Vermont’s creative sector, stung by losses during the Covid-19 pandemic, is beginning to see some much-needed help.
Ten arts and cultural organizations across the state are set to receive nearly $630,000 in direct relief funds from the federal government as part of the CARES Act.
“Those are critical,” Paul Gambill, executive director of one of the recipients, the Community Engagement Lab in Montpelier, said of the federal dollars. “Until we can help understand how to reimagine the way artists work in the pandemic.”
The new funding awards — announced recently by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities — came just days before Gov. Phil Scott signed a pandemic-aid bill that allocates another $5 million for nonprofit arts and cultural organizations.
That state-distributed money also came from the CARES Act, signed in March by President Donald Trump as a way to stem the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
Along with sending $1.25 billion Vermont’s way, the act provided $75 million each to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as $25 million for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and $7.5 million for the Smithsonian Institution.
For the Community Engagement Lab, a nonprofit focusing on arts in schools, the $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts may be key to the small organization’s near future.
The nonprofit halved the hours of one of its three full-time employees when the pandemic hit, Gambill said. That person had a crucial role — managing its partnerships with schools, teaching artists and more — without which “we wouldn’t have been able to keep going,” he said.
He said his organization received a Paycheck Protection Program loan that allowed for the partnership manager to come back, but that would only last through June. The new federal funds mean that member of his team can stay full time until at least October 2021, he said.
“This position has an outsized impact on our ability to succeed,” said Gambill, explaining how the lab’s partnerships are its core work. “Especially in a small organization with just a few employees, cutting that capacity is devastating.”
The Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, too, to support staff and facilities costs.
The center also received just over $97,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to buoy a project archiving the experiences of Vermonters during the Covid-19 crisis.
“That money will help us pay our full-time archivist and also retain an assistant archivist for six to 12 months more than we were originally going to,” said Kathleen Haughey, the center’s executive director.
The archival project — centered around oral history–style recorded interviews — had been underway beforehand, Haughey said. And the $97,000 will help the center create and distribute educational materials based on those interviews.
Those funds will also allow the nonprofit to hire a director of education six months earlier than planned and help pay a trained folklore specialist in Franco-American songs, Haughey said.
Haughey said the center was fortunate that a major part of its revenue doesn’t come from ticket sales, which fell when the pandemic hit Vermont. But the nonprofit did lose revenue from contracting work with schools and other entities, she said.
Arts and cultural organizations and individual creatives across the state have suffered “enormous financial losses” during the pandemic, said Catherine Crawley, a spokesperson for the Vermont Arts Council.
The statewide group heard from more than 200 organizations and more than 400 individual artists who reported close to $37 million in total and projected losses due to the pandemic, Crawley said.
“Some of them will not survive beyond six months,” she said.
As of early June, the council had given out $517,500 to 81 different organizations through an emergency relief fund with the Vermont Humanities Council.
The arts council has also awarded more than $170,000 to 425 individual artists who lost income because of cancelled projects or events, Crawley said. Those awards were capped at $500 per person.
Part of the reason aid for the arts and culture is important now, said Gambill of the Community Engagement Lab, is that continued financial losses could push people out of the creative industries.
“If artists don’t have any way to make a living, they’re going to have to do something else,” he said.
That could be particularly harmful for Vermont, where nonprofit arts and culture organizations are a $123 million industry, according to a 2017 study by the national nonprofit Americans for the Arts.
Data from 2018, collected by the Vermont Arts Council, showed that the state’s creative economy accounted for about 9% of all employment in Vermont, a share higher than the national average. Most of those jobs were in design, specialty foods and visual arts and crafts.
Leaders in the field also highlight the non-monetary benefits that creative work brings, especially at a time of national unrest.
“The thing about art is that it allows us to see ourselves and our world differently,” said Gambill. “When we’re struggling to redefine who we are as a culture and to survive the largest economic crisis in the last 100 years, we need artists to help us build those definitions of who we want to become. We think artists are essential workers in that challenge.”
The federal spending, however, won’t meet the need, National Endowment for the Arts chair Mary Anne Carter told NPR last week.
“Times are drastic. Our arts organizations are suffering. They don’t know if they’re going to survive, let alone reopen,” Carter said.
And some in Vermont’s arts and culture sphere have concerns about $5 million coming from the recent state bill, H.966, which was signed into law last Thursday.
The bill sends the money to the Agency of Commerce and Community Development “to grant to the Vermont Arts Council.” The agency requires organizations to demonstrate a 50% or greater drop in total revenue in any month from March 1 to Aug. 31, compared with the same month in 2019.
But the bill passed last week restricts the definition of revenue to exclude tax-deductible charitable contributions.
“If all you can count is just earned revenue like a for-profit business, then it’s not accurately reflecting the revenue model of arts and cultural organizations,” said Steve Perkins, executive director of the Vermont Historical Society in Barre.
For many of those organizations, donations and other charitable contributions make up a substantial portion of their revenue, Perkins said, like his own, which doesn’t qualify.
Of the recent arts and culture CARES Act grants in Vermont, the historical society received the largest: $133,512 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
That money is supporting a digitization effort of roughly 50,000 books and serials; 30,000 photos, broadsides, maps and manuscripts; and 30,000 museum pieces.
Despite his misgivings about the state administered funds, Perkins is grateful for the attention paid to Vermont’s creative sector.
“I can’t imagine Vermont without that,” he said.
