One Saturday afternoon every spring, you can wander around the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn and see live music everywhere for free — jazz groups playing on brownstone stoops, drummers playing in gardens, big brass bands playing in streets temporarily closed to cars.

This year, if you happened to walk down Seventh Avenue around 3 p.m., you might have also stopped to join the crowd outside the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music listening to a group of elementary school kids playing trumpets, flutes and drums. 

Mila Suarez, 11, of Brooklyn, was on percussion, having a great time. 

“I didn't get as nervous, because we always have concerts at the end of every semester,” she said. “It was just really nice, because I got to do what I love in front of a lot of people.”

Suarez takes both percussion and guitar lessons at Brooklyn Conservatory’s Community Music Center, on the border of Cypress Hills and East New York. 

Her mom, Anclin Suarez, signed her up three years ago, as soon as she learned the center would be offering lessons to low-income families in the neighborhood at little to no cost. 

“From the get go, I mean, I didn't ask my kids,” she said with a laugh. “You know, otherwise we wouldn't be able, to be honest with you, to afford the type of music education that they were providing. And it was like a no-brainer.”

When Suarez was a kid in the Dominican Republic, she didn’t have any kind of music education.

“And so, though I listen to music and I like music, I never had access to it,” she said. “So that was something that I wanted to provide for my kids.”

The Community Music Center, and the heavily-subsidized private music lessons it offers, have been funded in part by a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brooklyn Conservatory had been hoping and expecting to have that money doubled this year. Instead, like arts organizations all around the country, it got a letter last month from the NEA saying its existing grant had been terminated, effective May 31. 

“The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” it read in part. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.” 

Going forward, the letter said, those priorities will include, “projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”

Dorothy Savitch, who directs the Conservatory’s Community Music Center, said the abrupt loss of NEA funding “puts tremendous pressure on our programs. We're going to do all we can. We're going to find a way. We're asking our other funders and colleagues and families and all our supporters to help us.”

So far, she said the outpouring of support has been huge. 

But even if private donors are able to bridge the gap for now, Chad Cooper, the Brooklyn Conservatory’s executive director, expects there will be few private funders willing to take chances like the federal government has. 

Historically, when a brand new program like the Community Music Center got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, “it said, the NEA thinks this is a great program,” Cooper said. “And that helps us attract other funders, and that telegraphs to a whole group of people, you know, a certain kind of credibility. And that helps us to ultimately, in the long run, make it more sustainable.”

In the absence of federal funding, Anclin Suarez is concerned about the future of arts education in low-income communities like hers.

“It's crucial for the development of our kids,” she said. “For their emotional health. What they get from it is not only discipline, it's a sense of community, it's a sense of peace within themselves, it's self expression.” 

“It’s a way to get away from reality,” her daughter Mila interjected.

“Whenever you're playing, like, your hardest, you forget that there's anything else in the world, and it's just really fun,” she added. “And you don't have to worry.”

At 11, she already knows she wants to keep playing music for a long time.