Quick Take
Two prominent museums in Santa Cruz County are adapting to the announcement that federal funds they have depended on have been canceled by the Trump administration. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and the Children's Museum of Discovery are both facing significant cuts and are planning to turn to foundation and individual support to make up the shortfall.
The much-publicized Trump administration funding cuts have arrived for Santa Cruz museums.
The Museum of Art & History (MAH) and the Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery (MOD) announced on Monday that long-established federal grants have been canceled at both institutions.
At the MAH, executive director Ginger Shulick Porcella said that annual federal grants totalling $250,000 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities have been canceled. Porcella said the MAH had received about half of that funding already in 2025, but that it would be withdrawn going forward for the rest of this year and into the future.
“Our [annual] budget is about $1.5 million, so it’s a huge chunk of money,” she said.
Porcella’s immediate strategy is to turn to foundation and private funding to make up the shortfall: “I’m hopeful, in my discussions with foundations and other museum directors, that someone will step forward, because it is sort of a crisis right now. Everyone is in crisis mode.”
In the meantime, she said, she has instituted staff furloughs, reducing hours and salaries from full-time to part-time for the top five employees on the MAH roster, including herself. (The museum has a staff of 20.) “We are not canceling programs,” Porcella said. “We’re not reducing hours. We’re not laying off staff.”
The NEH grants had been earmarked to help fund the upcoming “Princes of Surf” exhibition at the MAH, scheduled to open in July. The IMLS grant funds were intended for a long-term project to digitize and make available a collection of archival photos from Santa Cruz County.
The Children’s Museum of Discovery in the Capitola Mall also lost an IMLS grant that, executive director Rhiannon Crain said, would have amounted to about $50,000 a year over the next three years. The MOD has an annual budget of about $450,000.
“We’re really small,” said Crain. “But about 50,000 people walk through our doors every year. So, we do it on a shoestring budget, and a loss of $50,000 a year is significant. It just means we’ll be providing fewer services and have to do what we normally do less robustly.”
She said that the IMLS grant, which was to be funded beginning in July, was to be used for professional development for her small staff and her board of directors. (The MOD’s staff amounts to 4.6 full-time equivalents and it has nine board members.) Like Porcella, Crain said she will turn her fundraising energies to the private and the local arena.
“I’m going to have to build up my capacity to ask for money locally,” she said. “If we can’t get it federally, I’m going to start talking to people locally who are interested in having robust science education for children in the county.”
The MAH’s Porcella said that foundation giving is down as well, so she realizes the timing of turning to them for funding is not ideal. “This is not the first time the museum has dealt with something like this,” she said. “We’ll just continue to fundraise and do what we do best. I really do believe that people and foundations will step forward. It’s just that people are in shock right now. No one really knows quite where to put their resources to make the biggest impact. But no one wants to see the museum close. We have a great community of supporters and if things got really really bad, I think people would rally to support us. So we’re not worried.”
Crain said that she and her organization had been keeping an eye on the Trump administration’s budgetary activities and were bracing for the worst. But, she said, the public might be shocked at the direct impact of those cuts.
“I don’t think that the vast majority of our audiences understand that these sorts of policy changes on the federal level are making direct impacts on our local organizations,” she said. “We want people to understand that delicate dance we’re doing with the federal government to provide these services.”
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