I’m glad to see that the many worthy examples of how arts organizations engage the public are receiving attention. But at this very difficult moment, we need to pay even more attention to a straightforward assault on the arts at the federal level, which is in turn an attack on the arts in our cities and neighborhoods.

The Trump Administration has proposed to eliminate funding—these are not cuts, this is zero funding—for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

If you love the arts and you didn’t already know this, well, that’s a problem.

Right now, there is one school of argument that says we shouldn’t be alarmist, that there is bipartisan support for the federal funding of NEA and NEH and IMLS that has been built up over many years now. And there’s greater awareness of how the arts and humanities contribute to our economy, innovation, education, vibrancy and the quality of the places where we live and work.

But I’m in a different camp. As an arts administrator who has had to watch politics for a long time—I’m president and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP)—these are very different times. And with this White House, nothing can be taken for granted. Seemingly unthinkable changes of directions are possible.

That’s why arts organizations need to connect directly with their audiences and let them know just how much is at stake for the arts. Arts organizations should be very specific about the threat. And arts organizations need to help their audiences communicate to people in power, from Washington, D.C. to their mayors and city councils, just how important the arts are to them.

Too often people don’t connect the dots between government support for the arts and the arts events that they see and attend, because the organizations providing the arts don’t make this link clear enough. The reluctance of arts organizations to encourage advocacy is understandable: they don’t want to be seen as too politically partisan, particularly if they receive significant amounts of public money. But support of the arts should be seen as an existential issue, not a partisan one.

And advocating for ourselves as arts organizations is nothing new. I’ve often seen the executive director or the president of the board at a performing arts event come onstage to thank the sponsor or donors for a particular performance. So why not use that same time and format to say, “Hey, folks, the NEA is facing elimination, and we received $10,000 for this show you’ll see this evening, which was crucial in helping us attract additional support to make tonight possible.”

But too few organizations do this, which is one reason why too few people understand the connection between the NEA and their neighborhood.

I know this firsthand. I worked at the NEA for eight years, where I was director of artist communities and presenting, before taking my current job in 2011. There, I inaugurated the NEA’s Artist Communities granting program and helped initiate Live from Your Neighborhood, a study of American community festivals.

From that experience, I learned this: Federal funding for the NEA and other arts and humanities organizations doesn’t add up to a lot of money. The current annual appropriation for NEA is less than $150 million, which is equivalent to the payroll of just one National Football League team. (The NEH budget is almost identical.) But the money has a multiplier effect as it gets sent, in small pieces, to every region of the country, to supplement state and local arts funding. The money often works as a seed for governmental and corporate and donor support of the arts at these local levels. Arts organizations, at the receiving end, are magicians at turning small amounts of money into bigger things.

The bottom line: If you zero out the funding for NEA, that multiplier effect will end, and you will see much less in the way of arts in many communities.

And you may see states, communities, and regions decide that their current support for the arts is not necessary and can be significantly diminished or ended completely.

That multiplier effect will instead become a domino effect.

The impact of this will be geographically disparate, in a cruel way. I think the largest metropolitan areas will probably continue to have robust artistic offerings although small and community-based organizations in those areas will probably be impacted in a way that larger, more traditional organizations are not. In a Darwinian way, small and struggling organizations in any community are the most vulnerable. Federal arts funding has a disproportionate impact on smaller cities and rural areas—and with small and midsize organizations, which receive most of the grants.

The elimination of funding also could affect the abundant pipeline of performers, including some of America’s cultural treasures. Most people don’t realize that the individuals we see in our performance venues, movies, TV or on Broadway don’t just magically appear with all of their talent fully formed. They need years of training and development. It is often in community nonprofits—which depend in part on government grants—that they mature and develop as professional and career artists.

For my part, I’m asking APAP’s nearly 2,000 member organizations— presenters, producers, promoters and creators of the performing arts—to engage their audiences about the current threat and the need to support the arts. This is vital work now, and it will remain important even if the current threat to federal funding passes.

The United States is distinguished artistically by its ability to mix its various cultures and artistic traditions. You think of the creation of everything from jazz to hip hop—from where else could they have come from but America? Our environment and culture are less tradition-bound, more porous and more free than in many other countries.

But the American system of using marketplace success as the measure of organizational success makes it a struggle to win the governmental, foundation and patron support that the arts need. This is especially true of community organizations, organizations operating in economically challenged areas, and organizations of color. Part of that goes back to the DNA of our country, where support for the arts is minimally valued and the arts are not necessarily envisioned as important to our culture.

