Every year HumanitiesDC awards approximately one million dollars to DC residents, community groups and nonprofit organizations through a series of grant opportunities to support public humanities projects that bring people together to explore the history, culture, relationships and topics that shape our city’s communities.
In 2025, HumanitiesDC distributed $1,156,097 in awards recommended by selective peer review panels of 81 volunteer grant reviewers across six program categories to support 69 grantees.
”HumanitiesDC has given me the support that I need to celebrate my community, to say Thank You and give back. I have really enjoyed this entire experience and so have my neighbors.”
– Paul Grant, Grantee
Our Funding Goals
We design and conduct our grantmaking with these primary goals in mind:
Help all DC residents, and those connected to our city, participate in and learn about our collective heritage and culture, especially the experiences, areas and voices that have been excluded from public conversation.
Provide opportunities for community members to use the humanities as a tool to explore their curiosities and document their own stories.
Strengthen our overall humanities community by supporting individual scholars, community experts, and humanities-based organizations.
Center the community in our grantmaking by creating a transparent and accessible process open to all local residents.
Our Grantmaking Practice
At HumanitiesDC we strive to:
- Make our grantmaking process transparent and accessible;
- Respect our applicants, grantees and reviewers throughout the process, and;
- Be responsible fiscal stewards of the funds we manage.
Our Grantmaking Process
This is how we plan to conduct our grantmaking each year. Changes may occur based on the availability to regrant.
If you have a question about our grantmaking process please reach out to our Grants Team at grants@humanitiesdc.org.
1
Post our annual schedule, which includes two grant cycles – so that perspective applicants can plan accordingly;
2
Distribute Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and open our online application for each grant opportunity at least 6 weeks before applications are due;
3
Offer applicants including: general information webinars, one-on-one office hours with grant managers and responses to Frequently Asked Questions;
4
Facilitate an external review process that uses community mem bers and humanities scholars as our reviewers. To learn how to be a reviewer click here;
5
Inform applicants about their status no more than 3 months after applications are submitted; grant recipients will be awarded funds once they become available to HumanitiesDC;
6
Survey applicants, grantees and reviewers to obtain feedback and refine our process.
