Press Releases

ACES Receives Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Support the Study of Civil Rights

August 7th, 2017

Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars and Institutes Program. ACES project entitled “The Long Civil Rights Movement” is a collaboration between the ACES Institute, ACES Professional Development and School Improvement Services, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.  

The award in the amount of $154,991 will support a two-week professional development conference at Yale University in June 2018. The conference will expand teacher understanding of the civil rights movement from a finite twentieth-century phenomenon to a 150-year continuum of American History that influences modern views and politics. Participation will be open to K-12 teachers nationwide. Participants will attend daily seminars given by visiting scholars from Yale University, Fairfield University, New York University, Duke University, Eastern Connecticut State University, Central Connecticut State University, and Loyola University. The conference will explore themes critical to understanding the movement and its modern legacies such as local activism; the role of women; the elderly and the young; regional variations; legal implications; and artists’ influence on social change.

“I am proud that ACES was successful in obtaining this grant funding from the NEH and even more so that they have taken on such an important mission with this new professional development course,  “‘The Long Civil Rights Movement’” said Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, CT-03.  “We must never lose sight of the hard-fought battles of the Civil Rights Movement.  While we have made progress, we must continue fighting for social justice and equality.  This program is a unique and important vehicle by which to do just that.”

“Civil rights continues to be a major issue. Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ACES in tandem with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University will help facilitate the understanding of this issue on a deeper level, and effectively create learning experiences and environments that ensure equity for all citizens,” stated Dr. Thomas M. Danehy, ACES Executive Director.     

The grant is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities “Common Good:  Humanities in the Public Square” initiative which seeks to connect the study of the humanities to current conditions in modern life. The National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars and Institutes for School Teachers grants support intensive one- to four-week projects in which sixteen to thirty schoolteachers, working with scholarly experts, engage in collegial study of significant texts and topics in the humanities. There were a total of 32 grants awarded nationwide. ACES was one of only five organizations in the state of Connecticut to receive an award.

National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) is a regional educational service center that serves the educational needs of the twenty-five communities in Greater New Haven. ACES mission is to empower its students, member districts and other clients to meet educational and life challenges in the changing global environment by providing collaborative, customized, cost-effective solutions to meet identified needs in the educational community. For additional information on ACES, visit www.aces.org.

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