Share Your Federal Funding Impact Story

June 15, 2017—The Trump Administration’s proposed budget for FY18 includes devastating cuts to federal humanities funding, including elimination of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

House Appropriations Committee subcommittees are drafting their spending bills between now and the end of June.  Never before have federal archival, humanities, and history programs been under such attack. Act now to save them!

Our colleagues at the National Humanities Alliance have created a legislative action center that allows you to send multiple email messages to Congress from a single website.  Alerts specific to NEH, IMLS, and NHPRC include a pre-written letter that you can personalize or send as is. The system uses your ZIP code to identify your House member and Senators automatically.  Access the NHA Action Center.

Personalize your message!  Whatever method of communication you choose, it’s important to personalize your message to your background, experience, institution, district, or state – something that, as a constituent, will resonate with your representative.

Need some background or ideas? 

• See SAA’s issue brief on Federal Grant Funding for Archives as well as backgrounders on NHPRC and NEH.

• See your colleagues’ Federal Funding Impact Stories.  (Or share your own story.)

• View the National Coalition for History’s in-depth agency-by-agency analysis of the administration’s FY18 budget proposal.

Help us gather the stories that will strengthen our advocacy efforts throughout this appropriations cycle!

By sharing examples of the positive impact of federal funding for the humanities and arts with representatives in the House and Senate, we as a profession can hope to affect their decisions about the federal agencies that fund archival repositories. As archivists, librarians, and museum professionals we know how our collections, institutions, and local communities have benefited from grant funding from these federal agencies. We collect statistics about the work we accomplish under these grants—but we also know that the impact goes far beyond numbers alone.

Consider: Did your federal grant-funded project empower K–12 educators to teach with primary sources, connect family members through genealogical records, or inspire a community art project? Did a federal grant enable your institution to create jobs, contract with an external vendor, or carry out a project that had a fiscal impact on your institution? It is these stories of direct impact, whether personal or fiscal, and at all levels--within your institution, your local community, or even on a national scale—that speak to the true value of federal grant funding for the arts and humanities.

Take a few minutes now—during this brief pause—to share the details of your federally funded project and the story of its impact. We’ll certainly need your story later!  

Need examples? Click here.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.