Cal Humanities is proud to announce that 20 projects throughout the State of California have been selected as grant awardees for its Community Stories program. Chosen from over 120 submissions, the projects comprise a broad range of community-focused stories to explore the diversity of the California experience, and capture the interest of local, regional, and even wider audiences.

Subjects range from an investigation of the culture of low-riding in San Diego to the diverse histories and traditions of the historic Mission town of San Juan Bautista to Sacramento’s contemporary “foodscape.” Some projects will give voice to Californians whose stories are seldom heard: LGBT farmworkers, homeless youth, and recent African and Middle Eastern immigrants.  Other projects will document stories of civic engagement and democratic practice, past and present, from the efforts of a small Northern California community to preserve a historic bridge to the challenges faced by a displaced group of Native Californians seeking tribal recognition to students involved in the DREAM movement. Grant awardees are equally diverse,  and represent a public library, museums and archives, theater groups, colleges and universities, an immigrants’ rights group, and community-based arts and cultural organizations. Most of the projects also involve collaborations between California-based institutions of higher education, both public and private, and community partners.

Community Stories (formerly known as the California Story Fund) is a competitive grant program that supports story-based projects that are informed by humanities perspectives, methods, and content; that reveal the realities of California and its cultures, peoples, and histories; and that will be of interest to local, statewide, and potentially even national and global audiences. It aims to provide community-based and academic institutions the means to capture genuine and compelling stories from and about California’s diverse communities, and to ensure that those stories can be shared widely.

For a complete listing of funded projects, please go here.

The production projects comprise a broad range of topics and approaches that will appeal to a wide range of audiences—from a biography of photographer Dorothea Lange to a radio series exploring the social and economic issues facing rural California; from the struggle of recyclers in Oakland’s Dogtown neighborhood, to the fight by Northern California’s Yurok tribe to preserve its cultural practices. Research and development projects also offer a promising array of subjects, including Khmer Rouge survivor and Academy Award-winning actor, Haing Ngor; the changing role of the public library; and a new, in-depth look at the rise and fall of the American Communist Party.

For a complete listing of the projects, please go here.

Community Stories (formerly named the California Story Fund) is our ongoing, competitive grantmaking program designed to support projects that document and share compelling stories from and about California’s diverse communities. Descriptions of previously funded projects can be viewed here. Applicants may request up to $10,000 in grant funds and any amount received must be matched with an equivalent cash or in-kind resource.

Our web-based and in-person informational meeting schedule will be held in early June and further details and registration instructions will be announced as soon as possible on our grants page.

What's in a new name (and look)?
You may have noticed that we’ve changed a little. 

Ok, a lot. 

We have a brand new organizational name, a new look and logo, both new and re-named programs, and a new website with plenty of ways for you to experience the power of the humanities.

Why all this newness?

We believe the humanities connect us to each other and can help us towards a better California.

Formerly known as the California Council for the Humanities, we have changed our name to Cal Humanities to underscore our increased efforts to promote the humanities as relevant, meaningful ways to better understand the human condition. 

We aim to be more accessible—reaching out to diverse audiences, inspiring curiosity, provoking courageous thinking, and facilitating meaningful connections. Our new website provides another avenue for Californians to engage with the humanities and each other. We hope that the results of our recent rebranding process—our new look and new language—reflect the passion we feel for all our new and ongoing work. 

What’s with the new logo?

The open quote represents the start of every great idea, the beginning of open-minded thought and open-ended conversations, the question that invites discussion. It’s the figurative start to new and shifting perspectives. Ultimately, it’s our tool to create a state of open mind.

As an independent, non-profit state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, we were originally founded in 1975 as a granting organization, but through the years we have created and implemented our own signature humanities programs and projects. Cal Humanities now plays a critical role across the state in producing, funding, and supporting cultural experiences in media, literature, discussion programs, and more.

Every day we ask ourselves: what does it take to create “a state of open mind?”

What do you think of the new us?

Check out our new site—our programs, the projects we support, and the various events and other opportunities to connect and converse. We want you to feel as excited by—and involved in—the work we are doing and supporting as we do. Tell us what you think. Email us at info@calhum.org. 

