The National Endowment for the Humanities is terminating federal grants supplied to arts councils, museums, historic sites, archives and more according to letters sent on April 2.
Samaa Abdurraqib, Executive Director at the Maine Humanities Council, said NEH funding brought roughly $3.5 million to the state of Maine last year to support many cultural programs across the state.
"It's smaller organizations with larger projects that are spanning multiple years, and those projects have just come to just kind of just have come to a screeching halt," Abdurraqib said.
Among them, the Shaker Community's Herb House rebuild, the University of Maine at Orono's Franco American digitization program and The Northeast Historic Film project cataloging and preserving Maine television archives date back to 1953.
The Maine Humanities Council's NEH grant has also been terminated.
Abdurraqib said NEH funding represents nearly 70% of the organization's budget and while she expects to continue operation through the end of this fiscal year, she is unsure about the future.
"It just feels hard that so many of us leaders of cultural organizations, have to shift our attention into scarcity mode, when what's really needed now is things that enrich our lives, things that bring us together, things that help us celebrate what it means to be human," Abdurraqib said.
Michael Graham, Director of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, said they had a $750 thousand dollar grant from NEH for their Herb House restoration project and $186 thousand of that funding had yet to be collected.
"The loss of the funding is a is a real setback, and it's part of a stream of funding that's making it possible to restore and rehab, rehabilitate an important structure here in the center of the village as a Community Center for Learning, culture and traditional arts," said Graham.
Graham said he will have to rely on community support to raise the more than $2 million needed to complete the project.
In a written statement Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree described the termination of these grants as "devastating and outrageous" and a "deliberate campaign to silence voices, erase history, and dismantle the public’s access to culture and education."
