By offering matching funds, challenge grants help local, state, and national institutions secure their humanities resources and activities for the long term. The “multiplier effect” is crucial to achieving this goal: recipients of a challenge grant must match every federal dollar with three (in some cases, two) nonfederal dollars. The NEH challenge funds and the matched nonfederal funds can be used for many long-term institutional purposes. For example, the money may be used to purchase capital equipment and upgrade technology, renovate or construct facilities, and increase library holdings or museum collections. Challenge grants can also be invested to build endowments supporting an institution’s staff or programming well into the future. Many different sorts of nonprofit organizations have made use of challenge grants—museums, tribal centers, libraries, colleges and universities, scholarly research organizations, state humanities councils, public radio and television stations, and historical societies and historic sites.
Challenge Grants guidelines:
www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/challenge.html

Stephen M. Ross is the Director of the Office of Challenge Grants. He received his Ph.D. in American literature from Stanford University and his J.D. from the University of Maryland School of Law.  Before coming to NEH in 1987, Steve was professor of English at the United States Naval Academy; he has also taught at Purdue University.  Steve has published primarily on the fiction of William Faulkner, including Fiction’s Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner (1989) and Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (co-authored with Noel Polk, 1996).

1,500
Awards made by the Challenge Grants program, 1977-2008

$450 million
Total amount of federal funds disbursed through Challenge Grants, 1977-2008

$1.6 billion
Value of nonfederal gifts raised in response to Challenge Grants, 1977-2008

$2.9 billion
Value of nonfederal gifts raised in response to Challenge Grants, 1977-2008, in current (2009) dollars