Top: City Cultural Affairs Director Shamain "Sha" McAllister. Bottom: Author Patricia Bellamy-Mathis reads to kids at the inaugural Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills neighborhood festival in 2025. The event received $1,000 from the 2025 Neighborhood Cultural Vitality Grant (NCVG) program. Lucy Gellman File Photos.
City Cultural Affairs Director Shamain McAllister has been figuring out how to stretch a dollar since before she started working in New Haven’s arts ecosystem almost a decade ago. Now, she’s learning how to stretch $190,000 of them on a municipal stage—when she’d like to have more than double that as a starting point.
McAllister, who has been in the role since October of last year, provided that check in earlier this week, as the New Haven Board of Alders moves toward a vote on Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed $733.3 million city budget. This year, the Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism receives $190,000, a number that will go primarily toward the city’s longstanding Neighborhood Cultural Vitality Grant (NCVG) program.
That number, which goes directly to the department’s 501c3 arm New Haven Festivals, Inc. is in keeping with previous city budgets—without the added cushion of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, $1.2 million of which allowed extra programming in the department from 2022 to 2026. It comes in addition to the $181,193 that covers department salaries for McAllister and Kim Futrell, who serve as the director and deputy director of cultural affairs respectively.
“I think what we are trying to do is stretch it like bubble gum,” McAllister said in a phone call Monday afternoon, just days after the final city budget hearing of the season. “I really think about what we can make happen, and then how we can help [with other resources]. It’s hard to navigate but we’re doing our best.”
As she sees it, she continued, it’s her responsibility to stretch those funds to pay contractors—who are often working artists and arts educators themselves—and support individual artists or organizations who apply to the NCVG, often with community-specific programs in mind. Since her appointment last year, McAllister has brought on curator Juanita Sunday and artists Gio Roper and Isaiah Providence to do graphic work for the department, and document cultural events like the inauguration of the city’s two newest poets laureate.
The hard part is that the demand—for space, for time, and especially for financial resources—far outpaces supply. In the past year, the department used NCVG dollars to support everything from spirited Mahjong pop-ups at a beloved local bookstore to an exhibition around New Haven’s homelessness crisis to the St. Luke's Steel Band for its annual summer camp with Music Haven (view a full list of 2025 recipients, of which there were 30 in total, here).
The 2025 performance of "Three Degrees," a collaboration between poets, visual artists and dancers that received $4,500 in NCVG funding last year. Prince Davenport File Photo.
But those dollars—or more aptly, the lack of them—also translate to programs that may sit in programmatic limbo until the right grant or donation comes through. This year, Futrell and McAllister said the department received 56 completed NCVG applications, for a total of $345,000 in requests (the recipients of those grants have not yet been finalized or announced). Of that, it will only be able to award about $100,000—less than a third of what people are asking for.
For McAllister, that process of elimination is painful, because New Haven is also her home. In the past decade, she’s built a career in the city’s arts organizations, including the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
In her current position, she sees and hears from artists who want to bring back New Haven’s vibrant legacy of jazz, see more public concerts on the New Haven Green, and have visions for creative and institutional collaborations that don’t always exist. Right now, it feels to her like there will never be enough dollars, even with private philanthropy, foundation funding, grants, and individual donors, to do that.
This year, budget season comes at a time when arts funding is more stretched, competitive and reliant on personal philanthropy than it has been in years. Three years ago, the department was able to award almost $200,000 in NCVG funding, and then give an extra $677,121 to cultural organizations using ARPA dollars that no longer exist. Meanwhile, grants from federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities are no longer reliable. It means that both artists and arts organizations are all competing for the same pool of funding.
“Sometimes I can’t give people what they’re asking for [with city funds], and I am encouraging people to think about alternative resources,” McAllister said. “We don't live in a country where you can fully rely on the government. I think you should be able to, but that's not the cards we're being dealt right now.”
Jasmine Nikole at the Harlem Fine Arts Show. Contributed Photos.
In the meantime, she’s trying to step into the gap—which is really more of a chasm—by offering time, collaboration, and vocal city support. The Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS), for instance, is one such example: the city didn’t have extra dollars to give artists like Jasmine Nikole and Rashana Miller, but spread the word about their journey, drumming up support along the way.
Roper, who the department hires to photograph events, helped shoot portfolio images for several New Haven artists doing the digital arm of HFAS, making their participation possible. And then, even on the eve of a snowstorm, several Cultural Affairs Commissioners made the trip to Harlem, bringing New Haveners across the arts along with them.
While the department covers a lot of ground with what it has, McAllister added, “I would love to see us in the figure of $300,000 to $500,000 in the future.”
Reached for comment Wednesday evening, Mayor Justin Elicker said that he too would love to dedicate more money to arts and culture in the city budget—if there were more money to go around. Already, he’s removed line items that feel essential, including $482,439 for emergency food aid and $30,000 for the New Haven Pride Center, to reduce budget costs. He’s trying to address a projected $13 million deficit at the New Haven Board of Education. He wants to see more funding for Elm City COMPASS and find dollars to keep an emergency shelter on Foxon Boulevard open for the people who critically need its services.
