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Major & Mini Grants - Project Examples - Goals

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Applicants should clearly summarize what they intend to achieve.  They should also answer the following questions: What will people learn or explore?  What impact will this project have on the lives of the participants or on the community?

(1)

“What’s Going On?” Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties is a multidimensional project that will explore episodes of civil unrest in 1967 Newark against the backdrop of the nation’s history of episodic urban violence.  “What’s Going On?” will examine the events – their impetus, their aftermath, their meaning, and their memory – in order to place the outbreak of urban unrest in a national context that looks both at the 1960s’ changing attitudes about authority and at the larger contexts of twentieth-century civil unrest.  Our objectives for “What’s Going On?” are to:

• Help develop the body of intellectual resources available for exploration and interpretation of New Jersey’s history

• Represent new programming on New Jersey history, by addressing topics that have received little scholarly attention and adding to the body of knowledge about 1960s urban unrest

• Expand public awareness of historical resources related to urban unrest of 1960s Newark, educating the public and encouraging critical thinking about issues of the past that may continue to have an effect on the present and the future

• Serve as a record of public participation in a meaningful dialogue about these events

• Serve as an effective bridge between humanities scholarship and public interest, using personal narratives and multimedia to immerse visitors in the exhibition’s themes

By the end of the funding period, we expect to have accomplished the following goals: to develop and install a dynamic exhibition that will serve as an educational resource for New Jerseyans of all ages; and to develop and implement related educational programming for children, adults, and families that will raise awareness of am pivotal event in the history of New Jersey

(2)

Beginning with the Armenian genocide of 1915, the twentieth century spawned multiple genocides and eruptions of “ethnic cleansing” (the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda), earning a reputation as “the century of genocide.”  Unfortunately, as the situation in Darfur (along with other areas of Africa) continues to deteriorate, the 21st century seems headed down the same path.  As educators, our mission is to reverse the direction of genocide by spreading knowledge about the “early warning signs” of genocide and stimulating critical awareness of the ways in which a culture may – deliberately or unwittingly – make genocide possible.  Thus, the Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study seeks a grant of $10,000 from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities to present a three part lecture-conference series organized around Dr. Gregory Stanton’s Eight Stage Theory of Genocide, a theory which proposes that “genocide is a process that develops in eight stages that are predictable but not inexorable.  At each stage, preventative measures can stop it.”  Our goal is to give our audience the conceptual tools by which they themselves can begin to identify the various stages of the genocidal process and to sensitize them to those early warning signs which we often ignore or dismiss.