SAA Foundation Awards Eight Strategic Growth Grants

June 20, 2018—The SAA Foundation has awarded more than $31,000 in funding for eight 2018-2019 grant projects from its Strategic Growth Fund. The SAAF provides grant funding for projects that meet the mission and goals of the SAA Foundation and the strategic planning priorities of the Society of American Archivists.  The 2018-2019 grant recipients are:

• Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation, Margaret Herrick Library, to fund a fellowship for a new professional from an underrepresented background to gain hands-on experience in archival processing with two library projects involving African American film history and web archiving.

• American Academy in Rome, to preserve and catalog a collection of 15,000 handwritten notes by archeologist Esther B. Van Deman. 

• Florida International University, to explore development and incorporation of translation and transcription functionality into open-source digital archives to support compliance with the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, thus increasing access to collections. 

• Historical Society of Mount Pleasant, Ohio, to preserve 600 glass plate negatives representing the work of two local photographers.

• Louisiana Historical Association and Louisiana Archives and Manuscripts Association, to train stakeholders in preserving Louisiana records to serve as effective spokespersons for the "History Lost? Saving Louisiana's Archival Heritage" initiative.

• National Security Archive, to digitize 35 audiocassettes of Washington Post senior diplomatic correspondent Murray Marder's interviews with Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance on foreign policy issues of the 1970s. 

• The Nomadic Archivist Project, to work with community partners to develop archival literacy in audiences who are unfamiliar with the process of collecting and preserving local histories.

• South Asian American Digital Archive, to create a SAADA Archivists' Collective to collect and share overlooked histories of South Asian Americans. 

Congratulations to all!

Read about the grant application process and guidelines here.  Letters of inquiry for grant funding in the next cycle are due by December 1, 2018.

The SAA Foundation is the nation’s leading source of nonprofit funding dedicated to the interests of archives and archivists. Donations to the SAA Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization, are tax deductible.