Last year, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) received the most applications ever, making FY2024 the most competitive, especially in the Museums for America program category. In New York State, 43 museums were awarded $7,741,317 in IMLS grants in FY 2024.

This year, museums and related organizations across the United States have eight opportunities to apply for grants from the IMLS. 

Applications are due no later than November 15.

IMLS Grant Opportunities

21st Century Museum Professionals Program 

Grant Amount: $100,000 - $500,000

Grant Period: One to three years

Cost Share Requirement: You must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of your IMLS request.

The 21st Century Museum Professional grant program supports projects that offer professional development to the current museum workforce, train and recruit museum professionals, and identify and share effective practices in museum workforce education and training. 

IMLS recognizes the important role of strong local and regional networks in providing peer-to-peer learning, training, and mentoring opportunities for the museum workforce. Partnerships among museums, museum-serving organizations, and higher education institutions are vital to expanding career pathways for broad groups of museum professionals throughout a city, county, state, region, or the nation. The 21MP Program encourages applications from museum associations, museum studies programs at higher education institutions, and museums that serve as essential parts of the professional learning and training environment.

Inspire! Grants for Small Museums   

Grant Amount: $5,000 - $75,000

Grant Period: One to three years

Cost Share Requirement: If your total request for federal funding is between $5,000 and $25,000, then no cost share is required. If your request for federal funding is between $25,001 and $75,000, you must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of your IMLS request.

Inspire! Grants for Small Museums is a special initiative of the Museums for America program. It is designed to support small museums of all disciplines in a project-based efforts to serve the public through exhibitions, educational/interpretive programs, digital learning resources, policy development and institutional planning, technology enhancements, professional development, community outreach, audience development, and/or collections management, curation, care, and conservation. 

Inspire! Has three project categories:

1. Lifelong Learning supports projects that position museums as unique teaching organizations. The goal is to empower people of all ages and backgrounds through experiential and cross-disciplinary learning and discovery. 

Objectives: 

In FY23, The Children’s Museum of the East End was awarded $50,000 to expand Estrellas de Lectura/Reading Stars, a reading mentorship program that improves special emotional learning skills and restores and supports reading fluency in bilingual children that were disproportionately affected by learning loss as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project includes gathering information through community meetings, recruiting and training reading mentors, updating the curriculum, and promoting the program through community partners. Students entering grades Kindergarten through fourth will meet with their reading mentors twice a week in the fall, winter, and spring at the museum’s Bridgehampton and Riverside locations. As a result, students will see improvements in their English reading fluency and general vocabulary, increased self-confidence, and improved social-emotional learning skills.

2. Institutional Capacity builds the capacity of small museums to serve their communities by supporting institutional planning and policy development, supporting recruitment, training, and development of museum staff, and supporting technology enhancements. 

Objectives

In FY24, the Underground Railroad Education Center (UREC) in Albany, NY was awarded $33,453 to develop a Museum Studies Teen Program for junior and high school students. Utilizing this funding, the UREC will offer a comprehensive out-of-school program to prepare students from low-income and/or marginalized backgrounds for a career in the museum field. This funding will help support hiring a full-time Program Manager, initiate partnerships for mentorship, develop a curriculum with input from external consultants, and recruit program participants. The project will result in a ready-to-implement plan that can be shared with other small museums wishing to replicate the program and their institutions.

UREC hopes to increase organizational capacity, engage with community youth, and help to diversify the museum workforce, benefiting student participants and the museum field as a whole.

3. Collections Stewardship and Access supports the role of museums as trusted stewards of museum collections. This program category focuses on the desire to improve long term collection care. It funds conservation treatments, rehousing projects, cataloging, and increasing collection access via digitization.

Objectives

In FY23, the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, NY, was awarded $50,000 to increase staff capacity to digitize two of its collections about the history of the Matthews Boat Owners Association (approximately 30,000 documents)  and the Richardson Boat Owners Association (approximately 5,000 documents, photographs, and works on paper). Project staff is working to catalog materials from these collections and make the collections diitally accessible online with a searchable collections database to benefit maritime historians and the public. 

Museum Grants for African American History and Culture 

Grant Amount: $5,000 - $500,000

Grant Period: One to three years

Cost Share Requirement: If your total request for federal funding is between $5,000 and $100,000, then no cost share is required. If your request for federal funding is between $100,001 and $500,000, you must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of your IMLS request.

