The Connecticut Arts Alliance, a statewide organization that has focused on legislative advocacy in the arts and culture sector for the last 21 years, has closed its doors due to increasing financial strain.  

The work of the nonprofit continues, however, as its executive director, Rufus de Rham, moves the organization’s assets and mission into CT Humanities, and shifts his focus to the legislative session ahead. 

Earlier this month, de Rham confirmed that CAA has formally dissolved, and moved its mission and remaining $60,000 in financial assets to CT Humanities. He cited significant federal cuts to the arts and humanities, as well as a rapidly shifting legislative landscape and shrinking pot of funding for nonprofit arts organizations, as the reason for CAA’s closure.      

De Rham was the second paid executive director of the organization; prior to 2020, CAA operated as an all-volunteer board. He will now serve as CT Humanities’ inaugural director of cultural advocacy and community engagement. Two of CAA’s former board members, Connecticut Main Street Center Executive Director Michelle McCabe and Northwest Connecticut Arts Council Director Stephanie Burr, have also moved over to CT Humanities to serve on its board. 

“It’s not an easy decision to dissolve an arts organization, but our primary concern was continuing the work,” de Rham said in a phone call last week. “This will, I think, allow us to make a stronger advocacy push for the greater cultural sector. We have a federal administration that is fully dismantling arts and culture funding in this country, and we’re going to keep doing the same work we’ve been doing.”

“We saw an opportunity to really reimagine the cultural sector,” said CT Humanities Executive Director Jason Mancini. “Rufus is a really delightful human being, a wonderful partner and a total policy wonk. We wanted to see how we could co-create something.” 

De Rham said that the decision to move beneath CT Humanities’ umbrella was one of both practicality and survival — if not of CAA’s formal 501c3 itself, than of its mission. For just over five years now, CAA and CT Humanities have been working closely together, during the tenure of CAA’s first two paid executive directors. 

De Rham took over at the organization in January 2025, around the same time that President Donald Trump took office and announced a freeze on federal funding that the administration later rescinded. Like former CAA Director Brett Thompson before him, he worked closely with CT Humanities from the beginning of his tenure, as well as with the Connecticut Office of the Arts (CoA), a state agency that lives within the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD). 

He was one of the first to hear when the administration’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashed National Endowment for the Humanities funding through a series of rapid-fire grant cancellations and significant staff reductions in April 2025 (a judge later ruled that those cuts were unconstitutional, but much of the money has not yet been reinstated, or taken over a year and an arduous request process for organizations to get back). Even before similar cuts came for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) the following month, impacting hundreds of organizations across Connecticut, de Rham knew it was only a matter of time.  

It was clear to him immediately that CAA would have to change its operating structure to stay alive (at CT Humanities, Mancini was having the same kind of discussions; he described the DOGE cuts as “existential” and “catastrophic” in a phone call last week). And it was also clear to him, in a budget year that included a proposed 17.5 percent cut to the Connecticut Tourism Fund, that the advocacy work CAA was doing was vital to the sector.

“We were like, ‘How do we restructure and reorganize?’” remembered de Rham, whose $65,000 salary was the organization’s most significant expense. By that time, federal pandemic relief funds were gone, and individual and foundation grants were few and far between. 

“We tried to think through multiple ways, including returning to an all-volunteer board and fundraising for advocacy work and a lobbyist, which CAA used through the firm Gallo-Robinson. 

Then they looked at how aligned the mission was with the work CT Humanities was already doing. 

A period of transition  

De Rham and members of the board navigated that decision during a legislative session that was already feeling the strain of federal cuts. In addition to the proposed cut to the state’s Tourism Fund, proposed reductions to dedicated line item funding added up to a total of slightly over $2.2 million for the sector, he told members in an email in February 2025. 

De Rham, working closely with Mancini, was able to activate people from across the sector, from small educational nonprofits to large theaters that reliably receive line item funding in the governor’s budget each year. On CAA’s website and in frequent email updates to members, he provided tutorials on how to write public testimony, with anecdotes about workforce development, statewide economic impact, and the cultural vitality of a city or town that has a thriving arts landscape. 

