Lesser-known artists who focus their projects on minority communities, but who have fewer connections in Orange County’s arts and culture scene, could soon face a harder time securing government arts grants moving forward.

The Orange County Arts & Culture Advisory Council, developed more than two decades ago to help promote the local arts, quietly suspended the activities of two committees earlier this month that were each tasked with doling out government grants specifically for local arts projects focused on promoting diversity and sustainability.

Both committees — the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee and the Sustainability Committee — were each given just a small portion of the Arts & Cultural Affairs’ budget, taking up little space. In response to recent federal directives from the Trump administration, however, the advisory council moved to indefinitely suspend the two committees’ on May 14.

A January executive order issued by President Donald Trump, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” requires federal contractors and grant recipients to certify that they don’t operate “illegal” DEI programs, with potential False Claims Act liability for non-compliance. That’s according to a spokesperson for Orange County, who shared as much in a statement to Orlando Weekly on the suspensions.

“Orange County receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds to support other departments’ work,” the spokesperson explained. “The applications, reports, and other documents for those grants will include this certification requirement, and it cannot be agreed upon if this work continues.”

So, in plainer speak, they believe a lot of money for local government operations is potentially at risk.

Both suspensions were approved in 8 to 1 votes, with just one advisory council member voting in opposition. Council members also voted almost unanimously to strike the word “diverse” from the Arts & Cultural Affairs Office’s goals and mission statement.

Terry Olson, a longtime arts instigator who spent 23 years first forming and then leading the Arts & Cultural Affairs Office, told Orlando Weekly in a phone call that stakeholders in the arts community “understand” the county’s actions. Olson, a former performer himself, retired from his job as the office’s administrator last year.

“We don’t want them to lose all of the resources that they get because of resisting an administration that seems to have no problem being vengeful,” Olson admitted. “They can see it happening that, if we use these words, we’re looked at suspiciously, [and] it could jeopardize things.”

So there’s understanding, he said, “even when there’s disgust.”

There’s understanding for the move, said former Arts & Cultural Affairs head Terry Olson, “even when there’s disgust.”

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The Arts & Cultural Affairs Office, a small agency of just three staffers, was first created in 2001 to help support the growth of Orange County’s arts scene. The office works with its 13-member advisory council to recommend how its funds for the arts, as well as cultural institutions like museums, should be invested. The office contracts with United Arts of Central Florida, a local nonprofit, to administer arts-related funding programs.

According to Jessica Evans, president and CEO of United Arts, their organization has an economic impact of $265 million annually, serving 125 nonprofits that have reached 2.7 million visitors and locals across the Central Florida region.

“We are your connection to helping artists and organizations to be a catalyst to create the greatest impact,” Evans told county commissioners during a recent county commissioners board meeting.

The office’s budget — funded largely by tourist development tax funds — has grown from about $500,000 at its inception to roughly $15 million today, according to Olson.

“We’ve added a lot of citizens, a lot of arts organizations to serve those citizens, and it’s been a very important support for our community,” he said.

The advisory council’s DEI and Sustainability committees were each responsible for doling out just a small portion of the office’s total grant funds — about $100,000 each. According to the county, those funds will remain with Arts & Cultural Affairs and will be used to support pools for other grant programs that support arts and cultural projects and programs like the Orlando Ballet, the Orlando Fringe, Descolonizarte Teatro, Open Scene, Enzian Theater and more.

Still, Olson fears that it’s smaller artists in the community who focus on the representation of minority communities who will be impacted the most.

“When government support is withdrawn, who it hurts are the small guys,” he said.

Smaller organizations and artists, he explained, “don’t have the resources” that larger, more established organizations do.

“They don’t have anyone that’s full-time on their staff, and so the DEI work really helps those organizations have some resources to serve their community,” Olson said. “And we want to serve everyone in our community.”

Reversing course

Orange County is a relatively blue, LGBTQ-friendly spot in a red state, with a diverse (yeah, we said it) population of about 1.5 million people, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Roughly one-third of county residents are Hispanic or Latino, and nearly a quarter were not born in the U.S.

The mission of the arts’ DEI committee, broadly, was to “advocate for the increase of diversity, equity and inclusion in arts and culture,” according to a now-defunct government webpage accessed through the Internet Archive. Goals of the committee included the suggestion of strategies “to increase equal access to funding opportunities to underserved arts organizations led by people of color” and advocating for the investment of “necessary resources” for diverse artists and groups.

