As a young child, at the age of five or six, I had a repetitive dream. In it I would hike up into the mountains with a band of fellow travelers, crossing a gap to arrive in a wide, beautiful valley. Sometimes there were just a few of us, sometimes dozens; sometimes just people, and sometimes wizards and hobbits. (At least once there were Care Bears in the crew.) I was already watching and listening to my parents read aloud a steady stream of fantastical quests, The Hobbit among them. It’s unsurprising that those stories found their way into my dreams.

But they didn’t just stay in dreamland. Years later, I would find myself on adventures sure to please my younger self, logging thousands of miles trekking on the Pacific Crest Trail and elsewhere. One summer I hiked across much of Southern Oregon with a group of fellow climate organizers, tracing the path of a proposed pipeline, determined to bring more attention to it to halt its harm to communities along the way (one of many actions that would, eventually, successfully prevent its construction).

This is the way stories shape us: from tales around a hearth to real-life quests that can change the world around us.

Stories inspire, help us make sense of strange times or sometimes just the stranger down the street, and build in us the power to imagine futures more varied than we might have otherwise dreamed.

This is why so many of us spend our lives telling stories. But stories need an audience. Those of us who have participated in the Community Storytelling Fellowship through Oregon Humanities have had a critical vehicle to share our stories — especially stories that haven’t always been shared as widely. The fellowship offers funding, mentorship, community, and that essential connection to audiences statewide — not just in urban hubs, but all over the state.

But this program, as well as many others run by its small but dedicated team, is at risk after the Department of Government Efficiency cut funding for Oregon Humanities from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). It’s not the only organization impacted: small presses and other arts and culture organizations around the country have had previously awarded grants withdrawn by NEH, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, throwing their work into disarray.

This refusal to fund the humanities and the arts comes at a moment when we need them most. In a world of content overload—made by humans and machines alike—where the skills to carefully read, interpret, and understand complex information is ever more critical, federal funding cuts are effectively eliminating local programs that model these skills. President Trump’s 2026 budget request calls for making these cuts permanent by eliminating the NEH and the other federal cultural agencies entirely.

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Such cuts threaten the real-world impacts that these programs have. Here are just a few of the successes brought about by the few short years of the Community Storytelling Fellowship:

• Meg Wade’s essay on cuts to intercity bus service, “Vanishing Lifelines,” brought attention to critical gaps in transit to Southern Oregon. Greyhound brought back stops in Medford and Grants Pass on its route along I-5 after the piece was published.
• Bruce Poinsette interviewed Black Oregonians for three essays and special episodes of the storytelling series The Blacktastic Adventure. An episode spotlighting discussions between Black native Oregonians and transplants was screened for the long-running discussion series Race Talks while his essay on Black history and placemaking in Eastern Oregon was featured on Rural Assembly’s Everywhere Radio podcast.
• Geneva Gano interviewed dozens of families who have come to Oregon as refugees because their home states passed anti-trans health care restrictions and shared their stories in an essay called “A Place to Be.”
• Fellows have won the Asian American Journalists Association Diversity and Inclusion Award (Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka and Jennifer Perrine) and the Banff Mountain Book Competition’s Mountain Article award (Astra Lincoln); been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (Astra Lincoln); and been named as finalists for the the Fields Artist Fellowship (Yanely Rivas) and the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize (Astra Lincoln).

This is what local humanities and arts funding provides. In addition to ensuring that local artists and writers can make their livelihood in part through their creative work, it literally gives us the chance to write our own futures.

Will you be a part of helping write your community’s story, or will you let the stories that are told about both our past and our future be determined only in the Oval Office? Now’s the time to decide.

This is the time to reach out to your senators and representatives to tell them you think local community arts and humanities programs are essential and to request that they preserve funding for the NEH and state humanities councils in 2026 and beyond. Not sure what to say or exactly who to call? See suggestions at oregonhumanities.org/who/advocacy/.

This isn’t all that you can do. You can help fund our work directly by donating to Oregon Humanities. You can also read, watch, and share the work at oregonhumanities.org and be part of this quintessential human act of creating culture through the making and sharing of stories.

Signed by:

• Meg Wade, 2025 Community Storytelling Fellow (Ashland)
• Caty Lucas, 2025 Community Storytelling Fellow (McMinnville)
• Meech Boakye, 2025 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Kevin Truong, 2025 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Jamila Osman, 2025 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka, 2024 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Geneva Gano, 2024 Community Storytelling Fellow (Seal Rock)
• Astra Lincoln, 2024 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Derek DeForest, 2023 Community Storytelling Fellow (Jackson County)
• Yanely Rivas, 2023 Community Storytelling Fellow (Salem)
• Melissa L. Bennett, 2023 Community Storytelling Fellow (Silverton)
• ke-ash (cultural name red-tailed hawk), 2023 Community Storytelling fellow (Portland)
• Stacey Rice, 2023 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Jennifer Perrine, 2022 Community Storytelling Fellow (Portland)
• Bruce Poinsette, 2022 Community Storytelling Fellow (Tigard)