Indiana Arts & Culture Nonprofits Facing Fear and Uncertainty
Mary Clark, International Marketplace Coalition Executive Director
In the four square miles surrounding the closed Lafayette Square Mall on the Indianapolis westside you can find over 130 cultural restaurants. Many of these restaurants are run by recent immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds. Indy’s Global Village, which highlights art and artifacts of the countries represented by these restaurants, is managed by the International Marketplace Coalition (IMC).
“We have a museum that celebrates over 180 countries, and everything in this museum has been donated to us by people from all over, whether they traveled abroad or they've come from abroad,” said the IMC’s executive director, Mary Clark. Founded in 2010, the IMC attempts to leverage the cultural diversity of local businesses to improve the economy of this challenged area.
But Clark has found 2025 to be a unique challenge. A federal grant that supports their organization has been put on hold, due to Trump administration budget cuts and/or policy changes.
While Clark didn’t want to identify this particular grant, she was willing to go on record with other funding challenges she has run into.
“I will tell you that I was at a luncheon today, and some of the vendors that were at the luncheon that normally would support our work—they still want to support our work—but we have to figure out ways to rewrite the scenario,” Clark told Indy Correspondent in a face-to-face interview on Feb. 28. “We can't say that we're putting on an immersive event to celebrate the Latino community. We can no longer say that anymore. We can't say we're putting on an immersive event to celebrate the Asian community.”
On January 20, 2025, the first day of Donald Trump’s term in office, the president signed an executive order eliminating funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) funding at the federal level.
One of these actions was Executive Order 14173, dubbed "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” This action aimed to shut down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government.
Just as concerning for Clark, if not more so, is the general cloud of fear that has descended on the environs surrounding Indy’s Global Village. One of the signs of this fear was evident (as of late February) at the nonprofit museum’s front desk: wallet-sized cards advising people of their fourth and fifth amendment rights under the Constitution. These are the same cards being made available across the country by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) to communities across the U.S. where residents are feeling increasingly targeted by the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies for deportation.
“It bothers me that we're labeling people,” Clark said. “It bothers me deeply. It bothers me that people are now afraid to step outside and breathe air because they have been othered... This country is beautiful because of the diversity that now calls the United States home. That's why we're beautiful.”
Clark also said that many migrants, who might not have come into the country legally, or who have Temporary Protected Status in the country because their homeland is being ravaged by civil war, or who are in school under a visa, or who are in school under a temporary visa, are paying taxes and “are doing extremely wonderful things for the United States.”
Clark isn’t the only nonprofit leader looking around and wondering how to navigate the fraught environment of Trump 2.0
One of the organizations where staff are trying to get their bearing is the Indy Arts Council.
The Arts Council coordinates with some of Indy’s biggest events to create synergies that expand reach for local artists and stimulate the local economy.
One of the events that the NCAA was working on, behind the scenes, was the men’s basketball tournament in Indy in 2021. With the assistance of the Arts Council, approximately 600 artists assembled 23 days of outdoor art, performances, and other activities associated with this tournament.
The way Indy Arts Council facilitated this was by paying local artists through grants to help bring their artwork to more individuals and communities around the city through initiatives like the Public Art for Neighborhoods and Public Art for All programs.
The Arts Council generally distributes city funding while its sister organizations Indiana Humanities and the Indiana Arts Commission distribute federal and state funds. The Council has received funding in the past from federal sources for overhead or projects it completes on its own as a public-facing organization.
This year, the Arts Council has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to expand their Arts for Awareness program, which supports local arts organizations that develop and implement arts-based substance use disorder prevention, education, and recovery programs in Marion County, according to former interim CEO Molly Wilkinson Chavers. (Judith Miller became CEO in late April.) However, she said another NEA grant—in the amount of $50,000—to provide support to artists and nonprofit organizations in Marion County is currently under review. If this grant is received, then awards would be made based on applications received and recommendations from grant reviews, Chavers said.
Chavers stated that this grant “would be a new opportunity for the Arts Council” as the organization normally distributes city funds exclusively. But whether or not they receive the funding at all is an open question.
Panoramic scenes of Indy’s Global Village and its Surroundings Photos by Dan Grossman
In response to Donald Trump’s executive orders, the NEA has instituted restrictions on grant applications, banning federal funding for DEI-centered programs. Accordingly, the Arts Council’s grant application is presumably being scrutinized per these restrictions, Chavers said.
According to Chavers, news of cuts to funding availability to nonprofit arts organizations and the artists they serve—or threats to such funding—is arriving on multiple fronts, and is becoming difficult to keep track of. “Several of us on the team got a few phone calls here and there, like, what the heck is going on?” she said.
The staff at Indy Arts Council decided to address this uncertainty head on. They put up a page on their website titled Understanding the Impact of Executive Orders and Proposed Legislation on Arts and Culture.
The web page, which went online Feb. 11, is updated regularly, with sections linking to legal assistance resources and other information.
If you are, say, an arts administrator wondering how to protect your diversity and inclusion efforts in this fraught funding environment, you can find links to The Protecting and Advancing IDEA Pro Bono Initiative on the page. If you are fearing your friends and neighbors, whether artists or not, might be targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because of their ethnicity or skin color, you can find information on how to obtain the aforementioned ILRC red cards explaining their fourth or fifth amendment rights under the constitution.
But the site might also be helpful if you’re an artist or patron of the arts, wondering what’s going on, or wondering how you can help.
“We wanted to strike the tone of this is what we know,” said Chavers. “This is what we know to be true. This is not legal advice by any means, but it is hopefully a way for arts organizations, and particularly the small to mid-size organizations that really don't have the resources to hire an attorney or to have those conversations on a regular basis with board members who are attorneys… to provide a place… that was actual up-to-date information, and we've just tried to keep track of that together as a small group.”
In addition to keeping track of Trump’s executive orders, the web page tracks legislation in the Indiana Statehouse that has the potential to affect funding levels for arts nonprofits. You can track legislation like Senate Bill 289, subtitled “Nondiscrimination in employment and education” which would actually ban diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in state government and schools, headed now to Braun’s desk.
Developments on the state level also include the budget bill that, among other stipulations, proposes a 5% across the board funding cut to state agencies and higher education in the state, among other funding cuts that, combined with federal cutbacks, could mean less funding available for the arts in the state. The budget will become law and take effect on July 1 if Braun neither signs or vetoes it before May 6.
Loss of federal funding affects Indiana Humanities, Vonnegut Museum, other organizations
But Mary Clark is hopeful that the public will open their hearts, and wallets, to do what they can to support arts and culture in this difficult time.
“We need funding, if your readers are truly interested in supporting organizations like mine that are celebrating the world,” she said.
