FY2024 Historic Preservation Fund- African American Civil Rights- History Grants | P24AS00540

Opportunity Information: Apply for P24AS00540

The FY2024 Historic Preservation Fund African American Civil Rights History Grants opportunity (Notice Number P24AS00540) is a competitive National Park Service grant program designed to support projects that document, interpret, and preserve the full scope of African American civil rights history, from the transatlantic slave trade forward. The program sits within the National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program (AACR) and is funded through the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF). A key guiding reference for determining whether proposed topics, sites, and related resources are appropriate for support is the NPS publication Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites, which helps applicants and reviewers align projects with nationally significant civil rights themes, stories, and places.

This specific funding announcement, P24AS00540, is focused on non-construction, history-oriented work rather than bricks-and-mortar preservation. It supports a broad range of history and documentation activities such as survey and planning work, research and documentation projects, interpretation and education efforts, and collections conservation. In practical terms, that can include identifying and surveying historic resources tied to African American civil rights history, developing historic contexts, preparing nominations (such as documentation that supports formal recognition), producing interpretive materials that help the public understand the history, and conserving historically significant collections so that documents, photographs, oral histories, and other materials are stabilized and accessible for future use.

It is important to distinguish this announcement from the separate AACR funding opportunity dedicated to physical preservation of historic sites. Physical preservation projects must apply under P24AS00541, while history, research, documentation, survey, and nomination efforts belong under P24AS00540. Submitting under the correct opportunity number matters because the two announcements fund different types of work and will be reviewed with different expectations.

Funding for the overall AACR program in FY2024 is backed by Public Law 118-42, which provides a total of 24,000,000 for the program. Individual awards under this history-grants announcement have an award ceiling of 75,000. Grants are awarded through a competitive process, and a notable feature is that these grants do not require a non-Federal match, which can make the program more accessible to organizations that might not have cash match readily available.

Eligible applicants include a wide range of public and nonprofit entities: state governments; local governments (including counties, cities or townships, and special district governments); independent school districts; public and state-controlled institutions of higher education; private institutions of higher education; federally recognized Tribal governments; other Native American tribal organizations; and nonprofits both with and without 501(c)(3) status (as long as they are not institutions of higher education in the nonprofit category). The program also references eligibility for Federally Recognized Indian Tribes, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiian Organizations as defined by 54 USC 300300, reinforcing that a variety of Indigenous and Native-serving entities may be eligible depending on status and structure.

There are also clear restrictions on what cannot be funded. Sites or collections that are owned or leased by the National Park Service, or where the NPS holds a property interest, are not eligible for grant funding under this program. That limitation is meant to ensure the program supports preservation and documentation efforts outside direct NPS property control.

Administratively, this is a discretionary grant offered by the National Park Service under CFDA 15.966. The opportunity was created on June 6, 2024, and the original application closing date is September 5, 2024. In short, P24AS00540 is best understood as a targeted federal funding source for researching, documenting, planning for, interpreting, and conserving the historical record of African American civil rights experiences and movements, with a firm emphasis on aligning proposed work to recognized civil rights themes and significant places while keeping construction and physical preservation activities in the separate preservation-focused announcement.

• The National Park Service in the other sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "FY2024 Historic Preservation Fund- African American Civil Rights- History Grants" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 15.966.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-06-06.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-09-05. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $75,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Nonprofits that do not have a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education.

Apply for P24AS00540

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