helps prepare them to attend top-tier universities.

MCT has received 13 grants form the NEA since 1998, ranging from $15,000 to $55,000.

According to its website, the NEA will operate as usual until a new budget is enacted by Congress. The NEA also approved a $2 million indemnity program for “Matisse/Diebenkorn“. The NEA contributes millions of dollars to both large and small cultural organizations across MA. “While Sesame Workshop now receives no direct funding from CPB or PBS, we stand firmly and passionately in support of the vital public investment that allows them to continue this important work”.

“Arts and humanities are not a luxury”, said Brenda Thomson, executive director of Arizona Humanities, the state’s affiliate organization for the NEH. “Everything is dependent on the awesome grants that we get from these institutions”.

While that number may appear small in a federal budget that’s in the trillions, arts advocates called it a short-sighted cut of a part of the budget where taxpayers “get a lot of bang for their buck with the small amount of funding they get from the NEA”.

That grant, and the matching funds from private philanthropic sources, has supported 30 to 50 free public programs a year in the humanities offered by CWRU, Knox said.