Nonprofit Focused on Restoring Cultural Sites Affected by State Department Cuts to Foreign Aid

The U.S. Department of State’s recent cuts to foreign aid grants is expected to affect New York nonprofit World Monuments Fund (WMF), which has lost seven grants totaling more than $800,000, the Art Newspaper reported Tuesday. 

The cuts affect restoration efforts in Algeria, Benin, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ukraine, and Iraq. The broader policy shift, part of the White House’s “America First” agenda, which seeks to move resources away from international projects, has led to the cancellation of nearly half of all foreign aid grants, which the government has claimed cuts $60 billion in funding that used to go abroad.

Over the last twenty years, the U.S. State Department has seen WMF as a diplomatic tool, giving the group around $25 million in grants towards heritage projects. 

(It is unclear the extent to which WMF’s efforts to document and protect at-risk heritage will be stifled or if the projects will be supported through other private funding.)

The $800,000 constitutes only a small part of the organization’s holdings. According to tax filings, as of 2023, the organization reported that it oversees $70 million in assets, with 97 percent of its revenue coming from grants. The group’s assets have increased by 47 percent over the last two election cycles, with its revenue doubling sine 2016 from 10 million to 20 million.

Among those previously approved efforts is the restoration of Old Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, a historic institution undergoing transformation into a music school. Another is the conservation of Cairo’s Takiyyat Ibrahim al-Gulshani, an Ottoman-era site that has also served as a training ground for Egyptian conservators. In Ukraine, the organization’s Ukraine Heritage Response Fund has done assessments of cultural sites damaged since Russia’s invasion and created a database of 1,400 at-risk sites.

The Geneva-based International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (Aliph) also lost a $645,000 U.S. grant meant to digitize Ukrainian archives. With UNESCO estimating a $9 billion restoration cost for Ukraine’s cultural sites, Aliph is organizing a conference in Geneva this May to explore alternative funding and support.