“I think we all try to do what we can to ensure that our arts organizations and the culture here continue to thrive,” he said, acknowledging the economic impact that the arts have in the city (he has called New Haven the cultural capital of Connecticut many times over, and reaffirmed that statement Wednesday).
Like McAllister, he noted that the city aims to help artists and cultural organizations in ways that are not only financial, like opening up downtown for CITA Park, the New Haven Night Market, and Black Wall Street Festival, which has grown from a modest cultural festival on Temple Street to an ebullient, sun-soaked celebration on the New Haven Green.
“One of the things I love most is the concerts on the Green in the middle of the day that I can hear from my office,” Elicker said (those are often a part of Arts & Ideas). He lauded the city’s cultural vibrancy, where he’s learned about new indie bands at the city’s Night Market, taken his daughters to performances at the Shubert Theatre (he had high praise for The Sound of Music, which came full-circle at the Shubert in March), and been delighted by some of the arts education that happens in the city’s schools, including in his eldest daughter’s band classroom.
Aleeki Shortridge as Aegeon and Na’Miah Williams as Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus in Common Ground High School's The Comedy of Errors. The Youth Festival of Shakespeare received $2,000 in NCVG funding last year. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
He also pointed to state dollars, including Connecticut’s line item funding for the arts, that have flowed to city organizations for years. Arts & Ideas, for instance, receives $414,511 in line item funding from the state. Music Haven, which has a budget close to $1 million, receives $100,000 to teach tuition-free music lessons to over 100 students. ARTE, Inc., which runs after-school and arts programming out of its Fair Haven hub, gets $20,735.
During last week’s budget hearing, Cultural Affairs Commissioners Rebekah Moore and Magaly Cajigas both encouraged the Board of Alders’ Finance Committee to reconsider the $190,000 figure, while also acknowledging the difficulty of having to balance a budget where food, housing, and public education are all extremely urgent needs. By the time they spoke, they had listened to hours of testimony pressing for both emergency food aid funding, money for the city’s Office of Climate and Sustainability, and a higher annual contribution from Yale University.
Moore, a podcaster and arts advocate who currently serves as program director at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, pointed to New Haven’s cultural vibrancy and recent prominence on a national stage as proof positive that those dollars would not go to waste. As a daughter of the city who is now raising her young son here, she’s proud of that distinction—and hopeful that she’ll one day see it reflected in the city budget. (In the interest of full transparency, the Arts Paper lives within but is editorially independent from the Arts Council).
Years ago, she noted, New Haven’s arts scene started its rise to national prominence: the New York Times named it one of the “Top 52 Places To Go In 2023,” with stops that included the Henry Street arts incubator NXTHVN and reimagined Hotel Marcel, which for years sat vacant as the Brutalist-designed Pirelli Building. Then in January of this year, Southern Methodist University’s DataArts Vibrancy Index listed the Elm City as the seventh most culturally vibrant place in the country. Just last month, USA Today listed the International Festival of Arts & Ideas as number three among its top 10 cultural festivals of 2026.
“It is imperative that this department with a staff of only two individuals sustain meaningful funding that will continue to allow this sector to flourish,” she said. “As an avid supporter of the arts through my professional career but [also] as an artist myself, I have seen just how impactful the arts are.”
She added that when artists flourish, it’s a sign of a healthy society more broadly—because it means that people recognize the sheer amount of labor that goes into making art.
“It’s a profession that provides housing, food, and other necessities for families,” she said. “The arts intersect with so many vulnerable populations that are here looking for support … the world sees us on a national scale. Let’s show them why we are indeed so vibrant.”
As an employee who works directly with artists at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, Moore has also already seen the strain that fewer overall dollars are having on arts organizations, including her own. From November 2025 through March of this year, all of the Arts Council’s full-time employees (including this reporter) participated in the State of Connecticut’s Shared Work Program, an initiative designed to prevent or delay furloughs and layoffs by providing temporary unemployment benefits. It meant that fewer of her own dollars went back into New Haven.
Cajigas, who for years has served on the all-volunteer board of Puerto Ricans United, Inc., echoed that enthusiasm for arts and culture, noting the importance of the sector as not just an economic engine, but also a teaching tool, through which people of all ages learn cultural competency and experience new perspectives. For years, she’s revelled in New Haven’s robust and diverse summer programming, including the city’s Puerto Rican Festival, New Haven Caribbean Festival, and Black Wall Street.
“All of these events uplift our community members, and specifically our community members of color,” she said. “Our Cultural Affairs Commission has believed in every aspect of these events, and its staff has been dedicated to helping nonprofit groups in the area make the events happen. Our commission understands the bandwidth of our municipality, however the arts … the cultural nonprofit activities and groups are what attracts thousands to New Haven year after year … it’s bringing in much-needed revenue into the city.”
Those dollars are even more critical as more federal cuts come for the arts, she added. She referenced the nearly 600 NEA grants that have been terminated in the past year, with new attacks of cultural programming that embraces any sort of commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
“I ask for your support in helping build the thriving arts community that we have here in New Haven, where creativity flourishes and artists from all backgrounds and cultures are respected,” she said, repping a shirt by self-described “artivist” Juancarlos Soto. “We need that support.”