Grant Details

The Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections (SCHC) program helps cultural institutions meet the complex challenge of preserving large and diverse holdings of humanities materials for future generations by supporting sustainable conservation measures that mitigate deterioration, prolong the useful life of collections, and support institutional resilience: the ability to anticipate and respond to disasters resulting from natural or human activity.

Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections offers two kinds of awards: 

• Planning Grants - to help an institution develop and assess sustainable preventive conservation strategies. Planning projects may encompass such activities as: site visits, risk assessments, planning sessions, monitoring, testing, modeling, project-specific research, and preliminary designs for implementation projects. Planning grants must focus on exploring sustainable preventive conservation strategies. They also must involve an interdisciplinary team appropriate to the goals of the project. The team may consist of consultants and members of the institution's staff and might include architects, building engineers, conservation scientists, conservators, curators, and facilities managers, among others. A preservation/conservation professional who works with collections must be included on the planning team. All members of the team must be identified in the application, and they should all work collaboratively throughout the planning process; and
• Implementation Grants - to help an institution implement a preventive conservation project. Implementation projects must focus on sustainable preservation strategies. Projects should be based on planning that has been specific to the needs of the institution and its collections within the context of its local environment. It is not necessary to receive an NEH planning grant to be eligible for an implementation grant. Planning for sustainable preservation strategies could be supported by NEH, other federal agencies, private foundations, or an institution's internal funds.

All applicants, whether applying for planning or implementation projects, must clearly address sustainable preventive conservation strategies in their application narratives. Sustainable preservation strategies can take many forms, depending on the nature of an institution and its collections, its building, and the local climate. However, interdisciplinary collaboration during planning and implementation of these strategies is essential. In SCHC projects, such teams typically consist of consultants and members of the institution's staff and can include architects, building engineers, conservation scientists, conservators, curators, archivists, and facilities managers, among others.