Understanding Your Institution’s Funding Process

Applying for money from an external granting institution as an HCI is different than applying for an individual research grant. While an individual may do most of the writing, you’ll have to lean on the expertise and connections of your staff and faculty to identify need and to create a project that is sustainable. The goal of many institutional grants is set up a long-term future and not just the publication of a monograph.

While you are looking for grant opportunities, take the time to understand how your parent institution handles the application of grants. Setting your financial relationships in the appropriate manner will lend credibility to your organization and your activities. It will also expand the institutional stakeholders.

Need and Strategy

Indispensable to any application process is a clear demonstration of need and how filling that need fits into a larger and long-term plan. Before you come up with a perfect project, taking the time to explore how it fits with your HCIs long-term strategy should be paramount concern.

Some questions to consider along these lines are:

• How will this grant advance your strategic priorities one, three, and five-years down the line?
• Who are the faculty and departmental partners or co-leaders?
• How will it set up your HCI to do new things?
• What do these new competencies, staff, facilities, or relationships bring to your HCI and your parent institution?
• What is the next project after this one?

Above all, you’ll want to demonstrate that you have wide buy-in and that the proposed project is not just for the benefit of the director only.

Research Offices

Many institutions have offices that interface with external granting institutions. In some cases, these offices are the preferred means of communication through which all campus units must operate. Taking the time early to map the funding process at your host institution will help build local buy-in and save administrative headaches down the line.

Fundraising, Development, and Alumni Relations

Fundraising can be sensitive. Some development offices are rather protective of their alumni relations and prefer that all alumni relations flow through them. Before reaching out to potential alumni funders, see how these relationships are handled locally. In particular, investigate whether a potential funder already has a standing relationship with a development office at your institution.

If you would like fundraising to be an important element of your financing model, a position that to consider creating is a part-time or full-time director of development: an individual focused solely on fundraising internally and externally. Working with a campus development office and attending meetings organized by them, this individual could expand your financial resources, both in the long-term and short-term, allowing your HCI to potentially hire new staff independent of your institution.

• Director of Development – Institute for the Arts & Humanities – UNC Chapel Hill
• Development Officer – Tanner Humanities Center – University of Utah

After working with your institution, a donation page along the lines of the ones set up the Humanities Research Institute at University of Illinois or the University of Tennessee Humanities Center

• Research Humanities Institute – University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Grant Administration

In the process of determining how your institution handles grant application, you can also learn about how your institution administers awards. Higher education institutions often have very specific procedures for the distribution of grant funds. By understanding the financial structure and procedures of your institution, you’ll have a better sense of what is possible and what is not with funds, and thereby unlocking greater budget flexibility.

Getting Local Buy-In

By establishing contacts throughout your host institution early and following their application protocols, you’ll be in a better position to ask for local buy-in. Granting institutions like to see that a host institution supports the HCI and is willing to financially back the proposed project. In addition to lending your project credibility, it also demonstrates that the project live on after the initial grant.

CHCI Funding

As a member of CHCI, faculty affiliated with your center and parent institution are eligible to participate in a number of unique funding opportunities that support inter-institutional international collaborative projects:

• CHCI Global Humanities Institutes. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Global Humanities Institutes are member-initiated, cross-institutional, and interdisciplinary research projects that mobilize a global and collaborative approach to scholarship. The core of the project is a summer (or winter) institute for early career scholars.
• CCKF-CHCI Summer Institutes in Chinese Studies and Global Humanities. Emerging through collaboration with the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (CCKF) for International Scholarly Exchange, the CCKF-CHCI Summer Institutes are opportunities to foster unique collective projects, international collaboration, and interdisciplinary work centered on humanistic approaches to scholarship on the general topic of Chinese Studies and the Global Humanities.

Links:

• https://chcinetwork.org/programs/global-humanities-institutes
• https://chcinetwork.org/programs/cckf-chci-summer-institutes