2 weeks Ago
PORTLAND, Ore. — Late Wednesday night, Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon Humanities, received an email from the acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In it, he learned their federal funding from the agency had been abruptly terminated — accounting for nearly half of their budget.
"I opened an email, a short, brusque email that said as of today, your funding is done. Rescinded," Davis explained. "The funding that you have followed all the terms of is gone for reasons that are not made clear through a communication mechanism that nobody recognized.
" Oregon Humanities is one of 56 independent, nonprofit affiliates of NEH. "It is especially the federal funding that we distribute to rural, frontier communities in the form of public program grants and grants to small libraries, and that's one of the ways we partner all around the state," Davis said. "What we work on is getting people listening to each other about the big questions that lie beneath how we live in community.
" Over the years, NEH grants have gone to the High Desert Museum, to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, to arts councils, libraries, and cultural centers. Davis said his organization and others have been scrambling to adjust. "Every one of these councils that's been doing a lot of good work has been scrambling like crazy to figure out what's going on, how to connect with partners, how to connect with grantees, how to contest this," he said.
"So, in the name of efficiency, it's fairly inefficient." He spelled out how the funding, when they do get it, breaks down. As of last year, Davis said, the entire national endowment received $211 million.
That's less than a dollar a year for each person living in the U.S. "The money that goes to state humanities councils was about a quarter of that," Davis said.
"So if you think is it worth about a quarter — 25 cents, less than a pack of gum — to support these organizations that are getting people connecting and building trust both in each other and in the possibility of democracy, it feels to me like a reasonable expectation for tax dollars to go to that, for less than a quarter per person.".
