This year’s Down in the Reeds Festival has been canceled after the organizers failed to secure two grants they relied on in previous years to pay artists and cover other event-related expenses.

Held since 2019 (with a 2020 break due to Covid), the festival celebrated D.C. artists of all genres who use music as a form of healing. The free event typically occurred at The Parks at Walter Reed with this year’s originally planned for Oct. 14.

Listen Local First DC (LLF) — the D.C.-area live music brand responsible for the festival — notified fans about the cancelation in a social media post last week.

Listen Local First’s co-founder Chris Naoum told DCist/WAMU that the organization typically receives grants through HumanitiesDC and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) to pay artists and cover the cost of equipment, tents, stages, and all of the infrastructure that goes into producing a successful event.

However, due to some payments and filings missed during a restructuring of Think Local First, LLF’s nonprofit partner that received $18,500 from the CAH, Naoum says the festival was unable to access the funds. (The District’s Clean Hands law prevents individuals or groups that owe money to the D.C. government from receiving its grants.)

For the past two years, LLF hasn’t received a HumanitiesDC grant. Naoum says his organization had some federal funds left over from a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant it received in 2020 but had to raise more than $25,000 just to host last year’s festival.

“Unfortunately, if you rely on grants, this is how it is,” Naoum says.

Naoum adds that this year’s cancellation speaks to a larger hurdle facing the city’s arts and events sector, which is that underinvestment means organizers have to chase grants that can be hard to qualify for, and aren’t a guarantee.

Many small local venues and independent promotors like LLF haven’t qualified for the city’s Bridge Fund, which provided pandemic relief to small businesses. Naoum says the reasons included having less than $15,000 in assets, not having a brick and mortar, and having already received some relief funds.

With the rising costs of running an event-based company, the situation facing the city’s entertainment sector as it continues to recover from the pandemic may be more dire than many locals realize.

“I know five of our small, independent venues [in D.C.] that are in the 100 to 300-capacity range… July and August were the worst months they’ve ever had on record since these establishments opened,” Naoum says. “Some of them are over 20 years old.”

This sentiment is backed by local venue owners, including Sandra Basanti, founder of Pie Shop and executive director of the D.C. Nightlife Council. She calls this situation a “crisis that people aren’t aware of” adding that a number of small-venue owners are contemplating selling their businesses or significantly cutting costs.

“‘D.C. is Open’ isn’t the full picture,” Basanti says, referring to the hashtag promoted by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration. “It’s a big freaking deal if we lose all our local clubs.”

Naoum works with the National Independent Venue Association and says he’s seen other jurisdictions pump money into local entertainment companies during the pandemic — rather than trying to attract, say, Live Nation-produced events. Illinois, for example, recently invested more than $22 million in grant-funded projects to promote live events and tourism in Chicago and statewide.

In D.C., some small venues are bleeding as much as $30,000 a month, per Naoum: “Even though everything’s open, the live music community is still struggling.”

LLF’s other programs still haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic — the decade-old Kingman Island Bluegrass & Folk Festival still hasn’t returned since before 2020. Funk Parade, which LLF promoted until The MusicianShip took the reins in 2018, has been downsized in recent years, Naoum says.

As for Down in the Reeds, Naoum hopes to bring it back in 2024 and says they could potentially organize some live music this fall with the little money LLF has left. However, he knows other local event organizers who have financial hurdles of their own, so he’s been speaking with them to see how he can help.

“All these independent festivals are part of the same ecosystem,” says Naoum. “If one goes down, we’re all screwed.”