The New Hampshire Theatre Project set out to make people uncomfortable, touring the state with plays on difficult topics.

Its current project, called “Aftermath,” tells the story of a firefighter experiencing post-traumatic stress and how it affects his family, job and relationships.

The twist? After each show, the audience gets to ask questions of a panel, discuss the themes and share their own experiences. There, people can find resources to learn more about the issue or get help.

“We’re not in the healthcare or the social service industry, but what we see as our job is to get people talking about this and communicating with each other about it,” said Genevieve Aichele, the Theatre Project’s community engagement director.

The creation of those “elephant-in-the-room” events depended on grants from New Hampshire’s State Council on the Arts. But after Republican lawmakers nixed the Council’s grant funding this year, Aichele said the program’s future is uncertain.

Six of the council’s seven employees, who administered and coordinated those state-funded grants to local arts organizations, were laid off on Thursday as a result of state budget cuts. The council and its volunteer members still exist — a reversal from lawmakers’ initial proposal to nix the group entirely — but the executive director, Adele Sicilia, is now the only employee left on payroll.

Mary McLaughlin, who chairs the Council on the Arts, said the whole process has been “not fun.”

“It’s very difficult to say goodbye to six incredibly talented, smart people who have lost their jobs for nothing that they did wrong,” she said.

Republican lawmakers, when cutting funding for those positions and grants, said the arts qualified more as a want than a need in a tight budget year.

“This just didn’t reach the level of necessary funding,” Rep. Dan McGuire, an Epsom Republican who played a leading role in crafting the state budget, said at a committee meeting in March. “It’s a want-to-have, a nice-to-have kind of thing but not a must-have, in my opinion.”

Sal Prizio, executive director at the Capital Center for the Arts in Concord, said that line of thinking is out of date. He argued that the arts provide a valuable economic stimulus to local communities and should be treated as such.

“It’s not a gift,” Prizio said. “It’s an investment that you get a return on.”

In an effort to avoid shutting down the council altogether, Sanbornton Republican Sen. Tim Lang engineered a new fundraising mechanism.

The state now allocates $150,000 from its general fund each year to cover Sicilia’s salary and miscellaneous expenses. The rest — up to $700,000 — will be raised through the sale of business tax credits. The state-run Granite Patron of the Arts Fund will allow qualifying businesses to purchase donations to the council and, in turn, receive a tax credit for half the amount they bought.

The Council can sell up to $350,000 in those tax credits, Lang said, but outside of that, it can raise as much money through donations and benefactors as it wants.

Lang said he doesn’t disagree with advocates that the Council on the Arts is important. But if tasked with a choice between funding developmental disability services or the arts, he said, he has to choose disability services — so he found what he said is a creative solution that doesn’t rely on state money but still lets people invest in the arts.

“Culture’s important for the state,” Lang said in an interview. “The question was: we’re in a tight budget year and where to find funds.”

That money isn’t secured or guaranteed yet, however, so arts organizations across the state are scrambling for other funding sources to supplement their operating budgets and programming. Some, like the Alliance for the Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, plan to reach out to loyal and new donors. Others will search for alternative grant programs from private charities.

Executive director Lars Hasselblad Torres said the AVA received a $15,000 Public Value Partnership grant that supports its operations, including art classes for those who don’t have “deep pockets” and its Art Lab, which provides a few hours of arts engagement each week for adults with disabilities.

In Hopkinton, the local historical society questioned whether it’ll be able to continue its Abenaki Trails Project next year without financial support from the council.

The group received $6,000 in 2023, according to executive director Heather Mitchell, which funded an exhibit on the Abenaki tribe and people at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture in Peterborough, visited by 650 people. The money also helped Hopkinton bring Abenaki artists to visit local schools — a program so successful that the historical society received another grant from the council to revive the same project this fall.

“It was wonderful because it allowed us to bring in these artists that otherwise would not be able to come into the schools,” Mitchell said. “The society, we don’t have that kind of money in our budget in order to be able to do that.”

Leaders of several organizations anticipate that changes at the council will lead to a more competitive market when applying for grants elsewhere. And, unlike the council, most charities aren’t dedicated to supporting the arts exclusively.

“They’re looking at places that do immediate work, like a food pantry or a homeless shelter, and so they think of the arts as not as important,” said Aichele, from the Theatre Project. “People don’t think of the arts as something that connects communities and healthcare in that sense, so it’s just going to be more difficult.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.