The Museum Grants for African American History and Culture (AAHC) program is designed to build the capacity of African American museums and support the growth and development of museum professionals at African American museums.

The AAHC program supports projects that nurture museum professionals, build institutional capacity, and increase access to museum and archival collections at African American museums and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

In FY23, the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor Commission was awarded $100,000 to build the capacity of five African American anchor institutions in Buffalo, NY to develop and expand public programs and exhibitions by creating a Visitor Experience Plan. Representatives from the Michigan Street Baptist Church, the Nash House Museum, the Historic Colored Musicians Club and Museum, and WUFO 1080 AM Black Radio History Collective will collaborate with visitor experience consultants to produce the plan. These anchor institutions preserve stories, collections, and structures on themes ranging from the Buffalo Anti-Slavery Movement, and the Niagara Movement, to the Civil Rights Movement, and the Jazz Age. The visitor experience plan will shape future interpretation, exhibitions, and public wayfinding in the corridor through a cohesive narrative that tells the entire Michigan Street Corridor story.

In FY24, the Lewis Latimer House Museum in Queens, NY, was awarded $195,000 to hire staff to improve collections management and create a digital exhibition from the museum’s collection. In partnership with Queens Public Library, museum staff will digitize the Latimer Family Papers. The museum will hire a Collections Digitization Manager to train and supervise paid interns on digital asset management practices for the project. The museum will also hire a digitization specialist to implement digitization software for collections. Staff will travel to conduct collections research, informing the creation of a digital exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection. The digital exhibition will be available on the museum’s website as a free public resource.

*NEW* Museum Grants for American Latino History and Culture 

Grant Amount: $5,000 - $500,000

Grant Period: One to three years

Cost Share Requirement: None

Museum Grants for American Latino History and Culture are designed to build the capacity of American Latino history and culture museums to serve their communities and broadly advance the growth and development of a professional workforce in American Latino institutions.

This is a new funding opportunity in FY25, and prospective applicants are encouraged to contact Senior Program Officer Gibran Villalobos at gvillalobos@imls.gov or click here to learn more.

Museums Empowered

Grant Amount: $5,000 - $250,000

Grant Period: One to three years

Cost Share Requirement: You must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of your IMLS request.

Museums Empowered (ME) is a special initiative of the Museums for America grant program. It supports projects that use the transformative power of professional development and training to generate systemic change within museums of all types and sizes.

IMLS recognizes the many challenges facing individual museums and the need to invest resources, time, and energy toward nurturing the professional development of staff and strengthening museum operations. The Museums Empowered grant program identifies four areas of museum operations to focus for professional development.

Digital Technology focused projects that will support the work of museum staff in using digital technology to enhance audience engagement, collections access, or general museum operations.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion focused projects that will increase cultural competency among museum staff and support the relevancy of museum programs through learning activities that strengthen their ability to connect with the communities they serve.

Evaluation focused projects that will enhance the ability of museum staff to understand a broad spectrum of evaluation methods and techniques and better use evaluation reports, data, and metrics to improve the design and delivery of programs.

Organizational Management focused projects that will help museum staff develop and implement effective practices in organizational management, human resources, and strategic planning in response to emerging internal or external priorities.

IMLS expects successful Museums Empowered projects to:

• Reflect a solid understanding of relevant theory and effective practices in professional development, organizational dynamics and change management.

• Engage staff, leadership, and volunteers in a series of training activities tied to directly to a key need or challenge.

• Generate systemic change or organizational growth that results in a more agile and sustainable museum.

In FY23, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in NYC was awarded $250,000 to create a new training program for supervisors of internship programs in the five New York City wildlife parks operated by WCS –the Bronx, Central Park, Prospect Park, and Queens Zoos, and the New York Aquarium. The professional development training program will focus on positive youth development, cultural competence, supervising young adults, and mentoring and career support to help the intern supervisors develop the necessary skills to succeed in this important role. 

Project activities include hosting listening sessions with current intern supervisors to understand their needs, gathering existing training resources, developing a training curriculum, delivering supervisor training, and conducting training follow-ups. The new training program will ensure the internship program is effective, inclusive, and supportive, transforming the zoo into a more welcoming place, resulting in a broader representation of youth participating in the internship program.

