The future of agencies that rely on funding from the Utah Humanities is uncertain. In April, the nonprofit lost almost $1 million in money that had already been approved by Congress. Nearly $200,000 would have been used to award competitive grants in Utah.
Torrey House Press, the only full-service nonprofit literary book publisher in the Intermountain West, is one of those organizations. Co-executive director Kirsten Allen said humans have been telling stories around the campfire since “we first learned how to light a match.”
“Arts and culture organizations like Torrey House Press are so important for developing community relationships and nurturing communities, helping us connect with one another as people,” Allen said. “That's what the arts and humanities ultimately do.”
Utah Humanities works with hundreds of partners across Utah.
Because of the DOGE cuts, Jodi Graham, executive director of Utah Humanities, said they have had to pause their program grants and scale back their remaining programs to minimal budgets.
Graham expected to lose some funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities following the reelection of President Donald Trump. But she wasn’t prepared for it to happen so fast.
“In sort of a terrible, overnight, unexpected way, all 56 state councils received notification that our funding was just killed, and with no real reason,” Graham said. “All of us were in compliance. All of us go through a rigorous reporting and auditing process every year.”
Organizations that received grants or funding before the cuts remain intact. However, Utah Humanities is unable to accept future program grant applications or give awards without NEH funding.
“Utah has a really strong history of supporting arts and culture, and it's one of the things that makes Utah a great place to live and work and play,” Graham said.
When Utah Humanities started in 1975, its only function was to take the funds it received from the National Endowment for the Humanities and distribute grants to communities.
“We absolutely cannot award program grants without that federal funding. That is key,” Graham said. “Those are the funds that get down into places like Blanding and Bluff and Moab, out to Tooele, up to Brigham City, the things that really get all over the state. So that is the biggest and deepest loss.”
Allen said the gap is big. Around 18% of their total foundation funding had come from those grants.
“We operate without an endowment. We operate without a significant reserve,” she said. “And so in an already challenging funding situation, funding environment, we now have to close the gap on a really significant chunk of our funding to be able to operate.”
Torrey House Press used its funds to send authors to rural areas, such as Bluff, Torrey and Springdale, for events like meet-and-greets and panels. Their mission is to publish books “at the intersection of literary arts and environmental advocacy and love for the land.”
The publishing house also uses funds to send Native American authors out to events, but it’s been more challenging without their expected funding.
“It's particularly distressing that we are short of funding to be able to really pull that off,” Allen said.
The grant funding also allowed Torrey House Press to help Utah Humanities with its annual book festival, which is still on track to happen this year, but at a much smaller scale. If funds are not restored, Allen said programming will be “curtailed by a lot.”
“We will have to not just have fewer events, but we'll have to publish fewer books. Perhaps we'll have to look at staff cuts. We're already pretty small, with just four full-time people,” she said. “But [it] could be a really destructive ripple effect, and we will just have to, we will just have to see.”
In the meantime, Torrey House Press and Utah Humanities are trying to make do with the money they have. Allen said they are continuing to reach out to individual donors and community members, but likely they won’t be able to do the same level of programming, especially for author events.
