The Kitchen Sisters at the Library of Congress, 2022
Dear Friends,
On Friday, May 2, The Kitchen Sisters — like hundreds of other arts and media organizations across the country — received word from the National Endowment for the Arts that our 2025 grant award has been terminated at the behest of the Trump administration.
Our $25,000 grant was for the production of a further round of stories for our public radio and podcast series, The Keepers, stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, historians, curators, and collectors — guardians of history, protectors of civil society and freedom of speech. This round of stories was in part focused on naturalists as keepers, the observers and preservers of the natural world.
These cuts by the NEA and NEH to The Kitchen Sisters, and so many of our colleagues, come at a time when NPR, CPB and public media are under deep threat and are being defunded. And last Thursday night, the President fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, the first African American and the first woman to hold the post.
These institutions — NPR, the NEA, the NEH, the Library of Congress — have been part of the bedrock of The Kitchen Sisters over the course of our decades-long careers as journalists, artists and historians. There would be no Kitchen Sisters without them.
The original inspiration for our Keepers series on NPR came shortly after the first Trump inauguration as his administration began to dismantle information on government websites about climate change, LGBTQ rights, the environment — to rewrite history or erase it outright.
Things are even more dire in 2025.
But now, like then, we see citizen archivists and community librarians springing into action and becoming part of the frontline in defense of the preservation of information, truth and culture.
Today we ask you, our community, to make a tax-deductible contribution to support the continued work of The Kitchen Sisters. Your support empowers us to keep telling truth-seeking, richly layered, highly produced stories that shine a light on people fighting for their communities and traditions, visionaries who spark the imagination and light the path to a better, more democratic world.
We also ask you to reach out to your representatives and make your voice heard. You can email them here.
We thank you, our community, for your unwavering support.
Forward ever,
Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva
The Kitchen Sisters
