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The last seven weeks have been unlike any other time in Humanities Texas’s history.

On April 2, we received notification that our annual operating grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) had been terminated. It was a devastating blow for our organization and the communities we serve statewide.

Since then, my colleagues and I have been heartened by the generosity of our friends and philanthropic partners across the state.

We have received over a hundred donations to our Emergency Fund, which our board established to provide the organization with a measure of stability during this challenging time. Chief among those contributions is a $250,000 grant from the Federation of State Humanities Councils, made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation. If you contribute now to our Friends group, your gift will count toward the dollar-for-dollar matching opportunity associated with that grant.

We have also received grants and offers of partnership that enable us to resume some of the programming we paused in early April.

We look forward to resuming our rural grants program this summer, made possible by rapid-response support from several of the state’s major foundations.

Just this week, we held a summit on rural grantmaking at our headquarters in Austin, where Andy Mink of the Smithsonian Institution shared the results of a national survey conducted by the Smithsonian on the unique needs of cultural and educational organizations in the nation’s rural communities. Attendees at the summit included representatives from the Texas Commission on the Arts, Texas Historical Commission, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Texas Rural Funders, Texas Association of Museums, Still Water Foundation, MINDPOP, and the Texas Tribune.

I’m delighted to report that we are also resuming work on several new traveling exhibitions, including Life and Literature of J. Frank Dobie, Of Birds and Texas: The Art of Stuart and Scott Gentling, and Legacies of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. We expect those titles to be available for circulation by the end of the year.

Our teacher professional development programs are moving ahead this summer as planned, as they are supported by the state through a grant from the Texas Education Agency.

As you see in this newsletter, this week we announced the winners of our 2025 Outstanding Teaching Awards, which have been supported for the past two decades by the remarkable generosity of a single donor.

Still, several of our core programs remain paused due to the termination of our federal funding—our reading and discussion program for veterans, our public lectures and film screenings, and our family literacy program. These initiatives are an important part of our service to the state. Each represents an opportunity for targeted support, so please be in touch if you’d like to discuss the possibility of securing private funding to bring one of these programs to your community.

Looking ahead, it is important to emphasize that the generous support we have received over the past few weeks is only a temporary measure. While it allows us to continue limited programming, it is no substitute for the NEH grant that represented the core of our operational and program funding for more than five decades.

NEH funding is an investment in Texas communities. For years, Humanities Texas has pursued our mission as a public-private partnership, leveraging federal dollars with state and private resources. NEH funds not only support our service to Texans statewide but also catalyze local contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

That is why we continue to communicate with members of the Texas congressional delegation, emphasizing our activity in each of the state’s thirty-eight congressional districts.

We also continue to spread the word by speaking with journalists about how the elimination of federal support affects Texans from El Paso to Beaumont and Amarillo to Brownsville.

It’s not yet clear whether our federal support will resume, but I can assure you that we will do all we can to bring those dollars back to Texas.

I can also affirm that our mission will not change. Humanities Texas remains committed to strengthening communities across the state by conducting and supporting programs that cultivate the knowledge and judgment that representative democracy demands of its citizens.

On behalf of our staff and board of directors, I send my thanks for your encouragement and support. Please stay in touch.