Grants for Humanities Programs
Wisconsin Humanities awards grants to support locally-initiated public humanities programs. Grants for humanities programs are awarded to encourage greater public participation in humanities programming, spark imagination, and promote thoughtful conversation across the state. We especially encourage organizations in underserved communities to apply.
NEWS: For many decades, our Mini Grant Program has provided organizations of all sizes with small but impactful funding awards. The diversity, depth, and creativity of these projects has amazed us.
After careful review and input from focus groups with past applicants, consultants, and surveys of other funding agencies, we are poised to pilot a new type of accessible grant that better meets the needs of organizations and communities in Wisconsin today. To prepare for this exciting roll-out, we have suspended our former Mini Grant Program until further notice.
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We will begin offering the new pilot grant program in the summer of 2024. Please stay tuned to hear all about our new grantmaking pilot program by signing up for our e-newsletter here.
Major Grants:
Major Grants (with budget requests of $2,001 - $10,000) are awarded three times per year. Award decisions are made about two months after the deadline. The online application opens after the previous deadline closes.
Whether you are writing your first grant application or you are an experienced grant writer, check out these four steps on our GETTING STARTED page before beginning the online application.
Grant Application Deadlines
Applicants can begin the online application process after the previous grant round closes.
MAJOR GRANTS
DEADLINES
April 15 (DECISION in June)
August 15 (DECISION in Oct.)
December 15 (DECISION in Feb.)
Who We Are
What is a humanities program?
Humanities programs should be reflective experiences that engage the public. Programs can take many forms including exhibitions, performances, community discussions, guest speakers, workshops, oral history projects, panels, town halls, films, and more. Creativity is encouraged!
To be eligible for funding, the humanities must be central to your proposal. “The humanities” include archaeology, art history, cultural anthropology, ethics, ethnic studies, folklore, gender studies, history, jurisprudence, languages, law, linguistics, philosophy, and religious studies. Social sciences, such as political science and sociology, are also often part of the humanities. We offer further explanation, including some distinctions between the arts and the humanities, here. If you aren’t sure whether your project is a humanities program, contact us. We’d love to hear your ideas.
Every year we give away
$200,000
in grants to support humanities programs
designed by communities
Can I see some examples
of programs that have been funded?
“The Lands We Share” started as an oral history project about farming across Wisconsin but became much more with help from a Major Grant. Funds supported a traveling exhibit that featured narratives, histories, artifacts, images, and recordings. After viewing the exhibit, visitors gathered to share a meal and discuss personal experiences with farmers. This project was a collaborative effort between faculty and students at four UW campuses and farmers at five culturally and regionally distinct farms. The project received the 2020 Leadership Award for excellence in public history from the American Association for State and Local History and the 2020 Best Public Program award from the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The Art Start Portrait Project received a Major Grant to run workshops that allowed boys and young men of color in Milwaukee to explore their personal identities and envision their lives beyond circumstance and stereotype. The workshops provided expert guidance from educators, mentors, and oral historians and resulted in an exhibit that featured stories from the young mens’ lives, visions of their futures, and feelings about family, community, society, education, and love. The exhibit traveled to the Milwaukee Film Festival, Milwaukee Art Museum and more. These stories are now part of a public archive and ongoing project, https://www.seemebecause.org/, and a formal curriculum is being developed at the request of school leaders.
A volunteer committee in the city of Kewaunee, population 3,000, led an effort to fix up the historic lighthouse and create a walking tour of the downtown harbor on Lake Michigan. The Friends of the Kewaunee Pierhead Light received a Mini Grant to create reader boards and a brochure highlighting six important historical landmarks. Robin Nelson, who helped to research the local history and write the grant application, says, “In Kewaunee, we’ve kind of continually reinvented ourselves. I think that happens in a lot of communities, that they’re required to keep reinventing themselves as time evolves." The historic walking tour ensures that no matter how many times Kewaunee reinvents itself, its past won’t be forgotten.
