This notice solicits applications for the Cultural and Community Resilience (CCR) program.
Resilience is the ability to prepare for, recover from, and adapt to the impacts of our changing climate and world. The CCR program supports community-based efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic by safeguarding cultural resources and fostering cultural resilience through the identification, documentation, and/or collection of cultural heritage and community experience.
Communities are a complex and dynamic group with shared locality, experiences, practices, and traditions. Humanists and preservationists in libraries, archives, museums, and institutions of higher education play an important role in strengthening communities facing change. As culture-keepers, they sustain memory and identity; as knowledge-brokers, they transfer abilities and perspectives that deepen our understanding of our place in the natural world and inform contemporary ways of working and living.
The CCR program contributes to the continuity of cultural heritage and its availability for future generations by supporting community-based projects that empower people to define, collect, and use cultural and historical resources. In addition, the CCR program recognizes the importance of documenting contemporary experiences with climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic and of deepening our understanding of their social, economic, and emotional impact on individuals and communities.
NEH welcomes applications at all stages of project development from planning through implementation, especially those that employ inclusive methodologies, such as participatory archiving, oral history, rapid response collecting, shared stewardship arrangements, and community-centered access. NEH also encourages you to leverage open access online resources and use Creative Commons licenses, when possible and as appropriate.
Deadlines:
Research and Development projects are encouraged to address one or more of the following areas of special interest:
• Preserving audiovisual and digital heritage. Research and Development supports work to address the needs of collection formats most at risk of obsolescence. Projects may address issues such as format degradation, preservation work at scale, algorithmic and machine learning methodologies, storage, sustainable infrastructure, data appraisal, and curation.
• Conserving the material past. Research and Development supports scientific work to improve the conservation treatment and preventive care of cultural heritage.
• Protecting imperiled cultural heritage. Research and Development supports the development of tools, methods, technologies, or workflows for documenting, sharing, visualizing, and presenting lost or imperiled cultural heritage materials. Learn more about Protecting our Cultural Heritage.
• Serving under-represented communities. Research and Development supports work that would enhance the preservation of and access to humanities collections for under-represented communities, including minority communities, Indigenous communities, and persons with disabilities.
• Responding to climate change. Research and Development supports work investigating the impacts of climate change on heritage collections along with developing responses to advance sustainability and resilience.
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
You may submit multiple applications for separate and distinct projects under this notice. An individual, however, may not serve as project director for multiple proposed projects under this notice.
