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Posts Tagged ‘grants’

NEH Awards $17M in Awards for 208 Humanities Projects

From the National Endowment for the Humanities:

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced $17M in grants for 208 humanities projects.  The funding will support projects, fellowships for scholarly research, the creation of exhibits, digital tools and the preservation of humanities collections and reference resources.  Institutions and independent scholars from 42 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support.

A list of the Mid-Atlantic region’s 57 recipients after the jump, full list of recipients available here.

Read more.

NEH Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions

From H-Public & neh.gov:

The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Preservation and Access has offered Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions for more than a decade. These grants help small and mid-sized cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, museums, historical societies, archival repositories, town and county records offices, and colleges and universities improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections.

Awards of up to $6000 support preservation related collection assessments, consultations, training and workshops, and institutional and collaborative disaster and emergency planning. Preservation Assistance Grants also support education and training in best practices for sustaining digital collections, standards for digital preservation, and the care and handling of collections during digitization. Institutions may request funds for a preservation assessment of digital collections.

NEH does not fund digitization or the development of digital programs in this grant category.

All applications to the NEH must be submitted through Grants.gov. See the application guidelines for details.

You will also find sample project descriptions, sample narratives, and a list of frequently asked questions. The deadline for applications is May 1, 2012.

Small and mid-sized institutions that have never received an NEH grant and those considering projects in digital preservation are especially encouraged to apply. For more information, contact the staff of NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access at 202-606-8570 and preservation@neh.gov

Elizabeth Joffrion

Senior Program Officer

Division of Preservation and Access

National Endowment for the Humanities

1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Washington, DC 20506

202-606-8570 (fax) 202-606-8639

 

Mid-Atlantic NEH Grant Winners

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced today $21 million in grants for 215 humanities projects.

This funding will support a wide variety of projects, including research fellowships and awards for scholars, the preservation of humanities collections at smaller institutions, traveling exhibitions, and humanities initiatives at historically black colleges, institutions with high Hispanic enrollment, and tribal colleges and universities. Grants awarded today will also support training for museum and archive staff to preserve and enhance access to their collections, while NEH Challenge Grants provide support for long-term humanities activities.  NEH announced awards in three special grant programs: Bridging Cultures Through Film, Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges, and Bridging Cultures Implementation Grants for Public Programs.

Mid-Atlantic Regional grant recipients:

Delaware: 2 awards, $595,000

University of Delaware, Preservation Education and Training, Project Director: Debra Norris.  Project title: Graduate Education in the Conservation of Historic and Decorative Arts, Objects, Furniture, Textiles, & Photographs.

Winterthur, Winterthur Museum, Challenge Grant, Project Director: Lois Price.  Project title: Endowing the Director of Conservation Position at Winterthur.

Washington D.C.: 9 awards, $1,242,439

Association of American Colleges and Universities, Bridging Cultures Community College RFP, Project Director: Caryn McTighe Musil.  Project title: Difference, Community, and Democratic Thinking: and NEH Bridging Cultures Prjoect.

American University, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Richard Sha.  Project title: Imagining the Imagination: Science and British Romanticism, 1750-1832.

George Washington University, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Gayle Wald. Project title: A History of “Soul”, the First Nationally Televised Program to Showcase the Black Power Movement.

Heritage Preservation, Preservation Education and Training, Project Director: Lori Foley.  Project title: Alliance for Response: A National Program on Cultural Heritage and Disaster Management.

American Historical Association, Bridging Cultures Community College RFP, Project Director: Robert Townsend.  Project title: American History, Atlantic and Pacific, An NEH Bridging Cultures Project.

Office of the Secretary, Office of Public Records, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Clarence Davis.  Project title: Preservation Assessment and Purchase of Monitoring Equipment and Storage Materials to Preserve Archival Collections.

Foundation of American Institute for Conservation, Preservation Education and Training, Project Director: Eric Pourchot.  Project title: Professional Development for Conservators: Providing Preservation and Access for the Humanities.

Unstaffed Independent Scholars, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars: 1. Project Director: Jules Witcover.  Project title: Evolution of the Vice Presidency in Politics and Governance.  2. Project Director: John Perpner. Project title: Political and Social Activism in African American Concert Dance: Eleo Pomare and the Black Arts Movement.