Museums for America 

Grant Amount: $5,000 - $250,000

Grant Period: Up to three years

Cost Share Requirement: You must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of your IMLS request.

The Museums for America program supports museums of all sizes and disciplines in strategic, project-based efforts to serve the public through exhibitions, educational/interpretive programs, digital learning resources, professional development, community debate and dialogue, audience-focused studies, and/or collections management, curation, care, and conservation. 

In FY24, the Museums for America grant program awarded 115 projects, the most of any grant award program, 21 of which were awarded to NYS museums.

Museums for America has three project categories:

1. Lifelong Learning

In FY24, the Museum of the City of NY was awarded $249,920 to create programs and classroom resources aligned with New York City’s “Civics for All” public school initiative. The museum will convene a paid teacher advisory group to work with a curriculum consultant to develop educational resources for students in grades six through eight. The advisory group will also provide feedback on two new “Civics for All”-themed field trips. In addition, the museum will host several professional development programs for New York City teachers focused on civic engagement themes. To support project activities, the museum will contract with a curriculum consultant, project evaluator, graphic designer, and translation services to translate curriculum materials into Spanish to reach a broader student population. The new “Civics for All”-aligned curricula and field trips will reach an estimated 10,000 New York City students and teachers.

2. Community Engagement

In FY24, Genesee Country Village & Museum was awarded $188,841 to strengthen interpretation related to the history of enslavement in 19th century New York State. The project will focus on the educational interpretation of four historic buildings on site: the Nathaniel Rochester House, Land Office, Livingston-Backus House, and Quaker Meeting House. Staff will work with interpretive and educational consultants to create content and evaluation plans and train staff on content delivery. Staff will also work with local community partners and local and national subject experts to create and review in-person interpretation, exhibit, audio tour, and school program content.

3. Collections Stewardship and Access

In FY24, the Staten Island Museum was awarded $248,057 to build a collaborative approach to the stewardship of the Native American and Indigenous collections in its care. Museum staff will work directly with Lenape representatives to catalog the Lenape archaeology collection and ensure appropriate handling, storage, and interpretation. The collection contains nearly 3,500 artifacts found on Staten Island and surrounding areas, part of the traditional homeland of the Lenape people. The museum will host advisory meetings with Lenape representatives to gain insight regarding the cultural and spiritual significance of the artifacts. The project will support the hiring of a part-time collections assistant and a museum fellow. This project will increase the care of the collection while allowing the museum to make the collection as accessible to the public as possible in a way that respects the heritage and significance of the artifacts.

National Leadership Grants for Museums 

Grant Amount: $50,000 - $750,000

Grant Period: One to three years

Cost Share Requirement: You must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of the request, unless otherwise indicated in the FY25 Notice of Funding Opportunity.

In FY24, four NYS-based organizations received a National Leadership Grant: Games for Change, Rochester Insitute of Technology, Visitor Studies Association, and Voices in Contemporary Art.

Native American/Native Hawaiian Museum Services 

Grant Amount: $5,000 - $250,000

Grant Period: Up to three years

Cost Share Requirement: None

The Native American/Native Hawaiian Museum Services (NANH) grant program is designed to support Indian Tribes and organizations that primarily serve and represent Native Hawaiians in sustaining indigenous heritage, culture, and knowledge. The program supports projects such as educational services and programming, workforce professional development, organizational capacity building, community engagement, and collections stewardship.

To be eligible for an award under the NANH program, your organization must be either:

• a Federally Recognized Indian Tribe, or

• a Nonprofit Organization that Primarily Serves and Represents Native Hawaiians.

In FY24, the Oneida Indian Nation was awarded $248,212 to address recommendations from a recent preservation assessment by purchasing and installing museum-quality mobile shelving in the Nation’s newly renovated Archives Room. Project activities include purchasing the new shelving, rehousing and cataloging the collections and archival materials, moving the collection to a temporary location, installing the new shelving, and re-shelving the collections in the Archives Room. The project will improve the safety and security of the collection and support the nation’s efforts to reclaim, preserve, and sustain Oneida culture, heritage, and knowledge.

Learn more about IMLS Grant Programs: https://imls.gov/grants/grant-programs