Join the Alabama Humanities Alliance throughout 2024 as we celebrate a half-century of telling Alabama\'s stories!
Read our year-end recap!
On April 2, 2025, the federal Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency terminated our 50-year partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities – and, with it, two-thirds of our annual budget. The funding we lost was statutorily enacted and Congressionally appropriated. Still, it evaporated – literally overnight.
Read on to learn about the local impacts of theses cuts.
And please make a gift to help save the humanities here in Alabama!
Our NEH partnership sustained AHA’s operational costs, as well as our statewide grantmaking, which supports nonprofits that put on local storytelling festivals, oral history projects, book clubs, art talks, community conversations, and more. In 2024 alone, we awarded $380,000 that helped more than 200,000 Alabamians experience local history, culture, art, and more in their hometowns.
Alabamians relyon us for these grants. When we surveyed our 2024 grant recipients, 90% of them noted their programming would not have been possible without AHA’s support. These are every community’s cultural cornerstones – libraries, museums, historical societies and historic sites, literary organizations, art centers, educational and literacy nonprofits, universities, civic engagement groups, and chambers of commerce.
Unfortunately, we have had to suspend our grantmaking and our Road Scholars Speakers Bureau. We are also pausing other initiatives as we look for new funding and partners to sustain our work.
No. 1: DONATE TO ALABAMA HUMANITIES
Your donations help us sustain our programming already planned for the year, including:
-ROAD SCHOLAR TALKS already scheduled for the rest of 2025, which we will honor. In 2024, our scholar-storytellers gave 82 talks in local libraries, museums, senior citizen centers, and historical societies.
-SMITHSONIAN TRAVELING EXHIBITS we have scheduled for 2025-2026: Spark: Places of Innovation traveling to Sylacauga, Dothan, Brewton, Uniontown, Athens, and Fort Payne; and Many Voices, One Nation, a new exhibit connecting Alabama’s stories to America’s 250th anniversary.
-STONY THE ROAD WE TROD, a weeklong summer field study that helps teachers bring Alabama’s civil rights history to life in their classrooms.
-THE ALABAMA COLLOQUIUM, our annual awards and storytelling event we plan to bring to Mobile for the first time ever this fall.
-HEALING HISTORY INITIATIVE, which brings Alabamians together, across any perceived differences, to explore our past and share our stories.
-MOSAIC MAGAZINE, which tells the fascinating stories of Alabamians engaged in the humanities statewide.
No. 2: CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE
Let your Congressional member know you value what the humanities bring to our state — and specifically to your community. Have you attended an AHA-funded event? Partnered with us on a project? Seen the impact of our mission in your hometown? Those are the stories to share.
You can also write op-ed letters for your local newspapers to rally support among your neighbors.
AHA has always worked tirelessly to leverage its federal funding into local giving that allows us to bring the humanities to more Alabamians. Thanks to state, corporate, foundation, and your individual support, we have programs that are funded independently of our federal partnership with the NEH. Programs such as Alabama History Day, which we celebrated this spring with students and teachers from across the state!
But we need significant and urgent assistance to help us keep our staff intact, keep our other programming viable — and give us time to, once again, secure long-term funding for our organization and our grantmaking capacity.
Thank you for believing in the value of lifelong learning and in the power of sharing our stories with one another. This isn’t a story we ever envisioned, but we are extraordinary grateful that you’re in this one with us.
List everyone by name here: David and Mary Mathews | etc.
Thank you for your support!
We made this video as part of AHA’s 50th anniversary celebration last year. Give it a watch and learn about who we are and what we value. And hear from some of the folks we work with – who bring Alabamians together, strengthen our communities, and make our state an ever more vibrant place to live.
NPR interviewed our executive director, Chuck Holmes, in one of its stories on the impact of cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities. One moment of joy in this piece: NPR used a beautiful photo of Gulf Coast artist Robby Amonett (below, taken by Mobile photographer Keith Necaise), during the Annual Songwriter Keynote, an AHA-funded event last month at the University of South Alabama.
