Louisville youth will be able to participate in after-school programs at a reduced cost, work with actors on stage, create community art events and attend theatrical performances through recently funded projects. Five Louisville-based arts organizations received $25,000 each in project funding through a National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) program.
The five selected organizations are:
- Louisville Youth Choir
- Looking for Lilith Theatre Company
- Louisville Folk School
- StageOne Family Theatre
- 300 for 300
This is the first time the city has been eligible to award Grants for Arts Projects dollars. Leaders with Louisville's Office of Arts + Creative Industries got the NEA funding and used an application process to select the five local grantees. Grant recipients are required to match funds for their grant.
The Louisville Youth Choir is using its funding to support its No Song, Unsung initiative which helps subsidize costs for choir participants.
“We give young, up-and-coming talent the opportunity to find their voice and then to use it on our stages,” Foster said. “But then through the confidence and the teamwork and all the things that they learn because of being involved with [Louisville Youth Choir] they're able to lead in life regardless of where life may take them.”
Looking for Lilith’s GirlSpeak/YouthSpeak program invites girls and other young people from marginalized gender identities to participate in a collaborative playwriting process.
“We kind of bring the structure and the framework, and they bring the content, and in the end, they create a play that lifts up their voices or whatever is important to them,” said Jennifer Thalman Kepler, the company’s co-founder.
The other project NEA money will fund is a production of the play “Book Women” which will combine the theatre company’s youth and professional ensembles.
The play is based on the true story of young librarians during the Great Depression who went out on horseback in teams to deliver books to the hollers in eastern Kentucky.
Some of the traveling librarians were as young as 13 or 14 years old, the same age as some of the Looking for Lilith participants.
Thalman Kepler sees the work of uplifting the voices of girls and other marginalized genders as increasingly important under the current political climate.
Making room for the voices of girls and other marginalized genders is increasingly important in the current political climate, Thalman Kepler said.
“We are starting to have conversations about what that means for our programming in terms of, how do we move forward in a way where we can continue to serve the youth that need these spaces, and do that in a way that is safe for them?” she said.
President-elect Donald Trump tried to eliminate both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities during his previous term. Both organizations give hundreds of thousands of dollars to arts organizations nationally. With Trump reentering office, the future of organizations like the NEA and NEH are in question.
Chastity Dotson is the founder and executive director of 300 for 300, a nonprofit aimed at giving middle school-aged girls of color a space to create.
Dotson, who started 300 for 300, in 2020 said she didn't have much institutional support when she created the organization. She's been successful in getting local and regional grants since, and said she's grateful for the federal dollars, too.
“We weren't relying on the government to tell us how we should love each other, how we should celebrate our culture, how we should express ourselves, how we should create our art, or who we could impact with our mission,” Dotson said.
300 for 300 will use its funding to help create a community art event called “Black Girls, Butterflies and the Magic of Dreams.” The project will allow 300 for 300 participants to create images of themselves that they feel truly reflect them and showcase them to the wider community.
“These stories may be the most important stories that are emerging in this time, because we are saying, listen for all the people who are voting to possibly have these voices silenced,” Dotson said. “These voices cannot be silenced in the same way that you cannot silence the thunder or you cannot stamp out the light of the sun, you cannot silence the voice of the people.”
This story has been updated.
