Rhode Island Council for the Humanities awards $124K in grants

AARON JUNGELS and Ari Brisbon are shown at the Aldrich House Wednesday where the Rhode Island Council for Humanities event awarded grants. They are from Everett: Company, Stage & School, which received $10,000 in grant funding from the council. / COURTESY MATT FERRARA
AARON JUNGELS and Ari Brisbon are shown at the Aldrich House Wednesday where the Rhode Island Council for Humanities event awarded grants. They are from Everett: Company, Stage & School, which received $10,000 in grant funding from the council. / COURTESY MATT FERRARA

PROVIDENCE – The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities announced Wednesday that $124,015 of the council’s major grants will be awarded to 14 humanities-focused organizations.

The event, hosted by the Rhode Island Historical Society at the Aldrich House, was attended by upwards of 60 community civic and cultural leaders.

R.I Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea applauded the recipients, saying: “It is critically important to participate in our democracy, but in order to be a really well-rounded citizen and resident of a community, we have to be able to celebrate our heritage – be it one that goes back hundreds of years or one that’s more recent. What I love about today’s grant recipients is that they do that. They really show the diversity, the wealth, and the asset that is Rhode Island.”

Everett: Company, Stage & School received $10,000 in grant funding from the council for its 2016 Freedom Café Series, which is a sequence of public events that brings together artists, community experts and scholars, along with the public, to discuss current events linked to mass incarceration and the human element of the criminal justice system.

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Aaron Jungels, Everett executive director, said this funding helps the organization recruit expert speakers from Brown, Bryant and Roger Williams universities.

“They’ve … presented at our Freedom Cafes, connecting with new audiences for their work and sharing their expertise with us. It has fed and become integral to our whole process,” he said.

The other grant recipients are as follows:

  • Little Compton Historical Society, $12,000
  • The Manton Avenue Project, $12,000
  • New Urban Arts, $5,000
  • newportFILM, $11,250
  • Opera Providence, $8,900
  • Orlando R. Smith Trust, $7,070
  • Providence Children’s Film Festival, $12,000
  • Providence Children’s Museum, $12,000
  • Providence Public Library / The Hi-Fi Collaborative, $4,000
  • Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, $12,000
  • OpenDoors, $5,000
  • Blackstone Academy Charter School, $8,090
  • The Preservation Society of Newport County, $4,705

Since 1973, the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities has donated $7.7 million in grants to 650 organizations that support and strengthen public history, cultural heritage, civic education and community engagement by and for all Rhode Islanders.

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