Local veteran outreach organization Mil-Tree faces grant challenges, seeks local fundraising

Our local veteran outreach organization Mil-Tree is one of the many being affected by the National Endowment for the Arts rescinding and termination of grants offered to non-profits nationwide.

Mil-Tree relies on grants to make up more than 60 percent of their annual budget, and half of those funds come from the California Arts Council (CAC), who is partially funded by the NEA. To make matters more challenging, Mil-Tree’s National Endowment for the Humanities-funded partner, California Humanities, who have steadily supported Mil-Tree’s programming since 2021, has now suspended all grant cycles. And with the current national administration’s ban on certain words from grant proposals, Mil-Tree President Patrick Wallace says it’s been tough to proceed without compromising their mission for veterans—one of the most diverse demographics our country produces.

“To even qualify for some of these you have to go through the ringer of avoiding banned words in your in your mission, vision, or your “about” statement or in your grant proposal. There’s a list of hundreds of words.”

When asked for examples of words a non-profit must avoid, Patrick offered some common terms in our vocabulary: “women,” “justice,” “equity,” and “accessibility.” With Mil-Tree’s sole mission of ending veteran isolation through community inclusivity, they’ve had to change their approach to fundraising to keep their programming free. 

“You could go scrub all this stuff on your website and your grant proposals to deal with the current environment but that’s like sacrificing your values, your mission, and vision. What are you left with? You’re left to turn to other funding sources. So we’ve been spending energy with our board and with our executive directors looking into alternative funding streams, from private foundations, granting organizations that that aren’t the government. We know our people better than anybody else––somebody in Washington has no idea about what life is like out here for our vets and our community. So, if we want to stick to our guns and what we believe in, it pushes us  to just do direct fundraising with the community.”

With fewer grants available, Mil-Tree Executive Director Danielle Giudici Wallace says unfortunately competition has surged, with The California Arts Council’s 30 percent increase in applications during its latest cycle.

“The CAC had an unprecedented number of grants this year. They had 202,633 applications submitted and a total of over 129 million in requests and I can tell you that that is not in the CAC budget.”

Mil-Tree founder Cheryl Montelle added that Mil-Tree usually receives Yucca Valley’s Measure Y grant, but even that has become harder to rely on. 

“They had so many applicants, I think over 600 requests but all they had was $100,000 to allot to grantees and this year we didn’t make it and we’ve always gotten funding from them.” 

For those who want to donate to Mil-Tree to help keep their programming free and accessible to all, please visit https://www.mil-tree.org/