La Raza Galería Posada is in a situation similar to many local arts organizations, needing to raise about $25,000 in the next two and a half months to stay open.

“We receive a lot of our funding from grants, but those have gone down significantly since about 2005,” said Executive Director Marie Acosta.

La Raza Galería Posada has been a culture center and art gallery for the past 40 years. It started as a bookstore, then morphed into a gallery. Acosta said it currently serves to give exposure to up-and-coming Latino and Chicano artists.

Private donors are being called upon to help raise the funds, and Acosta said that the organization has a mailing list of about 2,500 people, so if each person donated $10, it would provide the needed funds.

A call put out a couple of weeks ago was encouraging, she said.

“We got a lot of checks, and a lot of them were more than $10, and even more than $20,” she said. “The problem was, we didn’t get 2,000 of them.”

With arts organizations lacking funding across the board, La Raza Galería Posada’s story isn’t unique, and Acosta said she hopes to see the type of success that the Sacramento Opera saw when it needed to raise funds from private donations earlier this year.

Funding for La Raza Galería Posada, which in years past has ranged from $50,000 - $70,000, dropped to about $30,000 this year as government funds for nonprofit organizations were cut, and other funding sources decreased.

One organization that has given grants to La Raza Galería Posada is the Sacramento Region Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that distributes grants based on community needs.

“I think La Raza is increasingly meeting the changing demographic, but also becoming relevant to our mainstream community as well,” said Priscilla Enriquez, chief giving officer for the Sacramento Region Community Foundation.

She added that data for Sacramento shows that there is no majority ethnicity, and Latinos are a growing population in the area.

Another organization that has supported La Raza Galería Posada is the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission.

“We’ve supported them for about 30 years, and we really believe in what they do,” said SMAC Executive Director Rhyena Halpern. “It’s a really important community-based organization, and they do really high-quality programming.”

She added that the inclusion of performing arts, films and other media has expanded the organization’s offerings in recent years.

“We have quite a few Mexican folkloric dance groups, but La Raza is really what we have here in terms of visual and performing arts,” Halpern said. “They’re the main Chicano, Latino and Native American arts organization, and they’re really important.”

One example of the expanded offering of La Raza Galería Posada, Acosta said, is the recent Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) celebration, which allowed approximately 40 families to build traditional Day of the Dead altars at no cost.

“It’s not just Latinos and Chicanos who come in here,” Acosta said. “We are a resource for students throughout the area who are learning Spanish or studying history and lots of other subjects.”

For the month of December, La Raza Galería Posada will house 14 vendors selling handmade items with Latino/Chicano roots in its Mercado Navideño, or Christmas market.

If the money is not raised by the end of January, Acosta said La Raza Galería Posada will be forced to go on hiatus, but she hopes that doesn’t happen.

“There is strong hope that we will raise the money,” she said. “I know a lot of people care about us and like having us here, and the economy is bad, but they have been willing to give when they hear about our situation.”

La Raza Galería Posada is located at 1022-1024 22nd St. in Midtown. To donate, follow the link on the organization’s website.

Brandon Darnell is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press. Follow him on Twitter @Brandon_Darnell.