Office of Enterprise | |
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The Office of Enterprise strengthens the Endowment's leadership role in the humanities by increasing the reach of Endowment programs and promoting opportunities for the humanities to make an impact on new audiences across the country.
EDSITEment, a joint project launched in 1997 by NEH, the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS), and MCI (now MCI WorldCom), to bring together online humanities resources, continued to grow in 1998. In July, the number of sites linked to EDSITEment more than doubled with the addition of twenty-nine new sites. Users of EDSITEment now have access to forty-nine high-quality humanities sites, representing more than 50,000 files searchable through the EDSITEment search engine. In October, just one year after its launch, EDSITEment logged its 200,000th user session. As the year drew to a close, MCI WorldCom renewed its commitment to EDSITEment through a second $500,000 grant, which will support EDSITEment activities through March 2001. A partnership with the Pioneer Place shopping center in Portland, Oregon, provided the Endowment its first opportunity to hold humanities programming in commercial public space. With the Rouse Company, which owns the property, the Oregon Council for the Humanities and the Oregon Historical Society are partners in what promises to become an annual humanities event. The program, "Life and Times of a Nation," included the Endowment's "Hail to the Chief: Presidents, Politics, and Power" exhibition, continuous-loop tapes of NEH-funded documentaries, and Chautauqua performances of Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis by Clay Jenkinson and of George Washington by Greg Monahan. With no additional funding, the Endowment helped to leverage $75,000 from partners and the media. It reached an in-house audience of more than 1,600 school children and adults, and a statewide audience through newspaper articles and television coverage. Because of its effectiveness, Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Portland CitySearch website have joined the partnership for the 1999 program. The Enterprise Office negotiated a five-year renewable international partnership with the German Historical Institute and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. This partnership will increase the value of NEH Fellowships by extending the scholarly opportunities for Fellows in the field of postwar German studies, providing them the opportunity to work collaboratively with German scholars. The NEH Fellows are selected through the established NEH peer review process. With no investment of funds beyond Fellowships already awarded, this partnership already has leveraged $272,000 granted to the GHI and AICGS by the German American Academic Council to support this collaborative German American scholarly project. Each year's research program will be based upon the topics of NEH Fellows. GHI/AICGS will carry out an annual competition to select the German scholars to collaborate in the research program, and will hold symposia and offer potential publication. NEH outreach to the nation's capital and its annual twenty-two million visitors from around the nation and the world includes not only humanities exhibitions in the Old Post Office Pavilion, its home building, but also participation in city-wide economic development and revitalization planning. Along with cultural, business, and government leaders, the NEH is one of three federal agencies with membership in the newly formed Downtown Arts Committee and one of only two with permanent liaison membership in the board of the newly incorporated Cultural Development Corporation. The Enterprise Office has supported outreach and promotion funding for the NEH-funded film series Africans in America. Through the Enterprise Office, NEH continued its participation in the consortium, Partners in Tourism. In 1998, Partners in Tourism helped design the Travel Industry Association's annual survey about trends in travel and tourism. As a result, cultural institutions can make a strong, quantifiable case for their significance to the nation's travel and tourism industry. Of the nearly two hundred million U.S. adult travelers over the year, 46 percent, or 92.4 million, included a cultural, arts, heritage, or historic activity while on a trip of fifty miles or more. Of these, 31 percent (62.6 million) visited a historical site and 24 percent (58.7 million) visited a museum. Those surveyed indicated that they often spend more time, and thereby more money, on their trips in order to include cultural activities and events. The Enterprise Office represents the Endowment on the White House Millennium Council and has supported an upcoming film called Crucible of the Millennium.
Ann S. Young Orr Historical Society of Washington, DC Washington, DC Barbara A. Franco $30,000** Humanities Content for New Visitor Center in the Ronald Reagan Building
National History Day
National History Day |