To the editor:

The recent decision to rescind grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts will be felt for years to come. As both an artist and an administrator, I have seen firsthand that public funding is essential to keeping the arts accessible for our community.

Access to private philanthropy dollars is often based on an organization’s social capital and its ability to navigate the nuanced preferences of individual donors. Development personnel who are comfortable in affluent spaces may excel in those endeavors while staff with grassroots experience may not. This can cause inequitable disparities that determine which groups survive challenging times.

Public funds serve to even that bar.

Government grants are typically peer reviewed with open access to panel meetings, and led by steering committees with transparent scoring guidelines. While general operations grants are certainly in existence, the majority of public funds are project-based. This pushes arts organizations to try new things, expand their boundaries and take risks — a practice that is absolutely vital to our creative ecosystem.

As art advocates, it’s easy for us to wax poetic on the “feel good” aspects of art and its authentic power to make our lives meaningful. But in order to convey the importance of creative expression across party lines, it’s time to articulate the “hard facts” of how the arts impact our communities, both economically and socially. We must communicate in numbers and statistics to those in power, or face the grave ripples of dismantled systems in the very near future.

Marlo Angell,

Lawrence