CAA, rallying support around the issue, successfully fought that 17.5 percent reduction, and the Tourism Fund received a $16.1 million allocation in 2025. Likewise, DECD’s line item funding remained even. 

Hope Chávez, executive director at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, remembered how grateful she felt to have someone walking her through the process after she stepped into her first regional leadership role in 2023. 

“Rufus and I have had a very fluid line of communication about advocacy in the last two and a half years. Just quick calls to say, ‘I’m tracking this bill, are you tracking this bill?’” she said. She remembered the number of times in the last two years that she’s come to Hartford to testify, or tapped 10 fellow arts workers to do the same, specifically because de Rham made the ask. “It’s so nice to have someone who can credibly answer those questions.”

“I’m very happy that someone with Rufus’s skill set in particular and existing legislative relationships is the one, at least for now, to build this machine inside CT Humanities,” she added. “There are so many people in our sector that want to burn it all down, and I would offer as a provocation back to that, composting. It [CAA] didn’t go away. It’s being composted back into the soil.”

In the 2026 legislative session, CAA and CT Humanities — still collaborating informally — focused their efforts on items including House Bill 5443, which if passed would have allocated half a percent of the state’s meals tax to the Connecticut Tourism Fund (the two organizations also supported Senate Bills 02 and 55, which also would have allocated portions of the same tax to the Tourism Fund). 

Together, they prompted over 200 arts leaders, as well as working artists, educators, and cultural conveners to present verbal and written testimony in support of the bill. While the bill ultimately did not move forward, it was the closest the sector had ever gotten to that allocation from the meals tax, de Rham said. 

In many ways, it was also proof of concept that their collaboration, which included coordinated outreach efforts and step-by-step guides on how to write testimony, worked. In August, CAA’s board voted to dissolve the 501c3, and move a remaining $60,000 in assets over to CT Humanities. The organization formally dissolved in September of this year. 

Over multiple conversations last week, both de Rham and Mancini framed it as a transition that will benefit both the sector and the cultural workers within it. If the arts and humanities don’t change how they are talking about their work, they said, they risk losing funding as the dollars available continue to shrink. Meanwhile, both agreed that arts policy often intersects with housing, healthcare, and public education in ways that they have not yet broached during the legislative session.

As CT Humanities’ first director of cultural advocacy and community engagement, de Rham will be responsible for talking to legislators, tracking proposals, spearheading advocacy efforts, and breaking down policy decisions in a way that people across the sector can understand them. He said he’s excited to start having conversations about the basic needs that artists have, including affordable housing and healthcare benefits for artists at a time when both have become prohibitively expensive.  

“The primary focus will be state funding,” de Rham said. “This will allow us to have a much broader advocacy base because there’s different support and connections [across the arts and humanities]. The concept is it’s all a huge tent and umbrella.” 

He added that CT Humanities is on comparatively stable financial footing. Currently, the organization’s annual budget is about $5.6 million, a number that includes $2.4 million from the State of Connecticut, $600,000 from America 250, and $675,000 from the NEH — only about half of the funding that Mancini would have expected over a year ago. 

In addition to its work regranting many of those dollars, it’s able to afford a lobbyist in Hartford, which gives the organization a larger advocacy footprint.  

An evolving arts landscape

The move to bring together the work of both organizations represents yet another chapter for CAA, which had been in flux for just over two decades. For the first 15 years of its existence, CAA existed as an all-volunteer board comprising arts leaders and administrators from across the sector, from representatives from the state’s regional theaters and large presenting houses to those running midsize ballet companies and small after-school arts programs. 

In those first years, “it was more of a roundtable and working group,” de Rham said, adding that he wasn’t part of that early work, but has heard about it through the organization’s board members and institutional history. In 2005, CAA incorporated as a 501c4, which it remained until 2020 (that 501c4 still exists; it underwent a name change and is now the largely-dormant Connecticut Arts Advocacy Network).  

Its advocacy work remained limited, largely because its board members were all working to keep their own arts organizations, including several of the state’s eight Direct Regional Service Organizations, or DRSOs, financially afloat. Then around 2018, the board launched a strategic planning process, with the goal of hiring a paid executive director and forming a 501c3. 