Maryland: 2 awards, $55,885

Bowie State University, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Katherine Hayes.  Project title: Preservation Assessment of University’s Archives and Special Collections.

University of Maryland, College Park, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Robert Levine.  Project Title: The Lives of Frederick Douglass.

New Jersey: 6 awards, $564,929

Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, NEH on the Road, Project Director: Nancy Maguire.  Project title: NEH on the Road: Wild Land.

Drew University, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Edward Baring.  Project title: The Spread of Phenomenology in Europe During the 20th Century.

Community College Humanities Association, Bridging Cultures Community College RFP, Project Director: David Berry.  Project title: Advancing the Humanities at Community Colleges: An NEH: Bridging Cultures Project.

NJ Institute of Technology, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Zeynep Celik.  Project title: The History of 20th Century Controversies Over the Possession of Antiquities.

Princeton University, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Christian Wildberg.  Project title: A New Text and Translation of the Hermetic Corpus, a Collection of Greek Theological and Philosophical Texts.

Montclair State University, Bridging Cultures Through Film, Project Director: Fawzia Afzal-Khan.  Project title: Female Singers and Muslim Tradition in Pakistan from 1947 to the Present.

New York: 27 awards, $2,777,882

Albany Institute of History and Art, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Tammis Groft.  Project title: Preservation Assessment for Archival Collections.

SUNY Research Foundation, Albany Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Karen Brown. Project title: Digital Preservation Readiness Assessment to Preserve Special Collections and Archives.

Bard College,  Challenge Grant, Project Director: Roger Berkowitz.  Project title: Endow Junior Fellowships, Humanities Lecturer, and Humanities Programs of The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

Western New York Public Broadcasting, Bridging Cultures Through Film, Project Director: David Rotterman.  Project title: The Railway that Built a Nation.

CUNY Research Foundation, Queens College, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Karen Strassler.  Project title: Media and Political Communication in Post-Suharto Indonesia.

Hastings Center, Challenge Grants, Project Director: Erik Parens.  Project title: The Hastings Center Humanities Research Initiative.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Anthony Cerulli.  Project title: The Study of Gurukula: South Indian Traditional Medical Education and Its Classical Texts.

Columbia University, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Mary Pollard Murray.  Project Title: The Prison as a Site of Literary Community and Writing in Early Modern England.

Barnard College, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Jonathan Rieder.  Project title: A Reinterpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.

New York University, Preservation Education and Training, Project Director: Hannelore Roemich. Project Title: Conservation Training for Preservation and Access.

Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Mary Anne Caton. Project Title: Purchase of Environmental Monitoring Equipment to Preserve Collections of the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum.

AFS Intercultural Programs, Inc., Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Carlos Porro.  Project Title: Preservation Assessment and Storage Materials to Preserve Archival Collections.

Century Association Archives Foundation, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Russell Flinchum. Project Title: Staff Training and Environmental Monitoring Equipment to Preserve Archival Collections.

City College of New York, Awards for Faculty, 1. Project Director: Emily Greble. Project Title: Islam and the European Nation-State: Balkan Muslims between Mosque and State, 1908-1949. 2. Project Director: Gregory Downs Project Title: The Ends of the War: American Reconstruction and the Problems of Occupations.

Women Make Movies, Inc., Bridging Cultures Through Film, Project Director: Riva Freifeld. Project Title: Buffalo Bill and the Influence of the American West on European Culture.

Leo Baeck Institute, Inc., Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Renate Evers. Project Title: Purchasing Preservation Materials to Preserve a Rare Book Collection.

New York University, Preservation Education and Training, Project Director: Howard Besser. Project Title: Graduate Education for Moving Image Specialists.

City Lore: NY Center for Urban Folk Culture, Bridging Cultures Implementation Grants, Project Director: Steven Zeitlin. Project Title: Poetic Voices of the Muslim World.

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Roberta Elliott. Project Title: Preservation Storage Materials to Rehouse the Photographic Archive.

