National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Shelly C. Lowe Testifies to Congress on the Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Request
WASHINGTON, DC (June 9, 2022) – Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) testified in front of the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies yesterday during its hearing entitled “Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Request for the Arts and Humanities.” She was joined by the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, on the panel. A second panel featured Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art.
During the question-and-answer period with the members of the Subcommittee, Chair Lowe discussed several important initiatives for the agency. This included the importance of the state and jurisdictional councils in advancing humanities initiatives at the state and territorial level. She also spoke about the efforts, through the developing Office of Data and Evaluation and Office of Outreach, to increase opportunities for rural and underserved communities. Through NEH’s funding of educational support with the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, the EDSITEment portal of lesson plans, and National History Day, Chair Lowe emphasized the agency’s nationwide support for our children and encouragement of strong civics education.
This wide-ranging hearing was the first time since 2011 that an NEH Chair has testified in front of the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and the first chance for Chair Lowe, sworn in on February 14, to speak to Congress on her work and goals in leading the agency.
Below are Chair Lowe’s opening remarks to the Subcommittee as delivered.
Good Morning. [Introduction in Navajo]
Good Morning everybody. Good morning Madame Chair, Mr. Ranking Member, and Distinguished Members of the Subcommittee.
My name is Shelly Lowe, and I have the honor of serving as the 12th Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
I am pleased to be here today to speak on behalf of NEH and our budget request for the upcoming fiscal year.
NEH is the only federal agency dedicated to funding the humanities, which include history, philosophy, literature, language, archaeology, jurisprudence, and comparative religion.
We fund numerous types of projects such as advanced humanities research leading to book publication, curriculum initiatives and professional development for educators at all levels, the documentation and preservation of languages on the brink of loss, physical and digital infrastructure for cultural and educational institutions, along with many more endeavors essential to national progress and scholarship in the humanities.
NEH has spent much of the past two years working to stabilize and support colleges and universities, museums, libraries, historic sites, public television and radio stations, independent researchers, and documentary filmmakers struggling to cope with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic which we continue to grapple with today.
Thanks to funding from the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan, NEH has been able to distribute millions in economy recovery funding, helping organizations retain staff, maintain programs, facilities, and operations, and convert physical programs into digital offerings to increase access, even from a distance.
But there is still much to be done and the humanities are vital to rebuilding our communities, institutions, and regional economies.
The NEH FY 2023 budget request submitted by the White House is $200.68 million.
This funding will allow NEH to continue to support the fundamental building blocks of American civil society, and fund projects that help us examine the human condition, understand our cultural heritage, foster mutual respect for diverse beliefs and cultures, develop media and information literacy, and promote civics education.
And it will allow us to expand some of NEH’s most impactful initiatives and grant programs in FY 2023.
This includes providing additional support to projects in the humanities and for awards to NEH’s partners in each of the 56 states and jurisdictions through our Federal/State Partnership office. These projects reach millions of Americans in rural areas, urban neighborhoods, and suburban communities. In the last year, projects supported by the state and jurisdictional councils and their subrecipients reached more than 6.6 million participants.
The proposed FY 2023 appropriation will also enable the expansion of NEH’s “A More Perfect Union” initiative, which builds on NEH’s 57-year investment in projects that catalog, preserve, explore, and promote American history and supports the utilization of these lessons of history to address today’s challenges.
As NEH Chair, I am deeply committed to extending the reach of NEH’s grantmaking and the projects and products we support so that all Americans have opportunities to participate and benefit from humanities-centered research, education, and public programs.
To meet this goal, we plan to create an NEH Office of Data and Evaluation to analyze the effectiveness of agency programs and policies in advancing equity and support for underserved communities; an Office of Outreach to focus on increasing NEH’s engagement with underserved communities and institutions; and a Chief Diversity Officer position to advise the agency on all matters of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access.
Recognizing our changing climate, NEH is also developing new initiatives to study and address the impact of climate events on our cultural resources, museums, and historic sites.
The budget request before you will allow NEH to build upon our current work and move the agency forward in our changing world.
Thank you, I look forward to your questions.
The full hearing can be found here.
National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
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