The U.S. Embassy Beirut, Lebanon’s Public Diplomacy Section (PDS) has announced a call for proposals for the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) 2024.
The AFCP Grants Program supports the preservation of archaeological sites, historic buildings and monuments, museum collections, and forms of traditional cultural expression, such as indigenous languages and crafts.
Sites and Objects Having a Religious Connection: The establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution permits the government to include religious objects and sites within an aid program under certain conditions. For example, an item with a religious connection (including a place of worship) may be the subject of a cultural preservation grant if the item derives its primary significance and is nominated solely on the basis of architectural, artistic, historical, or other cultural (not religious) criteria.
Funding Priorities
Some of the most impactful AFCP projects have been designed as part of a greater PD programming arc promoting specific U.S. policy goals and host country or community objectives. Accordingly, in FY2024, ECA will give preference to projects that do one or more of the following:
Directly support U.S. treaty or bilateral agreement obligations.
Directly support U.S. policies, strategies, and objectives.
Support disaster risk reduction for cultural heritage in disaster-prone areas or post-disaster cultural heritage recovery.
Partner, connect with, or feed into other ECA or public diplomacy programs.
Funding Information
Expected size of individual awards: $10,000 to $500,000
Activities
Appropriate project activities may include:
Anastylosis (reassembling a site from its original parts);
Conservation (addressing damage or deterioration to an object or site);
Consolidation (connecting or reconnecting elements of an object or site);
Documentation (recording in analog or digital format the condition and salient features of an object, site, or tradition)
Inventory (listing of objects, sites, or traditions by location, feature, age, or other unifying characteristic or state);
Preventive Conservation (addressing conditions that threaten or damage a site, object, collection, or tradition);
Restoration (replacing missing elements to recreate the original appearance of an object or site, usually appropriate only with fine arts, decorative arts, and historic buildings);
Stabilization (reducing the physical disturbance of an object or site).
Eligibility Criteria
Eligible Project Implementers must be reputable and accountable non-commercial entities that can demonstrate they have the requisite capacity to manage projects to preserve cultural heritage. Eligible implementers may include non-governmental organizations, museums, educational institutions, ministries of culture, or similar institutions and organizations, including U.S.-based educational institutions and organizations subject to Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. The AFCP will not award grants to individuals, commercial entities, or past award recipients that have not fulfilled the objectives or reporting requirements of previous awards.
All project activities must take place in Lebanon.
Ineligible
AFCP does not support the following activities or costs, and applications involving any of the activities or costs below will be deemed ineligible:
Preservation or purchase of privately or commercially owned cultural objects, collections, or real property, including those whose transfer from private or commercial to public ownership is envisioned, planned, or in process but not complete at the time of application.
Preservation of natural heritage (physical, biological, and geological formations, paleontological collections, habitats of threatened species of animals and plants, fossils, etc.) unless the natural heritage has a cultural heritage connection or dimension.
Preservation of hominid or human remains.
Preservation of news media (newspapers, newsreels, radio, and TV programs, etc.).
Preservation of published materials available elsewhere (books, periodicals, etc.).
Development of curricula or educational materials for classroom use.
Archaeological excavations or exploratory surveys for research purposes.
