The Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis is granting $3.7 million to arts organizations across the region as federal cuts and fewer corporate sponsorships shrink funding sources.
RAC is distributing funding to 122 groups, including Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the National Blues Museum, Cinema St. Louis, Laumeier Sculpture Park and the International Institute of St. Louis.
The funding comes as corporate philanthropic support for arts organizations is declining across the region, said Vanessa Cooksey, RAC president and CEO.
“Several of our large corporations have shifted their philanthropic priorities away from the arts, some of our large corporations have shifted their philanthropic priorities outside of St. Louis,” Cooksey said.
International Institute officials said they’ve seen slightly fewer sponsorships for this year’s festival compared to other years. The organization received $8,000 from RAC for its annual Festival of Nations, which is in August in Tower Grove Park.
“We're down not too much, probably about 5 to 10% from last year,” said David Gonzalez, International Institute’s vice president for development. “There are a couple more that I hope will come through, that we will finish just about where we were last year.”
About one-third of the festival’s funding comes from corporate sponsorships, Gonzalez said. Those sponsorships, along with the $8,000 grant and individual donations, keep the festival free.
Federal support has also waned amid cuts by the Trump administration to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. RAC created a crisis response fund earlier this year to support arts groups that lost NEA funding. It also created a fund for arts groups damaged by the May tornado.
Cooksey said the new funding opportunities better prepare RAC for future crises.
“Since I've been at RAC since November of 2020, there's literally been one crisis after another,” Cooksey said. “When the next thing happens, we can immediately open up a special grant for artists and arts organizations that have been impacted by disasters.”
This round of grants also marks the first time in two years without federal coronavirus relief funds. The organization's primary source of funding comes from the hotel/motel sales tax, but the city allocated about $10.6 million to the commission in 2023 to support arts organizations after the coronavirus pandemic shut down in-person events.
But there’s encouraging news for RAC and the organizations it supports.
“If you were to just track hotel/motel grants, you would see an increase in the amounts year over year,” Cooksey said.
The International Institute typically uses funding from the commission to support musicians and other artists who perform at the festival, Gonzalez said. The institute had to furlough about 60% of its staff earlier this year following other federal cuts. Some of those cuts directly impacted the organization’s events team. The institute paused festival planning for a few months earlier this year as leaders questioned how it would return.
But those cuts also led the institute to pause most refugee resettlement programs, he said.
“At the end of the day, our priority is the new arrivals, the immigrants and refugees that we serve,” Gonzalez said. “Once those [cuts] happened, we had to shift our funding, we had to make sure that we had funding there for educational purposes, workforce placement, English as second language, citizenship classes, all of those things.”
Gonzalez said that despite the changes and cuts to programs, the institute has seen an increase in new donors so far in 2025 compared to 2023 and 2024.
“The festival will continue to go on because, frankly, I think [it’s] a celebration of what makes us great, and that's our diversity and multiculturalism is something that our community not only needs, but longs for,” Gonzalez said. “When we when we talk to people about possibly not doing the festival, we did see an outpouring of people saying, ‘You guys need to do this.’"
