This is what the Miami arts world loses if President Trump cuts the NEA

President Trump’s initial federal budget plan has proposed completely eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, along with its $148 million annual budget.

Miami’s cultural institutions are, obviously, concerned. NEA grants are rarely massive, but if you get one, it’s a stamp of excellence that pretty much anyone understands. And that’s when dollars from other donors begin rolling in.

“I got my first NEA grant in 1981 for a chamber music project in a little town where I grew up: Park City, Oklahoma. At that point in time, the idea that I had, the idea of creating the festival, needed credibility and the NEA provided that credibility,” said Howard Herring, president and CEO of the New World Symphony.

“Because of the credibility of the selection process, the programs that receive NEA funding are powerful, and they are attractive to audiences and they often attract even more funding.”

Back in 2001, the NEA gave NWS $100,000 for arts and tech development – the largest such grant in its history. Today NWS is at the cutting edge of mixing tech and the symphony music experience.

Pérez Art Museum Miami has had a similar experience. Executive Director Franklin Sirmans said this in a recent email:

The value of an NEA grant isn’t just in the dollars awarded. An NEA grant award is an endorsement that arts organizations can leverage into hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional support.

For example, just this past year PAMM received a $25,000 grant from the NEA for the exhibition Julio Le Parc: Form Into Action. With this internationally recognized seal of approval, PAMM was able to secure multiple additional private donations in order to present this extraordinary exhibition in Miami.

For a big, well-known organization like PAMM, that money can come from elsewhere. But for organizations in less wealthy communities or outside metro areas, an NEA grant can be make or break.

“It’s not so much for organizations like YoungArts that [the NEA grants are] truly a vital part of our funding. It’s most important for communities where there are very few other resources for funding. It’s those communities who are overlooked by the larger foundations. They don’t have a great amount of personal wealth in their towns,” said Carolina García Jayaram, the CEO and president of the National YoungArts Foundation.

She’s referring to organizations like the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation, which received $30,000 in 2014 (considering the city is now bankrupt, funding like this is more important than ever). For two years, the NEA provided a significant portion of the Rhythm Foundation’s budget for Big Night in Little Haiti.

You can search the whole list of 2014-17 Florida grantees below by organization, city, or year. (Note: Statewide organizations, including government entities, are listed as being in Tallahassee if you’re searching by city.)

This should feel far from hopeless, though. So far it’s merely a proposed budget. There’s plenty of time to sign a petition or call your representative to tell them not to accept the cuts.

Some of their districts have received a massive amount of NEA funding the last couple years – take a look at the map below. Organizations in Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s district, the 27th, received $1 million between 2014 and 2017.

Florida NEA Grants, 2014-2017

Source: Florida Cultural Alliance

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Rebekah Monson contributed to this piece.