Connecticut Humanities (CTH) recently awarded $226,461 to 14 humanities organizations in Connecticut.

According to Dr. Jason R. Mancini, CTH Executive Director, “Connecticut has an extraordinary and often unheralded history, civic heritage, and intellectual tradition that have direct relevance to our nation’s current events and public discourse. The Connecticut Humanities Fund provides direct support to cultural and educational organizations in our communities that advance Connecticut’s diverse stories, build civic participation, and increase access to content for all of our citizens.”

Capacity Building Grants support Connecticut organizations that bring the humanities to the public by helping them better understand their audiences, assets, and operations.

Five (5) Capacity Building Grants were recently awarded to: Cheshire Historical Society (Cheshire, $4,774), Strategic Plan Development; East Haddam Historical Society, Inc. (East Haddam, $5,006), Creating Community Connections Through Visionary Planning; Harriet Beecher Stowe Center (Hartford, $8,020), Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Collection Digitization Planning; Sankofa Kuumba Cultural Arts Consortium (Hartford, $9,900), Board development success planning; and Yale Peabody Museum (New Haven, $7,500), Developing a Community Engagement Framework for Creative Storytelling in the New Human Culture Galleries of the Yale Peabody Museum.

“The Stowe Center is grateful for the support of CT Humanities as we plan the digitization of our nationally important collections, which will provide open public access to critical resources in the history of abolition, women’s suffrage, literature, and nineteenth-century social and political thought,” says Briann Greenfield, the Center’s Executive Director.

Project Planning and Implementation Grants support projects that help us understand and appreciate human history, culture, values, and beliefs. They allow us to analyze our complex society and to make thoughtful, reasoned decisions based on inquiry, evaluation, and empathy.

Nine (9) Planning and Implementation grants were recently awarded to: Greenwich Historical Society (Cos Cob, $22,248), Planning & Development of Exhibition on Sports and Athletic Pastimes in Greenwich; Connecticut Public (Hartford, $20,000), Connecticut Public Sheff Documentary; Arts Council of Greater New Haven, Inc (New Haven, $24,875), “Connecticut’s Resilient Indigenous People”; The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University (New Haven, $25,000), Planning a Composite Curriculum: A Professional Development Program in African American and Latino Studies; Stepping Stones Museum for Children (Norwalk, $25,000), We (Heart) America!: Phase 2; Lyman Allyn Art Museum (New London, $20,460), The Way Sisters: Miniaturists of the Early Republic; Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme, $30,000), The Year of Alternative Voices; Mattatuck Museum (Waterbury, $15,999), Mattatuck Museum History Gallery Reinterpretation; and Westport Country Playhouse (Westport, $7,679), Programs for Next to Normal production in April 2021.

“The Gilder Lehrman Center is honored to have been awarded a CT Humanities Planning Grant. This award will allow GLC to work with academic experts as well as teachers and students throughout the state to develop professional development resources designed to help Connecticut teachers address the vital mandate of treating African American and Latinx history as absolutely central to the history of the United States,” says Michelle Zacks, Associate Director. “As the nation engages in a long overdue reckoning with the persistent legacies of slavery and structural racism, we are grateful to CT Humanities for their support in helping the GLC and our partners undertake this important endeavor.”