Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations

Small and mid-sized cultural organizations are keepers of history and culture, sources of lifelong learning, and community place makers. Public Impact Projects grants seek to assist you in meeting your community’s needs by expanding the scope, reach, and excellence of your public programs. These awards support a variety of activities that focus on enriching interpretive strategies, strengthening interpretive skill sets or enhancing community engagement with public-facing programs. This program aims to meet small and mid-sized organizations where you are by supporting projects that are appropriate in scope and content to each organization’s resources and community needs.

The key questions this program asks you to consider are: What are your organization’s interpretive humanities needs or programmatic goals? How would meeting these needs or goals benefit public audiences?

NEH’s Public Impact Projects encourage you to think critically about the humanities programming your organization currently offers and to assess your organization’s relationship to your community and surrounding neighborhoods. You will develop or implement strategies to strengthen the interpretive goals of your organization and ensure your public programing meets audience needs. Funded projects may focus on evaluating current interpretive programing, collections, and other available resources to identify new story opportunities or interpretive methods. Additionally, you may choose to propose the implementation of new programs you have already developed. Another option is to request support for professional development opportunities that will assist your staff and volunteers in expanding their skills as interpreters of humanities grounded material. You may also combine one or more of these approaches to create a strategy that meets the needs of your organization and audience.

NEH encourages proposals from first-time applicants and those who have not received NEH funding.

Five tips for successfully submitting your application:

1. Start working on your application early and don’t wait until the deadline day to submit the final proposal!
2. If you apply to more than one NEH program, remember that each proposal must be distinct, with completely different project scopes and budgets. Multiple proposals with identical or overlapping budgets will be declared ineligible.
3. Applications will be declared ineligible if you do not observe the requirements stated in the Notice of Funding Opportunity:
   • Comply with all listed required page limits;
   • Include all required and conditionally required information and attachments;
   • Remember that projects involving federal agencies (for example, National Parks, Smithsonian Museums, Library of Congress, etc.) are ineligible if the project takes on characteristics of that federal entity’s own authorized activities.
4. After you submit your application, check your email and spam folder frequently for a series of messages from Grants.gov tracking your application through the process of validation and transmission to the NEH. At each stage in the process Grants.gov will send you either a confirmation message that your application has successfully advanced to the next step or an error, incomplete, or ineligible message. Applications will not be accepted if you do not correct the error before the deadline, so allow time to fix them. If your application is successfully submitted, you will receive a total of five messages from Grants.gov.
5. Ask for our help and advice! Contact a Program Officer in the Division of Public Programs @email.

The recording from Public Impact Projects live webinar and Q&A on April 25, 2024 may be accessed here. 

If you wish to access the PDF of the April 25, 2024 Public Impact Projects webinar slides separately without the recording, the presentation slides are available here.