NHA is currently working with 14 NEH-funded summer professional development programs for teachers to document their impact. Though our final follow-up survey is still several months away, pre- and post-program surveys shed light on what drew educators to the workshops and what they found most valuable while there. The responses have been enlightening and have helped us understand how NEH-funded programs are fulfilling teachers’ needs and filling gaps in the curricula.

Over the past two years, we have partnered with Common Heritage programs across the country to profile their mission–from preserving Franco-American veteran stories in Maine, to digitizing Tahoe’s history, natural beauty, and culture in Nevada, to collecting stories of the Hmong population in North Carolina. These programs, supported by the NEH, are based around public digitization events that preserve family and local history. In reporting our initial survey efforts to document the impact of select Common Heritage programs, we’ve shown how these programs surface artifacts of ethnic and migration histories that would otherwise be lost. As we continue our survey efforts, we’ve added to these impacts and found more robust evidence of how these programs are demystifying cultural heritage preservation by equipping communities with the tools, resources, and a sense of urgency to preserve their familial and community heritage.

In recognition of National Arts and Humanities Month, the National Humanities Alliance teamed up with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and Americans for the Arts (AFTA) to host a briefing on Capitol Hill. The event was developed at the request of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, and our goal was to introduce staffers who are responsible for arts and humanities issues to the Endowments, as well as give them a brief glimpse of their impacts.

By supporting the preservation of cultural heritage at organizations across the U.S., the NEH works to ensure that their collections are accessible to the public. At the most basic level, NEH funding supports libraries and archives as they process important collections, enabling them to create the guides and databases that are crucial to researchers trying to access archival materials. NEH funding also helps organizations digitize collections, making collections like the Adams Family Papers, the Journals of Lewis and Clark, and Fox Movietone Newsreels accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

This past Tuesday, we joined forces with the University of Iowa to bring Iowa’s congressional staffers into conversation with 35 representatives from universities, museums, libraries, and archives. Hosted at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML) in Cedar Rapids, the event was one in a series of in-district meetings intended to educate public officials on the value of the humanities to their communities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) supports summer programs across the country for K-12 educators, covering history, literature, religion, politics, art, and culture through various themes connected to local histories and cultures. This summer, we partnered with 14 programs to document their impact on educators and, in turn, our nation’s schoolchildren. Data collection will continue until summer 2020 in order to understand how educators are implementing what they learned. However, this year’s pre- and post-program surveys demonstrate these programs provide teachers with a renewed excitement for content, classroom materials that promote connections with students of diverse backgrounds, and a sense of community with educators across the country.

On August 20, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $29 million to 215 projects located throughout the U.S. These include grants for collaborative research, public scholar fellowships, and scholarly editions and translations; funding for media projects, exhibitions, humanities discussions, and historic site interpretations; grants for the national digital newspaper program and collection preservation; professional development programs for K-12 and college educators; and digital humanities projects and institutes.

On July 23, we partnered with Hagley Museum and Library to present an exhibition-style briefing on Capitol Hill. Congressional staff members, humanities advocates, and other local friends had the opportunity to view items from Hagley’s remarkable collections and gain new insights into the impact of NEH funding in preserving our nation’s heritage.

From its support for academic research to its funding for public programs, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fosters a strong humanities ecosystem in communities throughout the United States. This was driven home to me most recently during a trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts. There, I saw first-hand how NEH-funded research allows us to reconsider how we understand key moments in our nation’s past and ensures that the public also comes to see these new interpretations.