The New Mexico Humanities Council will be able to keep its doors open — at least for now — thanks to an injection of funding from the Mellon Foundation. The money is meant to help alleviate the sting of the Trump Administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE group eliminating grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of their war on federal spending.
The Mellon Foundation stepped in to provide $15 million to humanities councils nationwide, and Executive Director of the New Mexico organization, Brandon Johnson, said they’ll be receiving $200,000 of that money. Plus, he said the foundation will match up to $50,000 in donations, thereby opening up another possible $100,000 to support the recently gutted organization.
The New Mexico Humanities Council lost more than $700,000 in grant money that not only paid for day-to-day operations, but also directly funded arts and cultural programs around the state by re-granting money that had been granted to them.
“If we don't have that funding,” he said, “I'm not sure that we're going to be able to continue our re-granting in the same way that we have done it over the past 50 years.”
Johnson said the initial $200,000 will be enough for the council to maintain limited operations and give staff time to plan for a new future and pivot in order to maintain themselves long term.
“We're doing a lot of planning, and thinking about what the New Mexico Humanities Council is going to look like in the future beyond this crisis,” he said. “Assuming that we find a way to get out on the other side, we're going to need to know what the organization is going to look like on that other side. I don't think it's going to look the same as what it does right now.”
The initial $200,000 wouldn’t be enough for the council to continue funding cultural, philosophical and arts programs around the state. For that, he said they’ll need donations, and even then the programs they could fund would be limited.
“If we can get the full $300,000 we will be able to restart programming,” Johnson said. “We will be able to start doing our speakers bureau. We may even be able to underwrite a small grant program, sort of a quick grant program where we provide emergency funding, or quick funding.”
One of the largest programs the council administers is National History Day, a nationwide research competition aimed at helping kids become more educated and engaged citizens able to place the current world in a broader context.
Johnson said they’re looking at moving National History Day to be housed under a different organization, even though the council has been administering the program for about 50 years.
“We want it to be able to affect students far into the future, and enhance their knowledge of history and help teachers think differently about history,” he said. “So we feel like it's the right move to make.”
For now, Johnson said the council will focus on fundraising to meet the $50,000 challenge grant.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