In 2018, as several new gubernatorial candidates emerged from the woodwork, CAA piloted “Create The Vote,” an initiative with the Connecticut Alliance for Arts Education (CAAE), designed to get political candidates talking about the arts. The advocacy push worked: Create The Vote held a candidate forum on arts and culture in New Haven that July, and then-incoming Gov. Ned Lamont included sector professionals on a gubernatorial transition committee focused on arts, culture and tourism that winter. 

Create The Vote, with CAA, gave arts advocates a framework to start talking critically about the sector’s significant impact on Connecticut’s economy and the cultural health of its towns and cities, still a talking point that advocates reach for in their testimonies. Currently, teh sector brings in $13.9 billion dollars and supported 53,000 jobs, according to research from the National Association of State Arts Agencies

In 2020, Brett Thompson became its inaugural executive director, a transition that also prompted CAA to incorporate as a 501c3 for the first time, just as members had discussed in those strategic planning meetings . Thompson was already familiar with the organization: he had served on the board for several years during his tenure as chief operating officer at the Greater Hartford Arts Council. 

In a legislative landscape transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic, from remote public hearings to an infusion of pandemic relief funding for the sector, Thompson started communicating with both arts workers and legislators around specific policy items, from proposed legislation to specific funding proposals on behalf of the sector to a continuation of Create The Vote that braved the remote pivot.   

In 2022, he began working with CT Humanities and the Connecticut Tourism Coalition to build a “Funding Roadmap” inspired by a $30.7 million CT Cultural Fund that CT Humanities had launched the year prior, through an infusion of pandemic relief funding and partnership with the Connecticut Office of the Arts (CoA), a state agency that lives within the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD). 

“Most people understand what the arts are, but most people don’t understand what the humanities are,” said CoA Director of Arts, Preservation and Museums Elizabeth Shapiro. For her, the Cultural Fund was the beginning of a collaborative chapter that she now thinks of as crucial to the health and growth of the sector. 

The roadmap, which proposed a historic $58.5 million boost to arts, culture, and tourism, became a cornerstone of CAA’s policy work, helping to shape what became House Bill 6692 during the 2023 legislative session. That overall figure — which did not ultimately pass — included $17.5 million for the CT Cultural Fund, that number included $8 million for arts, culture and tourism line items, $5 million for CT Humanities and the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and $3 million for sector-wide workforce development.   

“Brett really grew the organization and set all the infrastructure in place,” said de Rham, who served on CAA’s board during his tenure leading the Northwest Connecticut Arts Council and later the Warner Theatre in Torrington. Each year, for instance, Thompson created a guide to which bills CAA supported, and communicated that information to member organizations who used it as fuel to testify in Hartford. 

A path forward 

Reached for comment, several CAA and CT Humanities supporters praised the decision to combine the work of the two organizations. McCabe, who first got to know CAA as a political candidate in the state’s 28th Senate District (that’s Bethel, Easton, Fairfield, and Newtown), and joined its board for the first time in 2021, called it a collaboration that will ultimately both benefit and unify the sector. At the time of the vote to dissolve, she was serving as CAA’s board chair. 

“This sector has been so devastated by the change in administration at the federal level,” she said. “Recognizing the realities of the situation [we’re in], it just made sense to pull all of those efforts together rather than to figure out how to do it alone.”

“I think it’s really honoring the spirit in which the organization was founded,” she added. “We are enlarging the tent through this. I see this as part of an evolution.”

CT Humanities Board President Frank Mitchell, who served for years as the executive director of the Amistad Center for Art & Culture, also pointed to the decision as one that benefits the sector when it is itself in transition. In the past six years, he’s watched organizations struggle as they receive pandemic relief funds, spend those funds, and then brace for federal cuts as they realize that they are suddenly cash-strapped. 

Or, in his words, “it’s starting to rain and there are not a lot of umbrellas.” Mixing metaphors, he framed it as getting in a bigger, necessary-to-survive vessel at a time when a shark is headed toward the boat. 

“Given the economy and given what’s happening in D.C., it’s a great time to be thinking about advocacy and to have this redoubled effort,” he said. “We’re at a point where we really do need advocacy across the board, and we need to be giving people a reason to be their own best advocates as well.”