Every year, more than 100 youths from across New Hampshire come to Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton for theater camps and workshops — but it wasn’t always that way.
Until a cash infusion from the state helped its programs become tuition-free several years ago, Executive Producer Jared Mezzocchi said, families used to pay to attend Andy’s, which at the time averaged only 30 to 40 youths. That transition depended on multiyear grant money from New Hampshire’s State Council on the Arts, which Mezzocchi said gave his group a “longer runway” of stable funding to plan for the future.
“As we made that huge pivot, that was kind of our north star, was just knowing we always had that base,” Mezzocchi said.
Hundreds of arts organizations, however, have now lost that leg up as Republican lawmakers nixed public funding for the council’s grants in the new state budget. The hole, while small for some, is sizable at Andy’s. Over the past two years, the group received two grants valued at $12,250, accounting for a solid slice of its budget, which runs between $120,000 to $150,000 a year.
“It’s a real hit for us,” Mezzocchi said.
Six of the Council on the Arts’ seven employees, who administered and coordinated those state-funded grants to local arts organizations, were also laid off Thursday as a result of state budget cuts. The council and its volunteer members still exist — a reversal from lawmakers’ initial proposal to nix the group entirely — but the executive director, Adele Sicilia, is now the only employee left on payroll.
Mary McLaughlin, who chairs the Council on the Arts, said the whole process has been “not fun.”
“It’s very difficult to say goodbye to six incredibly talented, smart people who have lost their jobs for nothing that they did wrong,” she said.
Republican lawmakers, when cutting funding for those positions and grants, said the arts qualified more as a want than a need in a tight budget year.
“This just didn’t reach the level of necessary funding,” Rep. Dan McGuire, an Epsom Republican who played a leading role in crafting the state budget, said at a committee meeting in March. “It’s a want-to-have, a nice-to-have kind of thing but not a must-have, in my opinion.”
Sal Prizio, executive director at the Capital Center for the Arts in Concord, argued that the arts provide a valuable economic stimulus to local communities and should be treated as such.
“It’s not a gift,” Prizio said. “It’s an investment that you get a return on.”
In an effort to avoid shutting down the council altogether, Sanbornton Republican Sen. Tim Lang engineered a new fundraising mechanism. The state now allocates $150,000 from its general fund each year to cover Sicilia’s salary and miscellaneous expenses. The rest — up to $700,000 — will be raised through the sale of business tax credits. The state-run Granite Patron of the Arts Fund will allow qualifying businesses to purchase donations to the council and, in turn, receive a tax credit for half the amount they bought.
The council can sell up to $350,000 in those tax credits, Lang said, but outside of that, it can raise as much money through donations and benefactors as it wants.
Lang said he doesn’t disagree with advocates that the Council on the Arts is important. But if tasked with a choice between funding developmental disability services or the arts, he said he has to choose disability services — so he found what he said is a creative solution that doesn’t rely on state money but still lets people invest in the arts.
“Culture’s important for the state,” Lang said. “The question was we’re in a tight budget year and where to find funds.”
That money isn’t secured or guaranteed, however, so arts organizations across the state are scrambling for other funding sources to supplement their operating budgets and programming. Some, like the Alliance for the Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, plan to reach out to loyal and new donors. Others will search for alternative grant programs from private charities.
Executive director Lars Hasselblad Torres said AVA received a $15,000 Public Value Partnership grant that supports its operations, including art classes for those who don’t have “deep pockets,” and its Art Lab, which provides a few hours of arts engagement each week for adults with disabilities.
In Hopkinton, the local historical society questioned whether it’ll be able to continue its Abenaki Trails Project next year without financial support from the council. The group received $6,000 in 2023, according to Executive Director Heather Mitchell, which funded an exhibit on the Abenaki tribe and people at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough, visited by 650 people. The money also helped Hopkinton bring Abenaki artists to visit local schools — a program so successful that the society received another grant from the council to revive the same project this fall.
“It was wonderful because it allowed us to bring in these artists that otherwise would not be able to come into the schools,” Mitchell said. “The society, we don’t have that kind of money in our budget in order to be able to do that.”
Leaders of several organizations anticipate that changes at the council will lead to a more-competitive market when applying for grants elsewhere. And, unlike the council, most charities aren’t dedicated to supporting the arts exclusively.
At Andy’s, Mezzocchi said he’s not yet certain how they’ll absorb the funding loss, though he’s determined to keep their summer camps tuition-free.
“We really want to get to the kids who really did not think there was access to what we’re up to, and I’ll be damned if we lose that aspect of our programming,’ he said.
Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.
