The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $87.8 million in COVID-19 stimulus money to bail out multicultural programs in 300 institutions, including 90 colleges and universities.
The NEH bailout comes from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, which the president signed into law on March 11 after it passed Congress in a narrow party-line vote.
The grants primarily sustain and expand multicultural programming on topics like indigenous peoples, Mexican culture, racial minorities, slavery, migration and LGBTQ advocacy.
On the West Coast, the NEH has awarded the San Francisco-based GLBT Historical Society Archives a $200,000 grant to create an “archivist position” and retain two other archival staffers “to process a backlog of archival donations and to make new acquisitions and existing collections of LGBTQ history publicly accessible through digitization.”
Some of the grants will go to companies only tangentially related to education and culture, as well as to multicultural programming.
In Alabama, for example, the Birmingham-based Sloss Furnaces Foundation will receive $9,964 to reinstate “school tours and other tours.”
Meanwhile, the University of South Alabama will get $453,394 for the “retention and hiring of staff” to digitize the stories of “minoritized Alabamans” at the campus library and museum.
Much of the relief money will cover the salaries of employees working on subsidized special projects, which the schools and museums could not otherwise afford to maintain during pandemic cutbacks.
The Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, Florida, will receive $200,000 for the hiring of four employees to create a permanent exhibit and online resources “focused on the maritime slave trade in North America within the context of Florida.”
The NEH said Monday in a statement that the emergency relief grants seek to help schools and museums “recover from the economic impact of the pandemic, retain and rehire workers, and reopen sites, facilities, and programs.”
Institutions in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands received grants.
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