Double Edge Theatre (DE) is a rural infrastructure organization rooted in artistic practice. Our mission extends beyond performance. We build and sustain the civic, cultural, and economic systems that allow artists, workers, and rural communities to thrive in place.
In 1994, DE moved from the Boston area to a 100-acre farm in Ashfield, a town of 1,800, in rural western Massachusetts. For more than three decades, DE has built a replicable model that counters the extractive forces draining rural towns of people, purpose, and possibility. By integrating housing, equity, food systems, land stewardship, and cultural programming, DE creates conditions that retain and attract residents, nurture local leadership, and sustain meaningful work.
At this moment, Double Edge—and the values that define who we are—is under threat. Like many arts organizations across the country, we are confronting the loss of crucial government support. While this loss is not in itself existential, the ripple effects are shattering. Federal funding cuts, along with near elimination of vital agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), are compounding the challenges already faced by an underfunded sector. These losses directly impact our ability to continue operating.
Family foundations, private philanthropic organizations, and individuals look to the government agencies as signposts for their giving. As states along with regional agencies lose their federal support, the trickle-down effect of loss has become exponential. While none of the above organizations individually contributed a significant portion of DE’s nearly $2,000,000 annual budget (which had been expected to grow to a much needed $2,500,000 this fiscal year), the impact on state and regional organizations, such as the Mass Cultural Council, Mass Humanities, and the New England Foundation for the Arts has compounded DE’s funding loss threefold.
The arts and culture sector is just one area where DE’s activities exist and from which we derive income. Our work intersects with food security, affordable housing, climate justice, and public health—all of which are also under threat. For example, major funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been cancelled—a loss to DE and our partner organizations of about $800,000–1,000,000 a year. This money, a significant proportion of our expected growth, is now gone. Until the Trump cuts, the EPA was working forcefully on climate justice’s intersection with the cultures of marginalized communities. At this point we will be lucky to have an EPA at all.
Much foundation giving has stalled or been modified, due to changing leadership and revised missions. We all need the larger foundations, at least, to stand opposed to the onslaught against nonprofits in general, including proposals to tax foundations. The pressure is mounting. It will not be possible for foundations, no matter their size, to cover all the losses from the public sector. Smaller foundations and family foundations are in a bind. Some insist they will continue to prioritize the arts, while others are moving exclusively into supporting social justice needs.
There is a palpable difference between rural and urban individual philanthropic giving. Double Edge’s home, Ashfield, is a rural western Massachusetts town. Individual donors in rural areas often do not make the arts a funding priority. Seeing food banks running low, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) in crisis along with the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, affordable housing at risk, and ICE savaging immigrants, individuals have hard choices to make with their limited funds. In urban areas philanthropists are more committed to supporting the arts as government and foundations withdraw. This urban-rural divide is a national crisis. However, it is exactly why the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the EPA, and state funding agencies (particularly housing and climate) have been and remain so important to the existence and growth of culture in rural areas. This is where DE was increasingly playing a role as Ashfield’s largest employer. DE is a significant economic as well as cultural force in our region. Ironically, because capital funds cannot be redirected, DE may be able to renovate some buildings but not have the money to support the core operations that are supposed to take place in those and other of our buildings.
Altogether, DE is facing a reduction of at least one-third of our annual operating budget. This has meant painful cuts to staffing and programming. The next 12–24 months will be critical. We are fighting to survive—and to continue standing alongside the communities we serve, who are themselves facing growing uncertainty and risk. We at DE are fairly certain we will survive. But by doing what? Paying at or even below living wages, tightening our program and production budgets, relying more on our partner programming. This restructuring will keep DE functioning for the next year and a half. After that, if things don’t radically change, we will have to severely restrict programs, personnel, and infrastructure.
I don’t even want to think of this future for DE after 43 years of growth. More upsetting than my own legacy is that the leadership transition from me and Carlos Uriona to the next generation of the DE ensemble is under threat. We are all working together to build scenarios for the future. But this future does not seem as bright as it was only a year or two ago. After years of projecting growth and developing a working model of living, making art, and exchanging with our community, we are now contemplating what might happen not only to our own theatre, but to culture and life in general under authoritarian rule.