Teachers College, Columbia University, Challenge Grants, Project Director: Anand Marri. Project Title: History Education for All: A Proposal to Establish a Center for History Education at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Rochester Institute of Technology, Preservation Education and Training, Project Director: James Reilly. Project Title: Sustainable Preservation Practices for Managing Storage Environments.

University of Rochester, Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Janet Berlo. Project Title: Fakes, Replicas, and Other Vexed Identities in Native American Art History.

John Jermain Memorial Library, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Jessica Frankel.  Project Title: Preserving Collections Related to Early Rural Life on Long Island, New York.

Town of Southampton, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Sundy Schermeyer. Project Title: Develop Disaster Preparedness and Response Plan and Staff Training to Preserve Archives

Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: William Ayres.  Project Title: Purchase of Storage Furniture and Preservation Materials to Preserve Historic and Textile Collections.

Woodstock Artists Association, Inc., Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Josephine Bloodgood.  Project Title: Preservation Assessment to Preserve Art Collections.

Pennsylvania: 8 awards, $318,531

B.F. Jones Memorial Library, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Linda Helms. Project Title: Preservation Assessment to Preserve Archival Collection.

Franklin and Marshall College, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Bennett Helm.  Project Title: Defining Moral Communities: Respect, Dignity, and the Reactive Attitudes.

Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, Humanities Initiatives: HBCUs, Project Director: Marilyn Button. Project Title: Lincoln University of Pennsylvania’s Global Heritage and Legacy.

Millersville University, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Tanya Kevorkian. Project Title: The Musical Experience in German Baroque Towns.

Chatham College, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Rachel Rohrbaugh. Project Title: Purchase Storage Furniture to Preserve the University’s Archives Collection.

University of Pittsburgh , Fellowships for University Teachers, Project Director: Ronald Zboray. Project Title: The Bullet in the Book: Uses of Print Media during the Civil War.

Swarthmore College, Preservation Assistance Grants, Project Director: Amy McColl. Project Title: Preservation and Disaster-Preparedness Assessment to Preserve the Library’s Special Collections.

Pennsylvania State University, Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, Project Director: Gonzalo Rubio. Project Title: The Earliest Semitic Literature: Ebla and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia.

For project descriptions and for winners outside our region, please visit the NEH website.

(From neh.gov)

DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Awards $3.7M in Grants

The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) announced 227 grants awarded to local artists and nonprofit arts organizations for 2012.  The grants fall into eight categories: Grants-In-Aid, Festivals and City Arts Projects, Arts Education Program, East of the River, Individual Artist Grant, Community Arts, UPSTART and Cultural Facilities Project.  The DCCAH administers Public Art Building Communities grants, but these grants operate on a rolling deadline and were not included in the $3.7M total.

The complete list of recipients is available on the DCCAH website.

Regional Winners of IMLS and MacArthur Foundation Grants

Today,the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the first 12 winners of a national competition to build 21st Century learning labs in museums and libraries around the country. The winners—four museums and eight libraries—will receive a total of $1.2 million in grants to plan and design the labs. Inspired by YOUMedia, a new teen space at the Chicago Public Library, and innovations in science and technology centers, these labs will help young people move beyond consuming content to making and creating it.

The twelve recipients were selected from a pool of ninety-eight applicants from thirty-two states.  The process for awarding a second round of grants begins in Spring 2012.

The Mid-Atlantic regional winners for the 21st Century Learning Lab grants are:

Howard County Public Library, Columbia, Maryland  who, along with partners The Institute of Learning Innovation and MindGrub Technologies, LLC, will develop a Learning Lab for youth ages 11-18 at the Savage Branch library. Staff at the branch and system levels have identified the need for a dedicated space and activities to meet the increased usage of the library by teen customers, and to deliver effective, informal, learning involving digital media.

New York Hall of Science, New York, New York which will will plan and prototype a youth-centered, community-engaged Digital Making program within the museum’s new Cognizant Maker Space. Digital Making is a program that will empower diverse groups of middle- and high-school youth to investigate and communicate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics through digital media including sound, video, and games.

