A $250,000 grant for the Watkins Museum to expand exhibits on local Indigenous history is in limbo and a Lawrence event honoring veterans will be canceled amid federal cuts to humanities programs.
Humanities councils in all 50 states, along with six other U.S. territories and jurisdictions, received a letter on April 1 from the “Department of Government Efficiency” terminating their share of $75 million previously allocated by Congress to these councils by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Per NPR, these NEH grants were terminated due to DOGE “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of President Trump’s agenda.” In addition, 145 NEH staffers were placed on administrative leave.
Federal funding, granted through several different agencies, has had a significant impact at the Watkins Museum of History. Between 2019 and 2024, more than $400,000 in grants have been awarded to the Douglas County Historical Society and Watkins Museum, said Steve Nowak, executive director.
“All of this is money from outside the community, not from local funding resources,” Nowak said. A portion of these grants came from Humanities Kansas, whose funding from the NEH was rescinded. “This action will curtail grants and other programs that provide support and programming to museums and cultural organizations across Kansas, often small, volunteer run, and in rural parts of the state.”
The museum has also received more than $125,000 in grants directly from the NEH, Nowak said.
“These grants fund special projects, like online classroom resources for teachers, and offset museum operating expense, which helps the museum stretch limited funding,” he said.
The Watkins has a project also directly affected by the suspension of the NEH, as the museum submitted a $250,000 grant application in January.
“So far, we have heard nothing about the status of our grant proposal,” Nowak said. “This leaves our project, an expansion of the museum’s core exhibits to explore Indigenous Heritage in Douglas County and the history of Haskell Indian Nations University, in limbo.”
In addition, Nowak learned this week that a $50,000 grant through the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a project already completed has been terminated before the final $13,000 was disbursed to the museum.
Humanities Kansas is an independent nonprofit whose “programming, grants, and partnerships have documented and shared Kansas stories to spark conversations.” Since 1972, HK has helped support programming and events in 126 Kansas communities. In 2024, the council awarded almost $400,000 in grants.
Humanities Kansas board Chair Brad Allen said state humanities councils are nonprofits created to distribute the NEH funds. Their staff members are not federal employees, and the council also does fundraising and gets other grants from different people for restricted funds, but the cuts have a “massive impact” on state councils, he said.
“We’re not dead — it’s just we have lost all access to 75% of the normal funding,” Allen said.
The main programs sponsored and funded by HK are the Talk About Literature in Kansas (TALK) book discussions and their speakers bureau, which offers free presentations and discussions for Kansas nonprofits. Allen explained the amounts that are paid out for each event is relatively small, but HK does hundreds of these speakers bureau events every year.
Additionally, the council helps with cultural preservation grants and Humanities for All grants, the latter of which is intended to “support projects that draw on history, literature, and culture to engage the public with stories that spark conversations.” As 62% of Humanities Kansas funding goes to communities of 20,000 people or fewer, it’s frustrating to see all of these programs paused until further notice, Allen said.
“This is a really great example of federal dollars getting all the way down to small-town America,” Allen said. “Places that are very small — they don’t have the ability or scale to ask for a grant at a national level, so it makes it easier for people to access federal funds that don’t have a grant writer. To me, it’s a good economy of scale, when you think about supposed government efficiency.”
It’s an opinion shared by Humanities Kansas Associate Director Tracy Quillin.
“When they use funds from Humanities Kansas, they’re using funds to talk about what that community wants to talk about,” Quillin said. “Inevitably, they connect the event in the past to something that is happening today. Those types of community conversations are really valuable and bringing people together is really valuable.”
We need more opportunities to do that and not less, Quillin said, adding that Kansans know what their priorities are and what they want to talk about, and the decisions made at the federal funding level are not addressing the needs of Kansans.
The suspension of the federal grants means that HK has had to make some decisions. The grants to communities for humanities projects and cultural preservation are not available, and the council had to stop future grant rounds. TALK is no longer available.
Quillin pointed to the cancellation of one big program scheduled for next month in Lawrence as being particularly heartbreaking.
HK worked for the past year with 11 communities across the state to collect oral histories of veterans of the Vietnam War. HK was planning to bring the veterans involved to do a symbolic handover of their stories to a representative of the Library of Congress on May 9.
“The stories are still collected, but that part where we actually all get together and honor their service and honor their stories won’t proceed,” Quillin said.
Fortunately, Quillin said, HK has been able to honor their speaker series, and everything on their calendar will proceed as scheduled.
For future funding, they’re taking that week by week, and they bemoan the way these cuts disproportionately impact Kansas’ rural communities.
“Even in communities like Lawrence, Wichita, Topeka are magnet communities for those small towns,” Quillin said. Residents of surrounding smaller communities participate in the cultural activities in larger communities, making bigger areas an important part of the rural conversation. In the long run, she said, this has the potential for some devastating effects.
“We also know that there are really strong health benefits, especially for rural adults and for older adults,” Quillin said. Active community museums, libraries and senior centers — places where there is affordable or free programming for people in the community — is important for overall health, she said.
“At a time when we are increasingly isolated as a society, these are free opportunities to come together with your community members, learn something new, meet some new people, make some contacts on a fairly regular basis,” Quillin said. “Without those opportunities to do something free and stimulating for your brain, there’s real health consequences. That sort of social isolation — it really takes its toll.”
Read more on how federal funding cuts are directly affecting Lawrence and Douglas County community members in the articles linked below and on this page.
Contact information for the congressional delegation representing Lawrence and Douglas County is available at this link. The nonprofit 5 Calls, 5calls.org, has phone numbers and templates of scripts to help people make their voices heard on several federal issues.
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Nick Spacek (he/him) is a freelance writer whose work can be found in The Pitch, Lawrence Magazine, Lawrence Business Magazine, along with Starburst Magazine in the UK. Nick lives in Lawrence with his wife, cats, and enough vinyl records and Blu-rays to constitute a small problem.
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