WV Travel Assistance Grants

The West Virginia Humanities Council offers Travel Assistance Grants to support individuals associated with West Virginia museums and educational institutions in attending professional conferences. These grants promote public humanities programming and facilitate participation in significant events such as the Appalachian Studies Association and Shakespeare Association meetings. Applicants are eligible for one grant every two years, with funding covering registration fees, transportation, lodging, and meals. This initiative underscores the importance of humanities engagement in local communities.

West Virginia Humanities Council
The West Virginia Humanities Council offers a variety of matching grants to nonprofit organizations that provide public humanities programming for West Virginia audiences.
What are the Humanities?
The humanities represent a group of academic disciplines that have traditionally been concerned with values, ideas and choices. The term humanities includes the following:
Language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, theory and criticism of the arts; those aspects of social sciences that have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to our diverse heritage, traditions and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current condition of national life.
These grants support travel to professional meetings and similar conferences for individuals associated with West Virginia museums, historical societies, institutions of higher and secondary education, and other nonprofit organizations. There is no cost share required.
Recent Travel Assistance Grants supported travel to conferences and meetings of the Appalachian Studies Association, International Thespian Festival, and the Shakespeare Association.
Criteria for Selection
Selection will be based on the significance of conference participation to the field of the humanities, and the benefits that the individual, the organization, and the community derive from conference attendance. The award is not designed to support attending classes at other institutions or general educational or research travel.

Eligibility

Travel Assistance grants are open to individuals associated with West Virginia museums, historical societies, institutions of higher and secondary education, and other West Virginia nonprofit groups.Applicants are eligible to receive one Travel Assistance grant every other fiscal year and no more than two staff members from any one organization may receive Travel Assistance grants per fiscal year. Further, funding is limited to two times attending the same event.Applicants must complete and submit an application at least 60 days prior to the date of travel in order to be eligible for consideration.TAP grants will cover the following items: Conference registration fees, transportation to/from the meeting (mileage is $.54 cents per mile or current state government reimbursement rate), lodging, food, and ground transportation while in attendance at the conference. If meals are provided as part of the conference, it is expected that participants will partake of these meals rather than incurring additional expenses.