by Richard Wellons – Grants Resource Center
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a major new program that may be of interest to your campus – Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grants. This program will provide matching grants to libraries, museums, archives, colleges and universities, historic sites, scholarly associations, and other cultural institutions for efforts that build institutional capacity or infrastructure for long-term sustainability. Collaborations among multiple institutions are also eligible as long as one institution is designated as the lead applicant of record.
Purpose: The funds may be used toward capital expenditures such as construction and renovation projects, purchase of equipment and software, sharing of humanities collections between institutions, documentation of lost or imperiled cultural heritage, sustaining digital scholarly infrastructure, and preservation and conservation of humanities collections. A challenge grant may support only one project but that project may have multiple elements or phases.
Awards: Applicants can request up to $750,000 from NEH, but most awards will not exceed $500,000. Grant recipients must raise—from nonfederal third-party donors—three times the amount of federal funds offered for grants up to $500,000 and four times the amount of federal funds offered for grants in excess of $500,000. HBCUs, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and two-year colleges are required only to match the federal funds offered on a one-to-one basis (whatever the size of the grant). NEH typically offers the federal portion of a challenge grant in four annual installments, but the grantee may take up to sixty-eight months to raise funds for matching (see the sample schedule in the guidelines for more information). Grantee institutions may also expend up to 10 percent of total grant funds (federal funds plus matching funds) to defray costs of fundraising to meet the NEH challenge.
The application deadline is March 15, 2018. Read the NEH announcement here and view the program guidelines and application resources here. Keep in mind that NEH program officers are usually available to review draft proposals up to a month in advance of the deadline.