Library of Congress Community Collections Grants

Deadline: August 18, 2023

Through a gift from the Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress will support a multiyear initiative, The Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center. These grants will fund and support contemporary cultural documentation focusing on the culture, traditions, and expressions of diverse, often underrepresented communities in the U.S.

 
The program is open to U.S. individual applicants and non-profits, including institutions of higher education, colleges and universities, as well as professional associations and community groups. For 2024, the Library intends to award ten 12-month grants of up to $50,000 each to support projects within their communities to produce ethnographic cultural documentation, such as interviews with community members and audio-visual recordings of cultural activity, from the community perspective. Funding through these awards can be used to cover travel, equipment rental or purchase, and other expenses associated with cultural documentation fieldwork.

The major goals of this grant program are to enable communities to document their cultural life and experiences from their own perspectives, while enriching the Library’s holdings with diverse materials featuring creativity and knowledge found at the local level. As such, successful applications will come from individuals closely affiliated with the community they propose to document.

The list below offers project ideas intended to spark creativity while leaving room for open possibilities. Projects should incorporate a blend of techniques, such as interviews, still photography, digital video, field notes, or alternative documentation forms.

• Exploration of a community festival or other culturally-meaningful celebration through interviews with organizers and participants, audio-visual documentation of event activities, and any ephemera or material culture;
• Seasonal or periodic documentation of institutions or gathering places, such as farmers markets, informal social hang-outs, craft fairs, or other periodic spaces that might serve as anchors or markers of the community;
• Community-centric reflection on emergent cultural traditions or practices that have developed as responses to the shared collective experience of widespread recent phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic, social justice movements, or economic change;
• Broad examination of community-specific cultural practices that can serve as markers of various aspects of identity, such as practices around death or bereavement, life milestones, or transition into different modes or phases of living; transmission of language or other intangible aspects of heritage; or informally learned aspects of communication that help cohere a social group;
• Community history of a neighborhood or other type of geographically-delimited collective space that tracks change and continuity from the perspective of current residents, both long-term and newly arrived, via multi-format documentation; and
• Documentation focused on temporality, such as tracing traditions and their changes over time, which can include multi-sited projects but do not need to be delimited geographically.

For more information and application materials, visit the website: https://www.loc.gov/programs/of-the-people/collect-and-preserve/community-collections-grant-application