Budget as Morality in Community-Driven Archives

Where the money resides, or in this case, where the power resides.

Can we talk about grant funding and community engagement for a minute? Many libraries, archives, and museum leaders make identifying grant-funded work a high priority. We rationalize the decision to seek out external short-term funding because grants can add capacity to our projects, allowing us to reach our goals quicker. Or because grants can inject additional resources to support the exploration of new ideas and buy projects time to secure more solid funding.

While these reasons are valid, what do we do if our work is in collaboration with communities that are not comfortable with the fast pace and short-term nature of grant timelines? Is it moral to engage with community partners exclusively on grant-funded initiatives?

Throughout my nine-year career in archives, I did not think about institutional budgets through a moral lens until the Black Lives Matter events of the summer of 2020. While talking with colleagues about the movement to defund the police, I learned more about how a morality framework has been used to critique too large federal defense and too small federal healthcare budgets. The concept has roots as a principle articulated by religious communities to policymakers. As Jim Wallis, a public theologian, states:

…any budget is a moral statement of priorities, whether it’s a budget created by an individual, a family, a school, a city, or a nation. It tells us, mathematically, what areas, issues, things, or people are most important to the creators of that budget, and which are least important.”

The question of who benefits from any budget line item is complex. For example, who does staff travel to an out-of-state historically marginalized rural community benefit? The institution, because the staff member is representing the university and building its network? The community, because their needs and expectations are centered? How often do we bend and stretch these discussions of “benefit” to support our own agendas? A more direct question might be: Who is receiving cash directly, institutions or communities?

The reality is that activities that promise longer-term returns, like grant-writing workshops or skill-building for future employment, are not guaranteed or reliable revenue streams for community collaborators. According to the Architecting Sustainable Futures report, in most community-institution collaborations, community organizations only received 3% of the project budget for their expertise and labor.

As we analyzed the spending breakdown of our own grant-funded community-driven archives project, 66% of our grant award went to UNC staff’s salaries and benefits, and the other 27% included direct payments to community members, but this percentage also includes other institutionally-directed spending.

Our grant team members live in and around Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a wealthy college town; we contribute to this expensive and often exclusionary and elitist academic community. We acknowledge that there are other communities and local economies that could use the support much more. Our team is inspired by alternatives to grant funding such as mutual aid, grassroots fundraising, and more opportunities to directly fund community needs.

Our grant project is one of many examples of this need for critical reflection about institutional resources, and our experiences spur us to devise ways to more directly resource our partners, to design grant projects with a bigger focus on equity, and to collaborate with our community partners in the development of frameworks to help us measure progress in these areas.

Many thanks to Bergis Jules and Nicole Kang Ferraiolo, whose writings on these issues within the worlds of grantmaking and cultural heritage practitioners helped to frame our team’s conversations.

Additional Reading

Burtman (2003, June 19), On the Road to a More Elitist Chapel Hill, Indyweek. https://indyweek.com/news/road-elitist-chapel-hill/

Caswell, Michelle, Christopher Harter, and Bergis Jules (2017). Diversifying the Digital Historical Record: Integrating Community Archives in National Strategies for Access to Digital Cultural Heritage (Forum 4). D-Lib Magazine, Volume 23, Number 5/6. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may17/caswell/05caswell.html

Cultural Heritage and Social Change Summit (2016). Nothing About Us, Without Us (report). Shift Design. https://about.historypin.org/content/uploads/2017/12/HistoryPin_CHSC_takeaways_final.pdf

Ferraiolo, Nikole Kang (2019, February 21). More Equitable Partners in Grant Funding (blog post). CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources). https://www.clir.org/2019/02/more-equitable-partnerships-in-grant-funding/

Ferraiolo, Nikole Kang (2019, March 12). Toward a more inclusive grant program (blog post). CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources). https://www.clir.org/2019/03/toward-a-more-inclusive-grant-program/

Ferraiolo, Nikole Kang (2019, March 12). Still Listening (blog post). CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources). https://www.clir.org/2019/04/still-listening/

Jules, Bergis (2018). Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community Based Archives (blog). Medium. https://medium.com/community-archives/architecting-sustainable-futures-exploring-funding-models-in-community-based-archives-da9a7a856cbe

Jules, Bergis (2019). Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community Based Archives (report). Shift Design. https://shiftdesign.org/content/uploads/2019/02/ArchitectingSustainableFutures-2019-report.pdf

Wallace, Jim (2017). Truth that Bears Repeating: A Budget is a Moral Document. Sojournershttps://sojo.net/articles/truth-bears-repeating-budget-moral-document

SHC partners with Southern Jewish Historical Society, grant supports digitization of part of the Mordecai Family Papers

Earlier this year, the SHC received $1,000 from the Southern Jewish Historical Society‘s Lowenstein Archival Grant program to support the digitization of 39 writings (diaries, travel accounts, memoirs, prose and poetry) from the SHC’s Mordecai Family Papers. The SHC’s Mordecai Family Papers are heavily used on site by scholars, students, and members of the local community. We were honored to receive this support from the SJHS and we are pleased that we can now make these writings available to researchers online, via the Digital SHC.

We are also pleased to share the news that the SJHS will hold its Thirty-fifth Annual Conference in Chapel Hill this year, October 22-24, 2010. In honor of the SJHS conference, the SHC will mount an exhibit celebrating the history of Jews in the American South.  The exhibit will run October 22-December 22, 2010 (on the 4th floor of Wilson Library).

Announcing the 2009 Southern Studies Visiting Scholars Grant Recipients

The Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2009 Southern Studies Visiting Scholars Grants. The Southern Historical Collection offers these awards to individuals who plan to use the collections for a major research project, including dissertations, theses, articles, and monographs.

The 2009 Southern Studies Visiting Scholars Grant recipients are:

2009 Joel Williamson Visiting Scholar Grants

  • Drew Addison Swanson, PhD candidate at the University of Georgia
    “Land of the Bright Leaf: Yellow Tobacco, Environment, and Culture along the Border of Virginia and North Carolina”

2009 Guion Griffis Johnson Visiting Scholar Grant

  • Katherine Armstrong, PhD candidate at Emory University
    “Children of Sorrow: Mothers, Child Mortality, and Grief in the Antebellum South”
  • Aaron Carico, PhD candidate at Yale University
    “Plantation State: Finance, Aesthetics, and the Political Reconstruction of America”

2009 J. Carlyle Sitterson Visiting Scholar Grant

  • Jennifer E. Tomas, PhD candidate at SUNY Binghamton
    “The Women’s History Movement in the United States: Building U.S. Women’s History, 1945-1995”

2009 John Eugene and Barbara Hilton Cay Visiting Scholar Grant

  • Christopher R. Lawton, PhD candidate at the University of Georgia
    “Re-Envisioning the South: William and T. Addison Richards, Georgia Illustrated, and the Cultural Politics of Antebellum Sectionalism”

SHC In the News: SHC to Join SFC on Film Grant; Wilson Accessibility

There have been two very nice articles published in recent weeks highlighting the work of the Southern Historical Collection and our partner collections throughout the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.

The first is an article by the UNC General Alumni Association covering two newly-awarded grants for film preservation that were awarded to the Southern Folklife Collection and the Southern Historical Collection (both headquartered here in the fourth floor penthouse of Wilson Library). These grants will provide critical funds for a project that will allow over 2,350 hours of rare film to be made available to the general public.

The second article is a piece by Ashley Bennett of UNC’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, discussing some of the great work going on in Wilson Library (and particularly in the Southern Historical Collection) to make our collections more accessible to our patrons

We really appreciate the great press and are excited to see these projects unfold.