Caroline Lowery, the executive director of Oklahoma Humanities, said her organization, which has seven employees, received roughly $1 million in operational support from the agency each year, which amounts to about 75 percent of its budget. That money is then used to support projects serving all of Oklahoma’s 77 counties, most of which, she said, are rural and lack any other humanities infrastructure.
“The impact will be devastating statewide,” she said. “There will be an immediate loss of support for programs that serve veterans, programs that serve rural communities.”
Projects have included an oral history project with survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, and an effort to digitize news coverage and other records relating to the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.
“Our history will literally be lost,” she said. “We are the stopgap. We are the institution that is making sure Oklahoma’s stories are preserved.”
Mark Santow, the founder of the Providence Clemente Veterans’ Initiative, a group that provides free cultural and educational programs for veterans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, said his group had been informed that its current two-year, $99,000 grant, of which about $18,000 had not yet been received, was canceled. Separate grants it receives from Rhode Island’s state council were also in jeopardy.
Upcoming programs, like a field trip to Civil War battlefields, were uncertain, Santow said.
“As always, the vets in our community will quietly bear the burden of these ill-considered decisions,” he said. That leaders have the power to make them, he added, “doesn’t make it right.”
