EDITORIAL: Humanities spending boosts quality of life

She’s worked for Republican leaders such as Sen. Richard Lugar, Gov. Mitch Daniels and President George W. Bush.

But Bechdol believes the National Endowment for the Humanities is not the place to start trimming — let alone wiping out its budget entirely, as the president proposes.

The agency’s $148 million funding represents a mere .001 percent of the federal budget, Bechdol said. She believes it’s money well spent on quality of life.

Bechdol is the chair elect of Indiana Humanities, which last year received $805,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its work. Next year, Bechdol will become the council’s chair.

Humanities are not Bechdol’s main line — agriculture is her expertise. She works as director of agribusiness strategies for the Ice Miller firm of Indianapolis and as president and CEO of AgriNovus Indiana, a nonprofit agency promoting food and agriculture technology and innovation in the state.

A few years ago, Indiana Humanities invited Bechdol to take part in its statewide Food for Thought campaign.

“It brought so many people and communities together, because it told the stories of food and how it connects people,” from family farms to 4-H to agribusiness, Bechdol said.

After her first involvement with Indiana Humanities, Bechdol said, “I was hooked. It’s such a great organization.”

Soon, Indiana Humanities invited Bechdol to join its board of directors, and now she stands poised to become its chair in 2018. The organization is led by executive director Keira Amstutz, a Hamilton native.

Indiana Humanities has a simple mission that can be summed up as “think, read, talk,” Bechdol said. “I’m really passionate about the importance of those three words.”

She added, “The impact of what they’re doing in so many small communities across this state to get out this message of humanities and people connecting to one another is really impressive.”

In the past two years, Indiana Humanities awarded grants totaling $23,000 in northeast Indiana. The money helped sponsor 51 events in 25 communities, with more than 10,000 people participating.

Local projects included the Noble County ALL-IN Block Party at Albion in 2016, free sets of books about Indiana for the public libraries in Auburn, Fremont and Garrett, and other activities with libraries in Angola, Auburn, Fremont, Garrett, Kendallville, LaGrange and Waterloo.

Supplementing the federal money it receives, Indiana Humanities obtains nearly half of its budget from private foundations, donors and businesses for a total of $1.5 million per year.

Bechdol has heard the argument that humanities are nice, but support for them should come entirely from private contributions. She has a ready answer.

“Federal funding for the humanities validates that history, cultural understanding and the arts matter to all people,” she said. “If we relied only on private-sector funding, our reach would be limited to the desires of the donors.” That could restrict the variety of programs.

“Private funding is often very narrowly focused and would likely limit the broad statewide work we are able to do, and would mean that many Hoosiers would not have access to humanities programming,” she added.

With the talk about eliminating humanities funding, she said, “This is an important time for us to speak up a little more loudly … about what the humanities really do, the value of them.”

Indiana Humanities is encouraging Hoosiers to contact their congressional representatives with a message that defunding humanities will not rescue the budget, but it will reduce quality of life. We hope our senators and representatives will “think, read and talk” carefully about those choices.