For our arts organization, the Nebraska Crossroads Music Festival, this year has been off to an exciting start.
We received notification just weeks ago that our application for the National Endowment for the Arts had resulted in our very first NEA Project Grant to support our 2025 Festival – a rare honor and the result of years of hard work.
Today, however, a White House memo indicated that the Administration would freeze all grant funding and programs, excluding Medicare and Social Security, to ensure compliance with previous Executive Orders, among them “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” – our NEA grant was on ice.
I won’t speculate on the legality of the order, which will undoubtedly keep the courts busy in the coming weeks. The message, however, is clear: anyone espousing the values of DEI, will not receive funding from federal government.
Diversity has always been a key element in the programming for our festival. It certainly played a role in our application for the NEA, since bringing together different kinds of musicians from different backgrounds is woven into the fabric of our organization.
But our application was primarily built on the foundations of artistic excellence, entrepreneurial spirit and a start-up mindset. Pulling off a festival with international impact that brings in tens of thousands of dollars of indirect economic impact with only two part-time staffers hardly seems like a waste of federal, or anyone else’s, money.
At the Nebraska Crossroads Music Festival, we have always aimed to bring artists together from many different backgrounds, both locally and internationally, because we believe this confluence allows people to grow. Without shared cultural references (and sometimes without a common language), the only thing we have in common is our most basic role as artists – express the inexpressible through our music – the rest is made up on the spot. It’s emotionally, interpersonally, and mentally taxing.
But this growth – with all its awkwardness, miscommunication, and ultimately, transformation and redemption – makes for great content. People want to hear authenticity and here you have it in its rawest form. The chaos from those first interactions washes away in a warm dopamine rush of awe, joy and appreciation.
Our organization watched with interest as the movement known as DEI – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – took hold of the public imagination in 2020, a year after our festival was founded in 2019. We witnessed many organizations scramble to address, or at least appear to address, years of perceived complacency.
It is not within the purview of this post to address the movements merits and shortcomings; it has already been the subject of much debate. We did not fundamentally change our goals or mission during that time. We continued believing that it was our role to highlight as many cultural groups as possible in the best light, not to raise up any one group at the expense of others. We do it because we all benefit from opportunities to experience new things.
Acknowledging people for what they do well – and the sights, sounds, memories, joys, tribulations, and love that gets poured into art – is also just the decent thing to do.
So during this heavy-handed effort to make a cultural course correction – regardless of whether you think it’s warranted or not – don’t throw out diversity completely. It is a word that has suffered from so much controversy that it hardly has any remaining meaning. Remember what it stands for: variation, freshness, color and the freedom to experience all of what life has to offer.
We are excited about our 2025 season and the NEA grant that helps to make it possible. It is going to be a great week of music with some magic for everyone. Let’s hope this freeze on legitimate and important federal grants is temporary, but that the conversation around what kind of society we really want to live in, continues.