The mission of the Sustainability committee, on the other hand, was to “pursue and implement the long-term sustainability and resiliency of the arts and cultural community, and its place in the natural, built and human environment of Orange County.” Its goals involved ensuring Orange County arts and culture support environmental sustainability, innovation, and “accessible” arts and cultural education.

Olson told Orlando Weekly that the county moved to create the Sustainability Committee under former Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, as the county began to grow and saw merit in promoting more environmentally sustainable practices across all county departments.

The DEI Committee was created later, after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 and the national reckoning with racial inequity and disparities that followed.

“The council was interested in helping some of these smaller organizations that really focus on diverse communities to kind of try to catch up with the mainstream,” Olson explained, referring to well-established (and well-connected) arts organizations in the community like the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and Orlando Opera.

Across Florida, arts and culture is a $50 billion industry — representing 3.2 percent of the state economy. The industry statewide supported 307,615 jobs (some of them are even union) as of 2023.

Still, it’s not just the federal government that has threatened the arts’ livelihood in Florida. Florida’s elected leaders have slashed public funds for the arts multiple times over the years, despite the creative industry’s ability to generate billions of dollars in revenue each year.

Just last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed $32 million in arts and culture funding across the state, affecting every nonprofit arts group that had planned to apply for state grants. When prompted for an explanation, DeSantis specifically blamed the annual Fringe festival, claiming it was “a sexual festival” that shouldn’t be supported by public funds.

“There is anger about that,” said Olson. “Anger that our state doesn’t understand the value [of arts] and will give tax breaks to corporations while arts employees are being laid off because the arts organizations that they work for aren’t able to afford them anymore.”

Under the Trump administration (DeSantis lost his own bid for U.S. President last year), the federal government has swiftly moved to enact an anti-DEI agenda and downsize the federal government through efforts to cut its federal workforce and spending.

According to a tracker from the Center for American Progress, the Department of Government Efficiency has cut over 700 grants and government-funded property leases in Florida, ranging from grants for research into mental health in minority communities, to initiatives involving community-based violence prevention and skill-building for Latinos and Hispanics into the construction workforce.

On DEI specifically, theTrump administration ordered the elimination of DEI initiatives and programs within the federal government, describing such programs as “radical” and “wasteful spending.”

The Trump administration has also sought to gut DEI initiatives in public schools and higher education institutions, vowing to cut off funding for educational institutions that do so, anyway. Notably, Florida lawmakers similarly passed a law (SB 266) to eliminate DEI programs in public colleges and universities in 2023 — a law that has drawn legal challenges from Florida educators and protests by students.

More specific to the arts community, Trump recently conducted a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center’s traditionally bipartisan board up in D.C. and moved to cancel grants issued by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in early May, according to NPR.

Since its founding in 1965, the NEA has awarded $5.5 billion in grants, serving as the largest arts funder in the U.S., despite its small size as a federal agency. A 2022 fact sheet from the NEA shows that the agency’s budget represents about 0.003 percent of the total federal budget.

According to a tracker shared by the Authors Guild, the cancellations of NEA grants have affected organizations like the Central Park Summer Stage in New York City, the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, the Miami Music Project and the Boston Center for the Arts. The United States’ participation in the prestigious Venice Biennale is in disarray, if not danger of not happening at all. The move to cancel grants was swiftly condemned by a variety of arts organizations, ranging from labor unions like the American Federation of Musicians and the Actors Equity Association to the American Folklore Society. A group of senior officials within the NEA resigned just days later.

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings warned in a recent board of county commissioners meeting that the county may be forced to “reassess” some of its spending in part due to anti-DEI initiatives from the federal government.

“I do see some headwinds based upon some of the DOGE work that is being done at the federal level here within the state of Florida,” Demings said, in reference to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, “and the passage of new legislation and executive orders that have come out that are likely going to put all subdivisions of the state and local governments into a position to reassess some of what we’re doing as it relates to cultural tourism and the diversification of what we’re doing.”

Part of what makes Central Florida “great,” Demings added, is “the fact that we have the opportunity to offer this diversity of experiences here.” Still, he said, “with recent executive orders and some directives that have come out, they lack the clarity and the specification to give guidance to what our federal and state government has deemed as to be prohibitive uses of different revenue streams, of public dollars.”

Support the arts in Central Florida

United Arts, the nonprofit that Orange County’s Arts & Cultural Affairs Office works with to administer arts-related funds, recently launched a new website to highlight Central Florida’s arts and culture scene. The online guide can be found at artsinorlando.com.

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