Responsive Grants provide opportunities to build knowledge and increase understanding of East and Southeast Asia through scholarship and exchange, with an emphasis on strengthening capacity in the United States. They typically support research and training, the creation of scholarly and public resources, and intellectual and cultural exchange between Americans and Asians.
The Responsive Grants category is deliberately broad, allowing the Asia Program to respond to new ideas and keep abreast of trends, needs and priorities relevant to Asia-focused work in our three grantmaking areas (academic work, foreign policy, public education). Most awards are made to colleges, universities, think tanks, museums and other non-profit organizations based in the United States.
Our interests include:
- Asia-focused teaching and research initiatives, typically for multi-year projects whose benefits extend to and advance Asian studies at large. The majority of our funded work is in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, including projects that seek to reexamine the conventional area studies model and explore new approaches to training and research.
- Work in underrepresented and emerging fields of inquiry.
- Examination of East and Southeast Asia in transregional and global contexts.
- Development and dissemination of library, archival, research and pedagogical resources, including digital resources.
- Policy dialogues and other projects with policy relevance.
- Efforts to educate and inform non-specialist audiences about Asia, through museum exhibitions, journalism and media offerings, and cultural programming.
- Next generation training and leadership development.
- Collaboration, exchange, and border-crossing initiatives, including across geographic, disciplinary, institutional and/or sectoral divides. This may include work that spans the divides of our own grantmaking areas, such as projects that bridge the gap between academic and policy work, or between scholarship and broader public education.
Restrictions for Responsive Grants
The geographic scope of our grantmaking is principally East and Southeast Asia. The Foundation's guidelines and resources do not allow inclusion of South or Central Asia as a primary focus of activity, although work on inter-Asia connections may be considered. While travel, publications, conferences and/or translation may be included as components of a larger project, we do not support stand-alone travel, publication, translation or individual research projects, and funding is not generally provided for stand-alone conferences, or film or television productions. Given the volume of inquiries we receive and because Asian studies is now well-integrated into American higher education, except through Special Initiatives (see below) we do not, as a rule, assist individual institutions with the development of their Asian studies programs.
Letters of inquiry can be submitted at any time through our online portal. Should you have questions in advance of completing the Letter of Inquiry, you may e-mail them to hkolenda@hluce.org.
Please read all of the information in the General Foundation Guidelines before applying through our online portal.
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