Creating Humanities Communities

Posted by National Endowment for the Humanities on December 19, 2016

NEH Accepting Applications for Creating Humanities Communities

The National Endowment for the Humanities is accepting applications for its Creating Humanities Communities program.

The annual program provides matching grants to help stimulate and proliferate meaningful humanities activities in states and U.S. territories that are underserved by NEH’s grantmaking divisions and offices. Grantees will use the funds to establish and undertake new humanities programs.

The goal of the program is to support the making of connections between organizations that foster community cohesion on a local or regional level. Applicants may define community in a variety of ways (by focusing, for example, on a place such as a village or town, or on a common interest or a common theme), while the programs that the cooperating institutions carry out together must aim to enhance the importance of the humanities in people’s lives.

Projects to create a humanities community might include, for example, linking a public library and a nearby community college in a collaborative effort to research, write, and produce a series of video biographies of the town’s important personalities (to be presented in public programs at the local historical movie palace); several railroad museums in a state joining forces to write a transportation-based curriculum module for use in fourth-grade social studies classes; three Native American tribes working together to establish a cultural heritage trail highlighting important sites and collections; a veterans’ group and a high school joining forces to develop intergenerational family programs at local historic sites; or a public radio station and philosophy department at a local college hosting public programs that commemorate the hundredth anniversary of a town’s paper mill with discussions of the industry and its ethics.

Three-year grants will be awarded in one of four amounts of the applicant’s choosing: $30,000, $60,000, $90,000, or $150,000. The requested grant amount should be appropriate to the needs and fundraising capacity of the applicant.

Applicants must form collaborative partnerships with at least two and at most five institutions. These partnerships may involve organizations such as public libraries, cultural centers, museums, historical societies, colleges (including community colleges) and universities, archival repositories, historic houses, school districts, civic centers, or other cultural entities.

See the NEH website for complete program guidelines and application instructions.

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15, 2017

https://www.neh.gov/grants/challenge/creating-humanities-communities