Funding Cuts Put a Decades-old Writing Program on the Flathead Reservation in Jeopardy

For more than 30 years, a small arts nonprofit in Missoula has connected elementary school kids with professional writers to create and perform poetry. Residency Coordinator Emily Walter says after 28 years of teaching, she still finds open-hearted creativity in every generation.

“It’s a 12-week program and at the end, kids choose two of their poems to go into an anthology book. Last week I felt like Oprah, like, ‘You get a book! You get a book!’” Walter says. “The kids get so excited and they immediately go and look for their name and their poems and their friends’ poems.” 

Walter is one of a small group of professional writers who participate in the Missoula Writing Collaborative’s Writers in the Schools program, which serves 32 regional schools, including six elementary schools on the Flathead Indian Reservation. 

The six reservation residencies are funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant. In mid-May, MWC staff found out the grants are in limbo.

MWC Executive Director Caroline Simms says she expected bad news at some point, given recent headlines about the Trump administration targeting arts and humanities programs. In early May, the NEA reported it would be reducing staff and rescinding grants. On May 14, Simms received an email from the NEA stating that the $40,000 grant they were awarded for 2024-2025 was “terminated,” which Simms says is odd since they’ve already received the funding and spent it. A promised 2025-2026 grant seems unlikely to materialize.

“Normally by this time I would have signed an agreement accepting the offer,” she says. “I’m just operating on the assumption that we won’t get another NEA grant any time soon.”

The grant for next year is $32,000, she says. “So no, it doesn’t sound like a huge amount of money, but for a little arts organization in western Montana it’s a pantload.”

Simms and Walter say the classes, like many arts programs, provide immense benefit to children and the community. The programs are intended to be a joyful experience for children to learn to express themselves — with a side effect of building social skills and empathy. That aspect of the work became more important in the last few years as the writers returned to in-person class after the pandemic lockdowns.

Walter relates a conversation she had with a group of teachers while preparing for the 2023-2024 school year.

“I wanted feedback on anything I could help emphasize,” Walter says. “And it was quiet and nobody said anything until one of the more senior teachers finally just said, ‘Eye contact. Can you work with eye contact?’ And it has stayed with me.

“What the teacher was saying was, ‘We’re at a point with our students where we don’t need fundamental academics, but fundamentals in a human-relation sense,’” she continues. “So I didn’t say ‘Now we’re going to do eye contact’ but I would work on having kids stand up and look at other people. If a poem was read that was quite sad, we wouldn’t clap, but we would rub our hands together and send love into the world.”

Simms says she doesn’t understand the justification for pulling the grants. The NEA email indicated that the poetry program doesn’t meet the “president’s priorities,” which she finds odd given that “tribal communities” are on the Trump administration’s list of new priorities for the NEA. (The list also includes “disaster recovery,” “skilled trade jobs,” “make America healthy again,” “the military and veterans,” and “make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful.”)

The writing collaborative also relies on state funding from the Montana Arts Council, which distributes grants to organizations and individuals throughout the state. Simms says those funds go toward admin costs and residencies at five elementary schools in Missoula.

The state arts council funds are also derived from NEA grants. MAC Communications Director Eric Heidle says their grant programs aren’t in immediate danger — for now.

“Forty percent of the NEA budget goes toward state art agencies, such as us, and that’s congressionally mandated, so that’s stable,” Heidle says. “It doesn’t mean our ability to do what we do is secure. What happens in Congress in the next few months will give us some idea of where we stand … The worst case scenario is to completely defund the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

A host of Montana arts organizations are grantees of the state arts council, including the Roxy Theater, Zootown Arts Community Center and Montana Shakespeare in the Parks. Most grants are less than $10,000.

At the Missoula Writing Collaborative, Simms says there are simply not enough funding sources to make up the gap from a reduction or loss in federal funding. MWC is moving forward with their plans to operate as usual in the upcoming school year while pursuing private donations and other grants, though Simms describes it as a “Lord of the Flies” situation for nonprofits scrambling for funding.

“I don’t want the public to think about cuts to a program like MWC’s without also considering the impact that these cuts have on other institutions that also build community,” Simms added via email. “I’d put a strong call out for Montanans to come together to advocate for what makes our state great together and to find ways that we can collectively continue our vital work.”

Walter says she’s already knocking on doors and seeking donations from local businesses near the schools served by the poetry program.

“Having so many specific NEA grants cut or reduced is going to have such an impact in ways that I don’t think we even fully understand,” Walter says. “When you diminish the value of art in a society, you’re diminishing the value of people.”

This story originally appeared in The Pulp, which can be found online at thepulp.org.