DaVinci Discovery Center of Science and Technology, Allentown, Pennsylvania which will partner with the Allentown Public Library to create a virtual studio environment for youth engaged in digital media and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities. Participation in the virtual environment will be supported by face-to-face outreach programs. Tools for the creation of digital content will be available on loan from the library.

Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation,  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania which will work with a variety of local organizations to develop a comprehensive plan for a digital media Learning Lab in the new Parkway Central Library. The lab design will be based on current research, teen focus groups, input from local partners, expert consultants, and staff experience.

Please visit the Institute of Museum and Library Services for more information on all the winning proposals.

(From imls.gov)

 

 

 

 

 

To Have and Have Not

These past three years or so, I have found that I’m using the phrases “in this economic climate” or “in these tough economic times” or some variation, a lot when discussing the state of the organization that I run. Times are tough, you’d have to be living under a rock (or be a CEO of a large banking house) not to know that money is in short supply. When you talk of cultural organizations it is even more challenging. However, even among cultural organizations, I’m including history museums, historic sites, libraries, archives, art museums, theatre and the performing arts under this umbrella term, things are far from being equitable. Recently when searching the Foundation Directory Online for potential granting organizations to which to apply for funding various projects, I found a great disparity between what is available for historical organizations versus arts groups. When you search this database you can check boxes beside terms that best describe what your organization does. For example, terms like historical society, history museum, education, art museum, performing arts, etc. are all included. Then the foundations that have listed these areas as ones which they prefer to fund will come up. Since my organization collects art, primarily art with historical connections, I thought I would play around with the box next to art museum or art exhibits along with the history terms. I can’t say I was surprised at what happened since I had always had the sense that the arts community was better funded than the history community, but the disparity in the number of grant opportunities was pretty sobering. The Foundation Directory Online database contains information on over a million grants nationwide for a wide range of projects and causes. By simply including “art” in my search the available grants that it returned increased by not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands over what I found when I only had historical terms chosen.

But these are private foundations. Surely support from public sources would be more equitable. I checked into that with my friends on the state level in Maryland and found funding to be equally disparate. In Maryland, we have a state arts council which for bureaucratic purposes is located in the department of economic development, and we have the Maryland Historical Trust which is located in the department of planning. This blog post would be too long if I tried to figure out why these two cultural arms are stuck in very different parts of the state bureaucracy. Anyway, here are the budget numbers for each department’s funds available for grants to non-profit institutions for FY 2012:
Maryland State Arts Council: has $8.9 million available for unrestricted operating support of arts organizations throughout the state.

Maryland Historical Trust: has $2.2 million for grants to institutions within designated heritage areas (there are historical organizations that are not located within a heritage area which means they do not have access to this grant program). There is also the Museum Assistance Program within the Trust which provides unrestricted operating support grants for history museums. In 2012 this program was not allocated any funds at all.

So, there you have it. Arts organizations in Maryland have four times the funds available for their projects and programs than history groups do. This is not just in Maryland but is a fairly common situation throughout the country. I wonder how many people are aware that when they say they think it is important to support arts and culture the culture part falls woefully short.

21st Century Museum Professionals September 2011 Grants Announced

The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced ten awards totaling $1,989,953, matched with $2,414,685 of non federal funds for 21st Century Museum Professionals Grants.  IMLS received 52 applications.  The Mid-Atlantic Region was well represented with recipients in Delaware, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The University of Delaware will work with the Tri-State Coalition of Historic Sites “to create a collaborative training program for small historic organizations and emerging professionals.”

The Historic London Town and Gardens in Edgewater, MD will create workshops designed to “train staff, volunteers and docents in the techniques of visitor-centered museums.”

Cool Culture Inc of Brooklyn, New York will create a three-year laboratory project with the goal of deepening “museum professionals’ knowledge of early childhood learning practice, outreach strategies for low income audiences, and how to align their museums’ resources and programs with community needs.”

The New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, NY will partner with the Albany Institute of History and Art to “develop a model for technology-based partnerships between museum educators and classroom teachers.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art “will create a descriptive materials terminology guide for works of art on paper.”  The goal is to create a common lexicon to facilitate understanding both institutionally and with the general public.

For more information on these projects,please visit the IMLS website.

(From the Institute of Museum and Library Services)