Recently, I was compelled to do a hard thing: I turned down a grant. The decision was painful because, right now, the organization I lead — Black Public Media — really needs funding. Congress’ rescission of $1.1 billion in public media support stripped $1.8 million of committed funding from our budget. Like many others in the public media sector, and the greater arts community, my team and I are now scrambling to accelerate our fundraising efforts. To stay afloat, we’ve had to do other hard things: trim staff, decrease grant-making, and cut programs.
Fortunately, BPM also has private sector support, so we’re not closing our doors. Some of our donors are stepping up in remarkable ways, but in today’s anti-DEI climate, others are choosing to lie low. As grateful as we are for the help we received, it is unclear whether private philanthropy alone can fill the $1.8 million gap.
For nearly 50 years, BPM has helped independent media makers bring stories about the global Black experience to the public. We’ve long served as a vital funding source for content creators whose projects make other funders uneasy. “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes,” “I Am Not Your Negro,” “Red Summers VR,” and “Mama Gloria” are among the hundreds of projects we’ve supported. Projects we fund sometimes provide source material for narrative films, video games and XR experiences, reaching even broader audiences. BPM’s collaborations with PBS bring groundbreaking broadcasts, streaming projects, and community engagement initiatives to the public free of charge. These projects often do the difficult but necessary job of challenging norms and sparking lively, essential conversations.
Pursuing BPM’s mission has never been easy, but lately it has become especially fraught. The $35K NEA grant we walked away from was modest, but it would have supported our community screenings program. I made the difficult decision to decline the funding to safeguard BPM’s independence. If we accepted the grant, I worried we’d end up clashing with the federal agency over films that don’t conform with the current administration’s priorities.
Earlier this year, we were advised to avoid using words included on the government’s growing list of disfavored words. The so-called “woke” terms include: diversity, inclusion, climate crisis, equity, systemic, racism, LGBTQ, social justice, minority-serving institution, pronouns, and Black, the first word in our name! The makers we serve frequently pursue stories addressing the themes on this list. Avoiding those words to placate a funder would compromise our very mission — one hard thing we just won’t do.
Independent media makers are experiencing hardships, too. The fact that so many are small business owners and job creators in communities across the United States — and that public funding is a force multiplier in stimulating local economies — is too often missed in this discussion.
Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation abruptly terminated parts of a $3.2 million grant it had awarded to a Scientists in the Family project, which includes a documentary titled, “My Mom the Scientist.” The award-winning filmmaker, Thomas Allen Harris, has over 30 years of experience in the industry. The film is about his mother’s perseverance in a field that didn’t openly welcome people who looked like her. This financial setback affects not only Harris, but ripples through to hurt all the subcontractors he would have supported and the engagement activities that would have highlighted other Black scientists in local communities.
Globally, the $13.64 billion documentary film and television industry creates jobs and benefits a wide range of small businesses. Firms that provide equipment, editing services, graphic design, AV, lighting, catering, costuming, transportation, marketing, publicity — the list goes on.
Our sister organizations that support stories from the Asian American, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and other underrepresented communities face similar challenges. The artists we all work with create content reflecting the rich diversity of this nation. We’re certainly not the only members of the creative economy going through hard times. But as public media producers and distributors, our artists’ work is accessible in all corners of the nation, at no expense to viewers. It contributes to the cultural enrichment and connectedness of all Americans on a scale unparalleled by most other art forms. That’s something to be cherished, not dismissed.
The United States is at its best and most prosperous when creative freedom rings, knowledge is shared and intolerance finds no shelter. Preserving these ideals requires more of us to be willing to do the hard things.
Leslie Fields-Cruz is the executive director of Black Public Media, the nation’s only nonprofit solely dedicated to the development of nonfiction Black content for distribution on public media. Fields-Cruz joined BPM in 2001 to manage its program development fund. She served as director of programs from 2005-2008 and as VP of programs and operations from 2008-2014 before being named BPM’s third executive director in 2014.