The National Endowment for the Humanities announced that the Georgia Historical Society has received a challenge grant in the amount of $500,000 to help support the Next Century Initiative Capital Campaign. GHS is the first institution in Georgia to receive this award made under NEH's new Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grant program, which will support infrastructure projects at museums, libraries, and colleges throughout the United States.
 
The Next Century Initiative Research Center Renovation Campaign, launched in 2015, is a $3.5 million endowment for renovation and expansion of the GHS Research Center that will provide more space for storage and processing of archival materials; ensure the conservation, usefulness, and accessibility of GHS’s extraordinary archival and library collections; and maintain the historically significant structure, one of the oldest purpose-built library buildings in the United States, in which these collections are housed and used by the public.

The half million dollars awarded to GHS places the institution in the top ten percent nationally of institutions receiving awards in this cycle.
 
 “We are grateful to the NEH for their belief in the mission of the Georgia Historical Society and the need to upgrade, maintain, and preserve the Research Center,” said Dr. W. Todd Groce, President, and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society. “The campaign will greatly enhance the way GHS fulfills its mission to collect, examine, and teach Georgia and American history by improving the institution’s ability to make accessible the documents, photographs, artifacts, and other primary source material that form the building blocks of not only GHS’s award-winning educational programming, but of all scholarly research and study.”
 
The challenge grant will require GHS to raise matching funds at a rate of three private dollars for every dollar of federal funding in order to receive the full award from the NEH.