Office of Enterprise

The Office of Enterprise strengthens the Endowment's leadership in the humanities, advances its programs, and supports special initiatives by forging strategic partnerships with state and federal agencies, private organizations, and philanthropic individuals. Under authority granted by Congress, the Enterprise Office focused its 2000 efforts on supplementing the NEH's annual federal appropriation with charitable contributions, grants, and corporate partnerships to help bring the humanities to people of all backgrounds across the nation.

Throughout the year, the Enterprise Office worked closely with NEH's Office of Public Affairs to promote My History Is America's History, developed in partnership with the White House Millennium Council with principal support from Genealogy.com and launched in November 1999. My History encourages Americans to discover, preserve, and share their family stories as integral parts of the nation's history. Educational and outreach tools created for the project include a website (www.myhistory.org) and a printed guidebook, subtitled 15 Things You Can Do To Save America's Stories. During the course of the year, people learned about My History through features in major newspapers--from the Los Angeles Times to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution--and on radio and television programs--from the Antiques Roadshow on PBS to Heritage Hunt on ABC affiliates across the nation. More than 450,000 visited the My History website, while nearly one thousand other websites created links to My History, as a resource for elementary and secondary education and other purposes. MyHistory.org was named the New York Times "Site of the Day"; the "Too Cool School Site of the Week" by WorldVillage; and one of "The Web's Best Sites" by Britannica Online. The My History guidebook was awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers and first prize for a soft-cover publication from the National Association of Government Communicators.

NEH worked with its partners--including the Federation of Genealogical Societies, the National Council of Negro Women's Black Family Reunion, National History Day, the Community College Humanities Association, 4-H clubs, and state humanities councils--to distribute eighty-five thousand guidebooks, including two copies to each of the nation's 16,227 libraries, to make the materials available in every American community.

On other fronts during 2000, the Enterprise Office worked with the NEH's Division of Public Programs to secure a $1 million grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York for The Millennium Project for Public Libraries. These funds support a partnership of NEH, The Library of America, and the American Library Association helping eight hundred small libraries build their collection of American writing and expand opportunities for educational programs. The libraries will be awarded fifty recently published volumes in The Library of America, the distinguished series of the nation's foremost writers, with support for public programs using the volumes. The project represents the first time NEH has administered a program entirely via the Internet, with applications both accepted and reviewed online.

Together the Enterprise Office and the NEH Division of Education secured a renewed commitment totaling $700,000 from the WorldCom Foundation to fund an additional three years of EDSITEment (edsitement.neh.gov), the educational website launched in 1997 by NEH, MCI WorldCom, and the Council of the Great City Schools. The renewed funding will allow the number of websites that are part of this portal for teachers and students to double, from one hundred to two hundred, and will provide for development of lesson plans for kindergarten through fifth grade.

The Office of Enterprise also worked with NEH's Division of Education to secure a renewed commitment of $50,000 from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to expand a pilot program aimed at strengthening middle- and high-school teaching of the humanities. The Humanities Scholar in Residence Program brings outside humanities educators into selected New Jersey schools to serve as consultants for improving the schools' humanities curriculum. The grant will support efforts to increase the impact and sustainability of the program in additional New Jersey schools.

Throughout 2000, the Enterprise Office continued its work with the NEH Chairman and Office of Challenge Grants to develop support for the NEH Regional Humanities Centers Initiative, which will create a network of major centers across the nation for research and public education about the diverse characteristics of each region, such as local history, people, cultures, language, landscape, and architecture. These efforts build upon NEH's success during 1999 in raising $1,000,000 from sources external to the agency, including private donors and one independent federal agency, the Appalachian Regional Commission.

A joint project between the NEH and Mount Rushmore National Memorial, NEH's first permanent partnership with a National Park Service site, was completed in 2000 with the installation and dedication of four exhibits on the Presidential Trail. These exhibits provide historical information about the Mount Rushmore presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and feature images and quotations from the presidents as well as quotations from Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. The South Dakota Humanities Council helped fund this project, intended to reach the 3.25 million annual visitors to Mount Rushmore.

Finally, an Enterprise grant made to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., in 1998 bore fruit during the year in the publication of a map titled "Washington, D.C. Beyond the Monuments." The map is a tool to encourage Washington's twenty million annual visitors to participate in the city's rich cultural resources. It is being distributed by the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority ( WMATA) along with eleven complementary brochures of Washington D.C.'s neighborhood cultural resources. The project is part of a city-wide heritage tourism and economic development partnership of NEH, the Historical Society, the WMATA, the Washington Convention Center Authority, and the D.C. Heritage Tourism Coalition.

Nancy Sturm
Director
Office of Enterprise

Enterprise Grants

Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
Washington, DC Barbara A. Franco
$5,000** Metro Poster Campaign

Private Contributors and Public Partners

The National Endowment for the Humanities is pleased to acknowledge the private contributors and public partners that have donated $1,000 and more in funds or in-kind services directly to the NEH during 2000 or have joined forces with the NEH to support its humanities initiatives.

American Library Association
America's Promise
Appalachian Regional Commission
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Chamber of Commerce of Washington, DC
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Council of the Great City Schools
The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation Foundation
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
Diane and Charles Frankel
The Gazette
Genealogy.com
The Howard Gilman Foundation
Grocery Manufacturers of America
Heritage Preservation
Houghton Mifflin Company
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Lyn and Norman Lear Foundation
James Annenberg Levee Charitable Trust
Polly Annenberg Levee Charitable Trust
The Library of America
Sandra and Chuck Lyons
Marlene Meyerson
Bobby Muller and Solange MacArthur
National Science Foundation
National Trust for the Humanities
John N. Palmer Foundation
Dion Peterson Foundation, Inc.
President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
PSINet Inc.
Sara Lee Corporation
U.S. Department of the Interior
Washington Convention Center
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
White House Millennium Council
WorldCom Foundation
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