Humanities New York is delighted to announce Action Grant funding for 22 organizations across seven regions of New York State.Action Grants award $6500 to $10,000 to non-profits to bring to life programs that promote the exchange of knowledge, skills, stories, and ideas on themes endemic—and important to—their local communities.Read on to explore the full list of projects.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2013 best-selling book, Braiding Sweetgrass catalyzed a shift in climate change discourse among scientists, lawmakers, and laypeople. Acknowledging this at a recent discussion hosted by Humanities New York, Kelsey Leonard—a water scientist and fellow policy change-maker—nonetheless wondered if a fundamental tenet of the book had not been deliberately misinterpreted to the detriment of Indigenous wisdom?Read the excerpt from this portion of the interview, and find the full video below.

In contrast to the downbeat timbre of most climate change discourse, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kelsey Leonard's conversation rang with positivity, impressing the importance of keeping our eyes opened to possibility rather than probability, and our ears attuned to the lessons that nature offers freely.Watch the full conversation here.

Humanities New York is excited to present our Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership (PIHP) grantees of 2023!PIHP is an annual grant that provides support to New York State-based organizations that serve previously incarcerated individuals and their families. PIHP aims to recognize the importance of and support these organizations and their work; explore humanities-based techniques to programming through workshops and discussion; and convene grantees in order to share experiences and engage with new resources.

On March 30, 2023, Humanities New York hosted Merlin Chowkwanyun in conversation with Celina Su about public health and the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City.

On October 18th, Humanities New York hosted its fourth annual “History and the American Imagination” event with poet and prison reform advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts and Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

HNY today announced $188,023 in summer Action grants to 38 organizations for innovative public humanities offerings, which will take place primarily in autumn 2022. Awards were made to tax-exempt entities in nine regions of the state, and are regrants of funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

HNY is proud to announce that the Mellon Foundation has awarded $1.2 million to its Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership for a period of three years. The 2023–26 HNY Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership (PIHP) will provide grants of up to $25,000 to organizations in New York State that serve individuals who have previously been incarcerated and their families.

Self-determination and survival: these were the factors that drove the actions of Indigenous peoples of eighteenth century colonial frontiers. Yet the ways in which they navigated the wars of their time were far more diverse than standard histories of the American Revolution typically confer. Though a close read of Atiatonharónkwen Louis Cook’s involvement—from childhood to retirement—in the European conflicts within Haudenosaunee Territories, Melissane Schrems asks readers of this blog post to consider what a more accurate telling of our complex, suppressed, Indigenous history could be.

“Land, Liberty, and Loss” by Alan Taylor, below, is the eponymous leading essay for HNY’s newest initiative, a scholar-guided, multi-part exploration of our nation’s founding and how its history—or, more pointedly, misapprehensions of that history—often serves as an obstacle to full democratic and civic flourishing. The project is grounded in the historical and ongoing intersections between racial justice, including the centuries-long deprivations endured by Indigenous and Native Americans, and the evolution of the American landscape. “Land, Liberty, and Loss” is meant to prompt reflection on assumptions about the human connectedness between the natural and built environments, and to allow us to reconsider in a holistic sense how the Revolution that resulted in the United States connects to or disrupts indigenous histories, our use of natural resources, political development, and national expansion.