Deadline: 28-Jun-23
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Public Programs is accepting applications for the Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations program.
This program supports small and mid-sized museums and cultural organizations in the creation of public humanities programming and strengthens their capacity to develop such programming.
Purpose
- Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations (PIP) helps cultural organizations enhance their interpretive skillset and develop public humanities programming. The goal of PIP is to help you identify the interpretive potential of your humanities collections, support your staff’s interpretive ability, or launch public programs that connect with new and existing audiences. Successful projects should demonstrate how the humanities matter to audiences and communities.
Funding Information
- You may request up to $25,000. This includes the sum of direct and indirect costs.
- NEH will award successful applicants outright funds, which are not contingent on additional funding from other sources.
- NEH anticipates awarding approximately $1,250,000 among an estimated 50 recipients.
- Duration: You may request a period of performance up to two years with a start date between March 1, 2024, and May 1, 2024.
Eligible Activities
- Allowable activities include:
- Consultation with scholars and interpretive consultants to develop new narrative frameworks for your collections or site
- Professional development to enhance staff and volunteer skills to present and plan public programing, including attendance at professional conferences or the creation and implementation of interpreter training specifically for your organization
- Front-end and formative evaluation
- Long-term strategic exhibition or interpretive planning
- Visits to other organizations to observe interpretive best practices
- Planning and/or delivery of interpretive public programs
- Co-curation projects that engage community members in doing the work of the humanities (e.g., primary research, oral histories, and composing interpretive content), resulting in a publicly available interpretive project, such as an exhibition or website
- Development or implementation of programming to amplify the presentation of a traveling exhibition hosted at your institution (exhibition fees and shipping are not allowable costs in this program)
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible to apply, you must be established in the United States or its jurisdictions as one of the following organization types:
- A nonprofit organization recognized as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code
- An accredited institution of higher education (public or nonprofit)
- A state or local government or one of their agencies
- A federally recognized Native American Tribal government
- If your organization is eligible, you may apply on behalf of a consortium of collaborating organizations. If NEH selects your proposal for funding, you will be programmatically, legally, and fiscally responsible for the award.
- The recipient may not function solely as a fiscal agent but should make substantive contributions to the success of the project.
- Individuals and other organizations, including foreign and for-profit entities, are ineligible.
- You may submit multiple applications for separate and distinct projects under this notice. An individual may serve as project director for multiple proposed projects under this notice. If an individual will serve as project director on multiple applications, you should explain in the narratives how the project director would allocate their time between the awards.
- NEH encourages proposals from first time applicants and those who have not received prior NEH funding. For the purposes of this program, NEH has established the following criteria to designate an organization as small- to mid-sized. The agency especially welcomes proposals from organizations that meet at least two of the following criteria:
- Your annual operating budget is under $1,000,000
- You are in a community with a population of fewer than 300,000 people
- Your employed staff totals 50 people or fewer
- You rely on volunteers and/or part-time staff to perform the majority of daily operations
- Your core mission is to interpret under-told stories and/or your core audience is drawn from underserved populations (e.g., communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, residents of rural areas, disability communities, U.S. religious minorities, and persons experiencing persistent poverty)
- If your organization is a subordinate of a parent entity – such as a museum at a university or a cultural center run by a municipality – but otherwise meets the above criteria, you may still be a good match for this program. In such cases, your organization must be programmatically and administratively distinct from the parent organization, maintain its own staff and budget, and have an independent board or group that has substantial responsibility for oversight and management.
For more information, visit NEH.