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Tuesday, August 9, 2005
Heritage, history and the
arts
Humanities grants
nourish society’s soul
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Dr. Joseph J. Plaud,
president and founder of the Franklin D. Roosevelt
American Heritage Museum Center at Union
Station.
(T&G Staff / PAUL
KAPTEYN)
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Cyrus D. Lipsitt got a call in late June that had him smiling ear to
ear.
Kristin O’Connell was on the phone to say that the Massachusetts
Foundation for the Humanities had awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt
American Heritage Center Museum a $5,000 grant to help pay for a
special fall program, “Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“Kristin
gave me the news,” Mr. Lipsitt, the director of the museum, said.
“It was great. It made my day and my week.”
Mr. Lipsitt needs
to raise additional funding for the program, which will honor the
121st anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s birth. But the grant from
the MFH, where Ms. O’Connell serves as assistant director, is an
important and prestigious start. The FDR museum is a newcomer to the
Worcester cultural scene. It opened at Union Station a little over a
year ago, and “Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt” is its inaugural
event.
In seeking his first grant, Mr. Lipsitt turned to the
MFH because, he said, “we’re a history museum, and they’re a
humanities group.”
The nonprofit foundation has been around
for 31 years. It is a creation of the National Foundation for the
Humanities, which set up state councils in order to reach the local
level. The state groups have different names but the same mission,
which is to encourage programming on issues of public policy or
social concern with which citizens must grapple, Ms. O’Connell said
by telephone from her office in Northampton.
The MFH and its
mission are well known among cultural organizations seeking
relatively modest grants. But the group has increasingly run into a
perplexing problem: “Most people have a vague understanding of the
humanities,” Ms. O’Connell said. “They think of humanism or humane
enterprises, animal shelters and the like.”
So just what are
the humanities?
They are a broad range of academic
disciplines, from history and literature to foreign languages to
aspects of the social sciences that encourage the exploration and
interpretation of the human experience. The humanities encompass the
law and the history and interpretation of art and religion. Ellen S.
Dunlap, who served on the MFH board for eight years, described the
humanities as ubiquitous, making them at the same time “everywhere
and nowhere.”
“The word ‘humanities’ is the cross all of us
in that field have to bear,” Ms. Dunlap, president of the American
Antiquarian Society, said with a good-natured laugh. “The foundation
promotes the concept of the humanities, not as a frill, but as an
essential part of society.”
Indeed, the MFH views its mission
as “exploring, assessing, interpreting and refining the human
experience,” Ms. O’Connell said. To that end, it helps support
projects developed by museums, libraries, historical societies,
schools, civic and social groups, media producers and others engaged
in humanities projects.
The foundation’s 2005 budget is $1.4
million, about half of which comes from the National Endowment for
the Humanities and a little less than a quarter from the
Massachusetts Cultural Council. Corporate, foundation and individual
contributions make up the balance.
By end of its fiscal year,
Oct. 31, the foundation will have handed out $280,000 in four
granting rounds to dozens of organizations and individuals across
the state.
For many years, the MFH was flush enough to award
grants of as much as $15,000 to $25,0000. In fact, in the late
1990s, the Worcester Women’s History Project received a $15,000
grant for development of a script dramatizing the first national
women’s rights convention and another $25,000 to produce three
performances of the resulting play, “Angels and Infidels,” which was
a highlight of the WWHP’s Women 2000 conference.
But in 2002,
with state government feeling the full impact of the recession, the
budget for the Massachusetts Cultural Council was cut by 62 percent
and funding for the MFH was reduced proportionately. Since then, the
MFH has capped grants at $5,000 each, with the exception of film
projects, which are limited to $10,000. The grantees are expected to
expend in dollars and in-kind contributions an amount equal to the
MFH award.
Additionally, the foundation distributes grants of
$250 to $2,000 to small historical museums for research projects
related to the institution’s holdings or the work of a scholar in
residence, perhaps in preparation for an exhibition.
