Overview
The Public Humanities Award
The Public Humanities Award recognizes individuals and organizations for their contributions to public understanding of the role the humanities play in transforming lives and strengthening communities.
Voices: A Collection of Illinois Stories
Voices: A Collection of Illinois Stories is an annual eight-part radio series that showcases a wide variety of programs created or funded by the Illinois Humanities Council. The series is produced by 98.7WFMT, Chicago's Classical Experience.
The Public Square at the IHC
The Public Square fosters debate, dialogue, and exchange of ideas about cultural, social, and political issues with an emphasis on social justice. All Public Square programs promote participatory democracy by creating space for public conversations.
Community Grants Program
The Illinois Humanities Council’s Community Grants program accepts proposals from nonprofit organizations that have a story to tell about Illinois or who have a way to use the humanities to enrich community life. It is our priority to support programs developed by, for, or aimed at reaching new or historically neglected audiences. Mini grants are typically up to $2,000 and major grants are typically up to $10,000.
Folksongs of Illinois
Folksongs of Illinois is a series of three CDs that document the rich and varied history of folk and popular music in Illinois. The CDs feature songs from a broad range of talented Illinois musicians and include recordings taken from archival, 78 rpm, LP, and contemporary CD recordings, as well as new studio recordings. The music includes traditional folk ballads, polkas, early country tunes, corridos, gospel hymns, labor anthems, Irish reels, and tamburitza kolos. Listeners can hear the legendary violinist Johnny Frigo, polka king Little Wally, "alt country" favorites Jon Langford, Kelly Hogan, and Janet Bean, and All-Ireland Champion fiddler Liz Carroll, as well as Grammy winner Alison Krauss, gospel great Mahalia Jackson, and early country stars The Girls of the Golden West.
Road Scholars Speakers Bureau
The Road Scholars Speakers Bureau allows non-profit organizations the opportunity to provide high-quality, free public humanities programs to local audiences. Illinois' finest public humanists continue the long tradition of the itinerant teacher-scholar, traveling to all corners of the state and making each town their classroom.
The Odyssey Project
The Odyssey Project is founded on the premise that liberal education is education to make people free, and it proceeds on the conviction that engagement with the humanities can offer individuals a way out of poverty by fostering habits of sustained reflection and skills of communication and critical thinking. It provides a college-level introduction to the humanities through text-based seminars led by professors at top tier colleges and universities in order to help low-income adults more actively shape their own lives, as well as the lives of their families, communities, and nation.
The Meaning of Service (MoS)
The Meaning of Service (MoS) is a reading and discussion program for Americorps volunteers featuring discussions that use short philosophical and literary texts on the nature of justice, service, and related themes. MoS presents participants with the opportunity to examine, refine, and regenerate the beliefs underlying their work.
Velosophie
Velosophie is a unique humanities reading-discussion program designed for individuals and groups participating in recreational, physical excursions outdoors. Participants read carefully selected and provocative readings that parallel their experiences on tour and engage one another in open, meaningful conversations about the larger questions that underlie their commitment to these activities. The program utilizes 'motion' as its organizing concept and seeks to ask questions and provide entry points into conversations that might help us better understand the possible connections between any journey of mind and body.
Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare®
Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare® is a discussion-based program that brings hospital staff together monthly to reflect on the larger mission of medicine through facilitated conversations about literature.
Museum on Main Street (MoMS)
The Illinois Humanities Council, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), offers high-quality traveling exhibitions to small museums, libraries, and historical societies in Illinois towns with populations of 30,000 or less, or by invitation. Museum on Main Street combines the prestige of Smithsonian exhibitions, the program expertise of state humanities councils, and the remarkable volunteerism and unique histories of rural communities.
Capitol Forum on America's Future
The Capitol Forum on America's Future educates high school students about controversial international issues and difficult choices facing America. Guided by their social studies teachers, students read, analyze and discuss nuclear proliferation, terrorism, immigration, trade and the environment in preparation for a public forum in Springfield, where they deliberate these issues with peers from across the state
The Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award
The Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award is a biennial honor bestowed on those individuals who carry the torch of the humanities. Every other year we invite mayors throughout the state to nominate one individual (up to two in cities with populations of 100,000 or more) who has demonstrated a sustained and significant contribution to furthering public understanding of the humanities in their community. These unsung "humanities heroes" contribute to cultural life through projects related to historic preservation, heritage, adult and childhood education, and the study of arts or music.All-Consuming: Conversations on Oil and Water
Using the lens of the humanities, the Illinois Humanities Council will present All-Consuming: Conversations on Oil and Water, a year-long, state-wide series that examines the key issues related to access to and control of oil and water.
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