Dear Friends,
If you’ve been following recent news from Virginia Humanities, you know that the sweeping federal cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the NEH’s network of Congressionally-founded and mandated state and territorial humanities councils poses an existential threat to the work these councils do across the country, and to the work Virginia Humanities does to serve you here in the Commonwealth.
When Virginia Humanities learned on April 3 that we had lost $1.7M of previously appropriated and approved funding from the NEH, we began working to minimize that cut’s impact both on the cultural programs and services we provide to all Virginians and to our staff’s livelihoods. However, an immediate loss this large is impossible to manage without making difficult and painful decisions.
Here are the measures we have taken to date as they relate to staffing, operations, and programs:
- We are reducing our workforce by 25%. This includes several open positions we will not be filling including our Virginia Indian Programming Coordinator and two Center for the Book positions. And most devastating for us, it includes laying off six current staff members, each of whom has brought value to our mission and work each day since they joined our team.
- We will vacate our office space at Dairy Central in Charlottesville later this summer. Our lease will be taken on by a University of Virginia department. Once we have a new address for our headquarters, we will let you know.
- We will reduce grantmaking by $200K and fellowships by $45K for FY2026.
- We will no longer be the institutional home of Book Arts, a program of our Virginia Center for the Book.
- And finally, while we will have a 2026 Virginia Festival of the Book and we will work to make it as educational, accessible, and joyful as it has been in the past, it will look very different and be smaller.
As we have made these painful decisions to reduce our staff, programs, and resources, we have also focused on questions about what we will look like on the other side of this: How do we sustain our statewide mission? With the deep cuts we’ve been forced to make, what do we prioritize as the most important elements of our service to the Commonwealth? Are there ways to restructure so that we can continue to perform certain aspects of our work that are jeopardized by these cuts?
At this moment, this is how we are answering these questions:
- We have created a new division called Programs & Education that will provide more direct collaboration between Encyclopedia Virginia, the Virginia Center for the Book, and our Office of Education and Community Initiatives. By consolidating across these education-focused programs, we will try to continue most of our Commonwealth-wide service to students, teachers, and lifelong learners to provide them with content and programming about history, culture, ideas, and books.
- We have consolidated outreach resources to produce and publish Commonwealth-wide stories and work from all our programs and grantees on different platforms. By focusing on expanded documentation, we hope to effectively amplify and engage Virginians with cultural work happening across the state and more collaboratively support core programs like our Virginia Folklife Program.
- Despite reductions to grants and fellowships, financially supporting organizations and the work of individuals is core to our mission and we will continue to make grants hopefully without further reductions. In addition, we are proud to continue awarding grants from the VA250 Commission to celebrate our nation’s birth.
- To best serve the state’s diverse regions, we will sustain our current regional humanities centers in Hampton Roads and Southwest Virginia to disburse locally directed grants. Because of our economic reality we have suspended efforts to create additional centers at this time.
- We will maintain our priority to partner with Virginia’s Indigenous communities. Even without a Virginia Indian Programming Coordinator, our support of Virginia’s State and Federally Recognized Indian Tribes is and will continue to be infused throughout our work and mission.
- Even though we will have fewer resources, we will continue to prioritize public humanities fellowships, the Rosel Schewel Fund fellowship supporting scholarship about Virginia women, and HBCU fellowships. As we seek to document and tell the stories of all Virginians, these investments are essential in supporting scholarship from under-resourced institutions and often overlooked voices.
These changes officially go into effect with our new fiscal year, which begins July 1.
This last month and a half has been profoundly challenging—for us, colleagues at our sibling humanities councils, and across the cultural sector generally.
As we move through this moment, Virginia Humanities will continue to provide as many of our programs as we can thanks to the generous, diversified support we receive from across the Commonwealth. This includes public funding from the state of Virginia; our longstanding partnership with the University of Virginia; foundations like the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation, which has supported both our programming and our regional humanities center at UVA Wise; organizations like the Federation of State Humanities Councils, which has provided emergency funding to councils with support from the Mellon Foundation; corporations such as the Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation, which has made our HBCU Fellowship Program possible; and individuals and friends like you.
As we mark our 50th anniversary, your continued support and engagement will drive our next 50 years building communities rooted in connection, culture, and shared stories. And as the 250th anniversary of the United States approaches, we’re reminded, as Congress affirmed in 1965 when it founded NEH, that this ongoing work of understanding one another—across differences and through shared culture—is what nurtures the wisdom our democracy rightly demands of us all.
Sincerely,
Matthew Gibson
Executive Director
Virginia Humanities