“The
foundation helps organizations that are not big enough to get
funding from corporations that want a big bang for the buck,”
explained Ms. Dunlap, who wound up her tenure as MFH board chairman
last year. “For smaller organizations, the grants are a huge boon.
If you can meet the standards, it’s like getting the Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”
Over the years, the MFH has
quietly played a key role in making possible diverse programming in
Central Massachusetts.
For instance, it gave $5,000 to the
Willis Center Cultural Institute in Worcester for an exhibition and
series of programs on the history of slavery in the Americas; $4,000
to the Hillside Restoration Project in Boylston to produce for
school performances a one-man play about 19th-century temperance
orator John Gough; $2,500 to Old Sturbridge Village for a public
symposium on Native American basketry; $4,848 to the Worcester
Public Schools for a professional development initiative to expose
Worcester teachers to their students’ varied cultures through the
study of literature; $6,000 to the Higgins Armory Museum in
Worcester for a day-long symposium on the history of swords in
various cultures in conjunction with the exhibition “The Double
Edged Weapon: The Sword as Icon and Artifact.”
The list goes
on and on.
“It often adds a public appreciation aspect to an
exhibition, to give legs beyond when an exhibition would be up,
bringing a scholar to a program or a library,” Ms. Dunlap
said.
A $5,000 grant awarded to the Worcester Art Museum in
the last funding round underscores Ms. Dunlap’s point. The grant
will help pay for a new brochure and creation of public programs in
conjunction with an exhibition, “Afterburn — Willie Cole: Selected
Works 1997-2004,” which opens Nov. 10.
“The kinds of projects
we go to the foundation for are those where we really like to take a
more interdisciplinary view,” said Honee Hesse, the museum’s
education director. “We’re about art, but we’re also about world
literature and history. The foundation helps to encourage projects
that take that more interdisciplinary, humanities view.”
The
foundation also creates its own programming. After 9-11 it developed
a reading and discussion series, “Understanding Islam,” which was
offered last year at the Worcester Public Library. And it has
sponsored a workplace program, “Literature and Medicine: Humanities
at the Heart of Health Care,” developed by the Maine Humanities
Council, which has been offered for the past three years to doctors,
nurses and other health care providers at UMass Memorial Medical
Center in Worcester.
This year, the MFH gained a higher
profile with its “Mass Moments,” a daily almanac of Massachusetts
history broadcast each day on AM and FM radio stations around the
commonwealth. Each of the 365 spots tells the story of a person,
place or event from the state’s history. The brightly and tightly
written vignettes can be read by going to http://www.massmoments.org/.
Meanwhile, Mr.
Lipsitt is moving ahead with plans for his Eleanor Roosevelt event,
which will be presented at 2 p.m., Oct. 8 at the Union Blues Jazz
Club at Union Station, 2 Washington Square, Worcester. The program
will include a one-woman living history theater piece performed by
Elena Dodd, an actor and historian who uses letters, speeches and
other material to assume the persona of Mrs. Roosevelt. At the end,
Ms. Dodd will step out of character and answer questions from the
audience. “She wears clothing similar to Eleanor’s and looks a bit
like her,” Mr. Lipsitt said.
The performance will be followed
by a talk and book signing by Cathy D. Knepper, author of “Dear Mrs.
Roosevelt: Letters to Eleanor Roosevelt Through Depression and War.”
The letters were written by despairing Americans who felt they had
nowhere to turn for help, Mr. Lipsitt said.
A Worcester swing
band, Sonic Explorers, also will perform music from the 1940s, and
Dr. Joseph J. Plaud will conduct tours of the FDR museum, which he
founded with his personal collection of documents and memorabilia.
The day’s events are free and open to the public.
“The
museum’s interest in displaying a fun, entertaining and educational
program for the community was the selling point in their application
for the grant,” Ms. O’Connell said.
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