Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Program in the United States

Deadline: 10-Jan-2025

The National Endowment for the Humanities has launched the Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Program to support environmentally sustainable preventive care strategies to reduce energy consumption and costs and to strengthen institutional resiliency in the face of increased risks due to global climate change.

The program helps cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations) meet the complex challenge of preserving diverse holdings of humanities collections for future generations.

The SCHC program supports environmentally sustainable preventive care, also referred to as preventive conservation or preservation, which includes measures and actions aimed at avoiding, minimizing, and slowing future deterioration or loss of cultural heritage collections, thereby sustaining them for future generations.

Cultural heritage institutions may use SCHC awards to manage collections’ environment, including aspects such as temperature, relative humidity, pollutants, and light; provide protective storage enclosures and systems for collections; and safeguard collections from theft, fire, floods, and other disasters. Recipients should use environmentally sustainable methods that reduce reliance on fossil fuels and improve institutional resiliency from current and future disasters.

Funding Information

• There are three levels of funding:
  • Planning (up to $50,000) provides funding for institutions to develop and assess environmentally sustainable preventive care strategies in collection spaces.
  • Implementation Level I (up to $100,000) provide funding for institutions to implement environmentally sustainable preventive care projects that address specific, discrete preservation challenges that have been identified through an assessment.
  • Implementation Level II (up to $350,000) provides funding for institutions to implement environmentally sustainable preventive care projects that address large or multifaceted preservation challenges that have been identified through assessments and planning conducted by a multidisciplinary collaborative professional team appropriate to the goals of the project.

Period of Performance

• If you are applying for a Planning award or an Implementation Level I award, you may request a period of performance up to two years.
• If you are applying for an Implementation Level II award, you may request a period of performance up to three years.

Program Outcomes and Outputs

• The outcomes of a successful Planning award may include, but are not limited to:
  • plans and specifications to reduce energy consumption and costs
  • energy reduction test data
  • environmentally sustainable collections management and preventive care plans
  • assessments, reports, and/or modification plans for the building envelope
  • and installation plans for climate control, lighting, security, and other building systems
  • assessments, reports, and/or modification of collections storage systems
  • plans to improve resiliency against disaste

Eligibility Criteria

• Eligible Applicants
  • To be eligible to apply, your organization must be established in the United States or its jurisdictions as one of the following:
  • 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
• Individuals and other organizations, including foreign and for-profit entities, are ineligible

For more information, visit Grants.gov.