One result of this legacy is that, while the U.S. has diverse arts organizations, it is very difficult for arts organizations to find funding for their core operations. Yes, there can be money for a sexy new project, or an experiment with engagement. And that money is important. But such one-off funding often is a better fit with the needs of a donor or foundation than with the needs of the arts organization or the community it serves.

There simply is not enough money devoted in this country to the two most fundamental needs in the arts: funding for individual artists, and funding for the arts organizations that bring the work of artists to audiences.

Long before the current challenge to the arts, most direct grants to artists were eliminated at the federal level. And general operating grants for arts organizations to do their work and pay their people are few and far between.

The core of the arts, and of arts engagement, is the relationship between the artist and the audience. If you can connect a strong artist with a strong audience, you don’t really need anything else.

As worried as I am about the present funding questions, I’m optimistic about the future of the arts. I witness such great resiliency and scrappiness from artists and arts organizations. And I see many young people who want to go into arts organizations, despite all the challenges.

People in the arts don’t let difficult circumstances keep us down. That is one resource that always runs deep within us. And today we are drawing more deeply from that well than ever.

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In retrospect, successful ventures often seem inevitable. But it has been my experience that excellent notions often fail to take hold and prosper, especially in the arts. For that reason, it may be helpful to provide a short history of the program, explore its rationale, and discuss some decisions that led to its ongoing success.

Originally called The National Poetry Recitation Contest, the now more evocatively named Poetry Out Loud is a partnership between three very different sets of organizations—the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), the Poetry Foundation (a private non-profit), and State Arts Agencies (state government bureaus). The NEA created the program’s curriculum and materials in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation, and it distributes them free to all participating schools.

Students choose the poems they wish to memorize either from the free classroom anthology or the Poetry Foundation’s special website, which offers 700 diverse selections. Beginning with classroom competitions, winners advance to individual school contests, then to city, regional, and eventually state finals. The state winners come to Washington, D.C. for the national finals.

There are prizes and certificates awarded to winners at each level, with the largest prizes distributed at the final competition. The national champion receives a $20,000 scholarship, with second prize earning $10,000 and third place $5000. The national champion and several finalists usually return to Washington to perform in the NEA’s literature pavilion at the National Book Festival.

Poetry Out Loud began at the NEA as a personal project. As the first poet ever to chair the agency, I was concerned about the declining audience for serious literature, especially poetry. Having grown up in a working-class home where poetry was enjoyed and recited, I had never accepted the notion that poetry was an elitist art whose pleasures were available only to intellectuals. I had long felt that poetry’s diminished popularity was at least partially due to the way it was taught. One can learn many important things about a poem through critical analysis and term papers, but simple enjoyment is usually not one of them.

When I look back on what created my own appetite and appreciation of poetry, two early experiences stand out. The first was my mother’s habit of reciting or reading poems. She was a Mexican-American raised in brutal poverty who had never gone beyond high school—exactly the sort of person the literary establishment usually assumes has no interest in the art. She knew dozens of poems by heart—Poe, Byron, Whittier, Tennyson, Kipling, and Shakespeare as well as mostly forgotten popular writers such as James Whitcomb Riley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Robert Service, and Eugene Field. It took me years to understand how deeply her favorite works connected to the private joys and sorrows of her life.

The second experience occurred a few years later in eighth grade under the tutelage of Sister Mary Damien, a small but formidable nun. One day early in the school year, she complained that she could hardly understand a word I said and told me to stay after school. There I discovered that I was not the only notorious mutterer. I found myself with three other boys—all of us Mexican-Americans raised mostly among non-native speakers.

We expected to be yelled at. Instead, the assiduous sister announced that we needed basic elocution lessons. Three days a week after school, she worked with us to improve our speech. The lessons soon took the form of listening to recordings of actors reciting poems and then memorizing and performing the poems ourselves. She pushed us to achieve the same clarity of speech and emotional expressivity as the actors. In that pursuit we failed notably, but we did improve greatly from our mumbly beginning. More importantly, we loved hamming it up and belting out Tennyson and Shakespeare. Without knowing it, she also nudged me toward a life of poetry.

What strikes me about both these life-changing encounters with poetry is that neither came from a book. They were primarily oral, auditory, and performative. Poetry was a social rather than solitary activity—something to be shared with family and friends.

For most students, the impact of participating in Poetry Out Loud is not solely or even primarily literary. The program resembles music or sports more than English class. Poetry Out Loud revives the ancient art of memorization, which was a central element of education until very recently. By studying and reciting poetry, students learn to master language as well as develop skills in public speaking. This practice also helps builds their self-confidence and expands their knowledge of literature.

