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91��ý cultural centers lose millions from federal funding cuts
Asian, Latinx, multicultural centers seek help from community donations

The BUENO Center was notified in September that it will lose more than $3 million in federal funding for decades-old programs — a pattern of federal funding removal that’s disrupting the work of many academic and research centers at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Bilinguals United for Education and New Opportunities Center for Multicultural Education aims to provide equitable education for diverse learners, and it relies heavily on federal funding to execute its programming. In September, the center received non-continuation notices for two grants, and the notices said the programs were not aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities.

The center lost $1.76 million from one grant, which was funding the College Assistance Migrant Program, a 35-year-old scholarship program to help Colorado seasonal farm workers pursue higher education. The center has also received federal funding to offer master’s programs to teachers in rural Colorado for 49 years, but that funding is now gone with the removal of its latest grant, a loss of $1.32 million. Both grants are from the Department of Education and part of a five-year cycle, and in each case the department stopped the funding partway through the five years.

91��ý leadership has provided funding to bridge the funding gap for now, BUENO Center Executive Director Tania Hogan said. But if the university had not stepped in, she said, the center would have had to initiate layoffs for nine staff and two consultants across the two programs.

“In the past, we have relied heavily on federal grants for all of our programming,” Hogan said, adding, “It feels frustrating to not be able to get something that we already applied for and were awarded.”

“(The programs) give education access to two communities that have historically been marginalized,” Hogan said. “It gives opportunities to students … wanting to access college and get the holistic and culturally responsive support that we know BUENO can provide. For the master’s program for the rural space, there’s a bilingual teacher shortage, and by being able to provide not only the master’s degree but also the endorsements, we will have more qualified educators in rural Colorado who are already making such important changes within their schools.”

Now, the center is relying on community support through foundations and donors to raise funds to keep the programs going.

Hogan said the BUENO center is not the only center on campus suffering from federal funding cuts.

“It’s right now impacting so many different centers and communities that it does become overwhelming,” she said.

As of Sept. 24, 91��ý had 57 federal grant terminations totaling nearly $30 million across campus. As of Oct. 2, 91��ý had 1,821 active federal awards it leads or is a subawardee on. When asked how many of those grants were regarding diversity or cultural programs, the university said federal funding impacts on the university continually fluctuate, so it cannot provide an accurate breakdown. There are more than 75 centers at 91��ý, which span a wide variety of academic fields and are organized around a specific theme or topic that conduct research, scholarship, creative work, education, outreach and service.

The Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder found out in September that it will lose $537,000 in federal funding it had planned to use for student fellowships, teacher salaries, Asia-related events and expanded programming for K-12 educators. The center focuses on the entire Asian continent, including East and West Asia.

The center was awarded two grants in August of 2022 that were supposed to continue through August of 2026. However, executive director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz got a letter from the Department of Education in September stating the center would not receive its final year of funding. The department said the programs do not advance American interests or values and that “the international and foreign language education grant programs are not a priority of the Administration,” according to the letter.

The grant funding allows the center to provide tuition and stipends for graduate students to study at 91��ý and for undergraduate students to complete summer programs domestically or abroad.

“We will not be able to make as many of those academic year awards as we had anticipated,” Salaz said.

The funding also helped the center provide information, lectures and workshops about Asia to anyone on campus and funded salaries for faculty who teach classes needed for students to obtain certificates in climate and society in Asia and Tibetan and Himalayan studies.

“Those positions are at risk after this academic year,” Salaz said.

The center provides Asia programming for K-12 teachers and community college instructors to help them have a deeper grounding in Asian history, culture and geography so they have more context for what they might be teaching their students.

“All of those will be winding down more quickly, and we won’t have the same capacity to be able to offer those kinds of programs,” Salaz said.

The Center for Asian Studies is working with the university to figure out how to provide funding internally, but the center is also looking at private grants and foundations and working with donors and alumni.

“We need to ensure that our students are not the losers because these programs support the American economy, they support national security,” Salaz said. “We are living in a world where there are impacts felt worldwide for things that happen. We’re not in a situation where the U.S. can pull back from the rest of the world and handle things separately.”

The center aims to prepare students to enter a global workforce, for example, to have the skills they need to interact with foreign tourists or to lead an American company into a new international market.

“I have always felt like this is really important work that we do here because I think it helps make sure that America is in a position to continue to lead in the future globally,” Salaz said.

The Latin American and Latinx Studies Center was unable to apply for a two-year, $250,000 grant from the Department of Education after previously being awarded it in 2020 and 2022, after the grant program had essentially been shuttered, Faculty Director Joe Bryan said. The center was also awarded a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities so the center could expand its programming in Latin American indigenous languages, but that award was rescinded in entirety in June.

“They’re not big awards in the grand scheme of what CU brings in in terms of federal (money) … so we’re small potatoes in that respect, but it was absolutely essential to us for offering courses for undergrads, especially,” Bryan said.

Students enrolled in the certificate program may find that classes they need to take aren’t available, and the center may not have access to the funding needed to develop research and curriculum. The center also plays a role in the university’s mission to serve all of Colorado by engaging with Latinx students, a demographic that makes up a significant portion of Colorado’s population.

“It threatens our core mission, which is to be an interdisciplinary home for Latin American and Latinx studies on the CU campus,” Bryan said. “In particular, it threatens the viability of our undergraduate certificate in Latin American and Latinx studies because we needed these grants to pay for the instructor who teaches those courses.”