NEA Ends Grant Program for Underserved Communities
157Feb. 11, 2025
TheNational Endowment for the Arts(NEA) on February 6announcedthat it has canceled its Challenge America grant program, which offered $10,000 grants to small arts organizations that targeted “underserved groups and communities that may have limited access to the arts relative to geography, ethnicity, economic status, and/or disability” and were able to supply matching funds. The agency additionally revealed that it will alter its 2026 grant guidelines and said it is prioritizing projects that celebrate the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The changes arrive amid the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming, and on the heels of a January 29executive orderestablishing a task force that will “plan, organize, and execute” the celebration of the United States’ semiquincentennial.
The NEA encouraged those who would have applied for the Challenge Grant to instead apply for its Grants for Arts Projects, or GAP grants, and moved the deadline for that application ahead, from February 13 to March 11. Organizations that had already applied for this round of grants, known as GAP 1, must now reapply. The deadline for the second round of grants, GAP 2, remains July 10, as originally set. The NEA additionally announced that organizations applying for GAP grants would need to show a five-year history of arts programming.
The end of the Challenge Grants comes just days after the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian scrapped their DEI initiatives in response to the president’s January 20 executive order decrying such programs as discriminatory as well as “illegal and immoral.” The program supplied roughly $2.7 million to about 270 organizations in fiscal year 2025. Though the Challenge Grants account for just a small portion of the $32 million disbursed to some 1,400 groups that year, its elimination imperils its recipients and will likely have unhappy consequences for the populations they serve.
“I feel like the Challenge America program is on the chopping block specifically because it helps support communities with lesser access to the arts and, in some verbiage, may be considered ‘marginalized’ or ‘underserved’—which are now rapidly becoming keywords that are associated with diversity, inclusion, equity and access,” Will Bowling, education director at Laramie, Wyoming’s Relative Theatrics, which runs a student playwriting program, told the Washington Post.