Week Eight: Connection in High Places (well, not really)

Week eight was mostly a short and uneventful week. Week eight just so happened to fall on the week of July Fourth. So, that meant that only one day was spent at the Public History Center. Most of the day, as with most days at the PHC, was devoted to working on the grant narrative, adding and removing sections, tweaking sentences, and obsessing over word choice. At around noon, I decided to take a short respite from the endless gazing into the computer screen. I left the PHC to buy lunch and then (so I thought) promptly return. While I was out, I figured I would take the opportunity to call the National Endowment for the Humanities to speak to a representative regarding the planning grant. Pulling into a parking spot alongside Sanford’s Main Street, I called the NEH with a brief list of questions about the grant.

I was pleasantly surprised to be immediately put through to a representative (who says government bureaucracy is slow and inefficient?). Her name was Barbara Bays, and she was as helpful as I could have asked for. What was supposed to be 5-10 minutes of questions and answers turned into just under one hour of conversation. As my car idled in the Florida heat, struggling to blow cold air into the cabin, I sat and discussed our project at great length with Barbara.

The conversation yielded both good news and bad news. The good news was reassuring. The NEH representative sounded genuinely interested in the PHC and its goals, the historic building it was housed in, and even the quirks of Sanford I so eagerly described. She told me that our project sounded truly worthwhile and that we had all of the requisite components to craft a (potentially) persuasive grant application. Our conversation also clarified many other aspects of the project for me. For an entire hour, I received an inside perspective on what makes a grant stand out. The exercise was invaluable, and it became immediately clear to me that it was useful to have a representative at the NEH who was familiar with our project. Of course, I guarantee that any grant-writer worth their salt contact the funding organization well in advance of the due date. What I did was certainly not unique. But this is the first grant application I have ever drafted, and as I stumble through it, encountering new and unexpected hurdles, it is enlightening to have that initial conversation with the funding agency.

But there was bad news too. The bad news was that our original goal – to have consultants come in to develop an institutional interpretive plan for us – was not the best use for NEH money. Sure, we could submit the application. But she warned that it would not be a very competitive application in that form. Why? Because it lent the impression that we really had made no progress at the museum and had no clear sense of our future goals. The reviewers, she noted, wanted to get the impression that organizations and museums had a clear sense of what they wanted to do with the museum. So, she advised me to change the phrasing to “interpretive strategies” instead of “interpretive planning.” The humanities themes were already in place, we just need scholars to help us come up with strategies to effectively interpret them. It was clear that, even with our vocabulary slight-of-hand, we would be walking a very fine line regarding appropriate usage for NEH funds. Even now, it is cause for unease.

But I won’t dwell on the negativities. No, it was a useful exercise to talk with the NEH representative. Her advice has since lent a much clearer and confident focus to my grant writing.