The Association has filed a proposal with the National Endowment for the Humanities for a challenge grant to raise $200,000 for the general endowment of the AHA. These funds would generate additional annual revenue with which to support the Association’s program of small research grants and to provide the financial security of a general endowment fund more than double the size of the existing one.
The AHA’s Research Division Committee is justly proud of the nearly five-year-old program of Beveridge Fund grants for research projects in American history, which it manages. The Committee has become increasingly concerned, however, at the schism created in the profession by our inability to support small research grants for areas outside the Beveridge Fund’s limits.
American and Western Hemisphere history is of vital importance, but European, African, and Asian research projects are equally important and reflect the fields of specialization of almost half of our members. Therefore we seek to enlarge our coverage. In the four years of its operation, the Beveridge small grants have distributed over $62,000 to 105 grantees. Dozens of articles and books have already been completed thanks to the small but timely infusion of these modest grants. An equally successful program can result from this fund-raising initiative.
The Council is concerned at the lack of financial stability and long-term security for the AHA that an enlarged endowment would relieve. Our present $134,000 general endowment is pathetically small given our almost one and one-quarter million dollar annual budget. A portion of the increased revenues generated by a successful challenge grant will help repair this deficiency.
Challenge grants are a far-sighted device of the National Endowment for the Humanities to strengthen the humanities. The program is designed to ally federal and non-government funds in support of the humanities and to improve financial stability and program quality within institutions and organizations in which teaching, learning and research in the humanities occur. If awarded, the AHA’s grant would provide $50,000 in federal funds provided a “match” of $150,000, a three-to-one ratio, is raised by the AHA from new sources of giving outside the federal government. The Association is confident that it can raise over a third of this sum from friends of history and supporters of our discipline. It is equally confident that the over 12,000 active members of the AHA can respond to the challenge by raising $90,000–$100,000 over the next four years, or about $2 per member per year.
Although the Endowment will not reach a decision on our application until December 1985, its generous regulations provide that new funds contributed for the purposes of the challenge grant proposal during the entire calendar year will be counted toward the “match.” So the appeal is open to our loyal and generous membership to begin building up momentum. Every dollar of membership contribution may bring thirty-three cents additional! Mark your contributions “Challenge Grant 1985” and let us do for the Old World—Europe, Asia and Africa—what we are already doing for New World history.
