St. Louis Public Radio: "Spike in grant funding didn’t keep pace with lost revenue for Illinois cultural groups"

Arts and culture organizations that received funding from Illinois Humanities have lost $24.3 million in revenue during the coronavirus pandemic.

A wide-ranging report released by the agency, which funds organizations with annual budgets of less than $1 million, states the nonprofit funder distributed a record $2.4 million between 2020 and 2022, largely due to federal pandemic relief funding.

But the total was dwarfed by the impact of factors like limits on public gathering and ongoing difficulty prompting audiences to return to venues and events — even as one national survey finds more people cite the importance of the arts now than before the pandemic.

“I think there's a lot of uncertainty about the revenue side and a lot of certainty about the demand side,” said Illinois Humanities Executive Director Gabrielle Lyon...

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