Here’s to the beginning of a great conversation… 

Under the dictatorship of Pol Pot, an estimated 95% of Cambodia's musicians and artists were executed in just four years.

Several of the few who survived are preserving Cambodia's traditional repertoires and teaching them to the next generation of Cambodian Americans in Oakland, many of whom are re-composing and creating new lyrics about their lives. Learn the stories of such people as master musician, teacher, and Bay Area resident Nhep Prok, 92—first as performers of traditional music before 1975; then during the genocide and Pol Pot's reign from 1975-1979; and finally as they recover, transform, and pass on traditional Cambodian music today.

Rhythm of the Refugee Exhibit

Wednesday through Saturday, 2:30-5:30 pm, now through Oct 22, 2012
Peralta House Museum of History and Community, Peralta Hacienda Historical Park
2465 34th Ave, Oakland

For directions and more information, visit www.peraltahacienda.org

My urge to check my phone—that ever-present, flashing, buzzing weight in my pocket—has reached the level of addiction. 

The reasons are admirable. I want to read the latest news about the world. All the time. When I’m having dinner with friends, in conversation with colleagues, when I wake up—the urge is there. It's a worthy habit, but one worthy of breaking.

We are in a time of great stress and upheaval. Tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters are changing our lives and landscapes; explosive violence, wars, protests, and economic crises beat out a rhythm that’s difficult to ignore. In Egypt, the people ousted a leader who had been in power for thirty years. Re-ignited by this revolution, civil unrest in Libya has resulted in an uprising against Qaddafi, who has ruled since 1969. It’s not all bad news. Most of it is important news. There’s just so much of it.

The media seem increasingly interested in detailing us to death with meaningless minutiae and featuring the immediate, emotional reactions of pundits or the "man on the street" rather than considered, informed opinion or insight. Perhaps I am complicit. It’s easy to consume junk food for thought, even when we would prefer something rich, complex, and nourishing.

All this combines with pressing personal concerns, the rush of getting from place to place, and the buzz of digital notifications and interruptions to create a life lived hurriedly in a noisy world—one in which moments for reflection are scarce, we are hungry to learn all the details but reticent to step back and consider what they mean, and many are talking but few are listening.

It is in this world that I feel the need to make quiet in my life. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I traveled to a part of California with no cell or internet coverage. For days, I hiked in hills uninterrupted. I read great books—Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón and A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit—and thought about the meaning of my work, of our work together. I saw a California Condor soaring overhead and thought about the fact that, in 1987, there were just 22 in existence and today there are close to four hundred. I had time to read about what drove those birds to the brink of extinction and wonder about the human impulse to bring them back.

We are learning that “fast” is not necessarily best for our food, the environment, international relations, our personal finances, our bodies, our minds. As I drove home, more slowly than usual, ready to return to my everyday life, I thought about how slowing down seems paradoxically to create more time and less noise.

Many of our greatest creations and achievements as human beings come from making quiet. Think of the years, possibly decades of quiet hours that James Madison spent in his library that informed and, in essence, formed the US Constitution. Think of John Muir’s quiet, solitary exploration of the Yosemite Valley that became so central to the creation and preservation of our cherished national parks. Think of Emily Dickinson’s deeply affecting poems; those words, illuminating the greatest truths of human experience and emotion like bolts of lightning, were composed by a woman who led a remarkably quiet and reflective life.

As author Anne Lamott recently wrote, “no one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor.” There is “nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder.” Most of us are really searching for “enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.”

This is not frivolous. Ideas are born in quiet hours, and ideas can change the world.

In these noisy times, let us not divorce ourselves from the world, but let us slow down and make quiet in order to live richer lives, to become more engaged and less distracted. Let us swim the depths of incredible books. Let us hone our abilities to see and hear and prepare for dialogue, not the soapbox. Let us be intentional about the lives we would like to lead and think about how the lives we already lead can feed our senses of curiosity and wonder.

Making quiet means building a house where you and an idea can live together. Savor ideas and treat them with great consideration, as though they could become your life-long partners or the newfound friends who, quietly, challenge you most. They very well may.

Ralph Lewin
President and CEO
California Council for the Humanities