New NCPH Grassroots Award to Support Non-Traditional Public Historians

22 February 2022 – Stasia Tanzer

The National Council on Public History (NCPH) is excited to announce the creation of a new award: the NCPH Grassroots Public History Award. This award reflects NCPH’s commitment to acknowledging the many different kinds of work public historians do and the wide array of places we do it, particularly outside of large and predominately white institutions. For the purpose of this award, grassroots is defined as an effort spearheaded by people on the ground that supports the communities they belong to or represent. In this post, we’d like to share how the award came to be and how you can help promote it.

For more information about the NCPH Grassroots Public History Award, visit https://ncph.org/about/awards/grassroots-public-history-award/.

The process to establish this new award was long, with starts and stops along the way. The seeds for a grassroots award were planted as early as 2016 when the 2017-2022 Long Range Plan (LRP) was developed. A number of goals and activities in the LRP relate to the inclusion of grassroots efforts, even if they aren’t referred to as such. For example, Pillar 1, Goal A asks that we “nurture a collaborative environment between all who are part of a broadly defined public history community (including those who do public history work but do not use the term public history).” Activity 6 then recommends reviewing “criteria for NCPH awards to identify areas where the guidelines too narrowly define the public history community or discourage collaboration.” The NCPH Grassroots Public History Award will directly address these goals of the LRP by recognizing people, groups, or organizations that have done public history work, whether or not they consider themselves public historians.

Additional work for the award began in 2018 with the launch of the 2020 Vision Endowment-building campaign. The Endowment has long funded inclusion, diversity, equity, and access work. One of the three pillars of the campaign was “to catalyze our capacity to lead via scholarship, excellence, and best practices in the field through our awards and travel grant programs.” This is related to Pillar 2, Goal C, Activity 6 of the LRP, which tasked us with reviewing and recommending use of the Program Committee co-chairs’ discretionary fund for diversity, such as with the “creation of scholarships to promote annual meeting access for participants…from underrepresented groups.” As the fundraising campaign picked up speed and success looked imminent, we also received suggestions and proposals from a number of members and conference attendees for material ways to achieve these goals, such as in the form of an award.

The NCPH Board of Directors began brainstorming and drafting the creation of a new award in this vein in 2019, and was progressing toward a proposal in early 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily sidelined it. In the summer of 2021, after several rounds of editing, we created the current award and selected our inaugural award committee members: co-chairs Romeo Guzmán (Claremont Graduate University/South El Monte Arts Posse) and Liz Ševčenko (Humanities Action Lab, Rutgers University-Newark), and Mayela Caro (University of California, Riverside) and Brittani Orona (Hoopa Valley Tribe/University of California, Davis). Upon joining the committee, Guzmán wrote that he was “drawn to the idea of acknowledging and awarding grassroots organizations and collectives that are doing some sort of public history labor outside the academy and formal institutions…I hope that in awarding grassroots projects, we begin to build relationships and imagine how we can be useful to those working on the ground.” Ševčenko noted that they “have found that the most exciting public history work is being done by people who would never call themselves public historians…I have long advocated for public historians to attend to the work happening outside the formalized field, and this award gives that listening and learning wonderful impetus and structure.”

There are, of course, challenges to administering this award. NCPH is predominantly a community of so-called traditional public historians, mostly from larger universities and museums who can afford NCPH memberships. Both Guzmán and Ševčenko acknowledged a concern that the people and organizations we are hoping to reach will be overlooked for this award. NCPH has devised several strategies to avoid this. The first is the creation of a subsidized NCPH Annual Meeting rate for underemployed public historians and community members. The second is the creation of two new membership levels at low cost (launched February 4, 2022)–the Under-/Unemployed and the Public History Adjacent rates, both set at $37. These options are intended to support public historians who: have been impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; are seeking employment in the field or are otherwise underfunded; or do public history work without considering public history to be their primary career. Ideally, this will bring some of our target audience into the NCPH fold.

Another major tool is you, our NCPH members. Ševčenko put it well: “We’ll have to rely on the NCPH community’s commitment to exploring outside its known world.” Go out and discover the work being done in your communities and invite the people doing the grassroots work to join us if they can. Keep these colleagues informed of our initiatives, including this award, and nominate them when the time comes.

This award is place-based for accessibility and for practical reasons. In this first year of the award, with the annual meeting originally scheduled to take place in Montreal, Quebec, the prize will be given to a person, group, or organization working in the province of Quebec, Canada. The winner will be invited to showcase their work by presenting at the 2022 Virtual Meeting as a session or an exhibit in the virtual exhibit hall. This fulfills yet another piece of the LRP (Pillar 2, Goal D, Activity 4) that suggests developing “a plan to include annual meeting host city community in established meeting activities.” When the annual meeting is again in-person, the regional focus of the award will minimize as much as possible travel costs for potential award recipients.

This year, the Grassroots Public History Award Committee and Local Arrangements Committee will be choosing the 2022 winner. This process will give committee members a chance to see the kinds of work being done, to consider how to finesse the award’s criteria, and to provide an example for future. We look forward to gathering your submissions and exploring the wonderful work grassroots public historians are doing in and around Atlanta, Georgia, in 2023.

~Stasia Tanzer is the NCPH Membership Coordinator.