The very process of reading through many poems to find the right ones to memorize can prove a catalytic experience for many students. Choosing the right poem may even help some students address inner needs of which they are not yet entirely conscious.

Poetry Out Loud began as an idea for a national recitation contest, but ideas are fragile things. To grow into something large and effective they must be developed carefully and subjected to ongoing critical evaluation. Any national program needs to be tested locally before it is expanded. The National Poetry Recitation Contest, as the program was initially called, first reached the public in early 2004 as two pilot programs in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Only one of the tests succeeded.

In Chicago, the competition was established as an after-school program. Without the regular structure of English class and the oversight of teachers trained in literature, the program lost focus. The participation and public response were so poor that the Poetry Foundation felt that the program probably did not merit further investment.

Meanwhile in Washington, Daniel Stone and Cliff Becker of the NEA conducted a pilot program in ten local high schools. Teachers took ownership of the program, and it proved an immediate hit with students. Participation exceeded our highest expectations with over 4,000 students entering the competition and teachers enthusiastically embracing the idea.

As the Washington finals approached, we learned of the poor results of the Chicago test. I phoned John Barr, the President of the Poetry Foundation, and asked him to fly out and see the Washington finals, which were to be held in the Folger Library’s elegant Shakespeare Theatre. We wanted him to see another city before making his final decision. Barr graciously agreed to come.

That evening in the Folger, the 10 finalists took their turns on stage reciting Yeats, Donne, Dickinson, Pound, and Brooks and the audience was reminded of the primal magic of poetry. There was nothing dutiful in the recitations. Some students performed better than others, but they all displayed a significant quality in common. The students quite literally embodied the poems, and the authenticity of their connection to the words was often startling.

The Folger audience was visibly engaged from start to finish, something I have noticed consistently at all Poetry Out Loud competitions. There is a special attention people—both competitors and spectators—bring to competitive activities. That evening I noticed something else that has struck me at every subsequent competition I have attended—namely how diverse the finalists were. They came from every cultural and ethnic background with a disproportionate number of first-generation Americans. They also comprised every type of high school kid—jocks, scholars, actors, debaters, slackers, class clowns, hipsters, and loners.

Having escaped one cancellation notice, the program soon faced another. The Arts Endowment felt that the best partners for the competition would be the State Arts Agencies, the official public institution in each state dedicated to arts and arts education. The state agency executive directors listened to the idea positively—not with great enthusiasm but with interest. But the state arts education specialists insisted that students would not willingly memorize poems, that teachers would reject memorization as an antiquated, even repressive technique, and that competition was anathema to arts education. They suggested that the NEA should create a program in which students would gather to read their own original poems without judgment—“no winners or losers,” one specialist said, “just sharing.” We worked very hard to build a consensus to go forward.

Once the national program got underway, the negativity almost immediately vanished. Initial participation was excellent with 100,000 students competing in the first year. Reacting to the competitive nature of the program, the media gave Poetry Out Loud the level of attention it usually bestowed on school sports. Many State Arts officials, whose good works had mostly gone little noticed for years, excitedly reported that mayors, state representatives, and even governors had become enthusiastically involved in the competition.

Poetry Out Loud demonstrates that large and ambitious literary programs of the highest quality are still possible. Properly planned and executed, they can succeed with both artistic integrity and broad democratic reach. There is now so much fatalism among American intellectuals and academics about the decline of serious literary culture. Poetry Out Loud demonstrates that a hugely popular program can be launched and sustained nationally—even on a relatively small budget.

Poetry Out Loud has also expanded the conventional strategies of literary funding. Before Poetry Out Loud, virtually all of the Art Endowment’s support for poetry focused on assisting its creation—fellowships for poets and translators, subsidies for presses and magazines, artists’ colonies, poetry organizations, etc. However, the audience for poetry has declined substantially. Between 1995 and 2002, for example, the percentage of the U.S. adult population who read any poetry fell by an alarming 30 percent, from 20.5 percent to 14.3 percent—almost one third of the audience vanishing in less than a decade! The 325,000 students who participated in Poetry Out Loud probably constitute a group almost as large as the core adult readership of American poetry. As the program continues across the next decade, its alumni will number in the millions.

Culture is not a marble museum; it is human energy. The true value of Poetry Out Loud is the sound of a young man or woman speaking the words of a poem he or she has chosen to learn by heart. Standing in a classroom or auditorium, among friends and family or strangers and competitors, the student momentarily becomes the embodiment of culture. Poetry has no better bridge between past and present, poet and audience.

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