Press Release

The Maryland Humanities Council Receives an $80,000 Grant from Boeing

January 21, 2010

Contact: Lisa Keir
410-686-0095
lkeir@mdhc.org

THE MARYLAND HUMANITIES COUNCIL RECEIVES AN $80,000 GRANT FROM BOEING

BALTIMORE, MD. Jan. 21, 2010. The Maryland Humanities Council (MHC) has received an $80,000 grant from the Boeing Charitable Trust to lead a three-state effort to develop effective means of holding civil discourse about important civic issues.

The Boeing Charitable Trust program officer Angel Ysaguirre notes, "There is an urgent need to re-imagine new ways to discuss issues across ideological camps, to model civil debate and dialogue between people who come down on different sides of an issue and to share information that strives to be unbiased, fact-based and even-handed."

To reach that goal, humanities councils in Maryland, Washington and Illinois, where Boeing has a corporate presence, were approached about how to explore ways to use the lens of the humanities to foster discussion and engage citizens in civil dialogue. MHC will lead the three-state effort, planning a series of public programs called Practicing Democracy: Seeking Common Ground, which is intended to foster discussions about community issues. Each program will be developed in partnership with other Maryland non-profit organizations. Similar efforts are planned for Washington and Illinois.

Maryland Humanities Council Executive Director Phoebe Stein Davis says, "We propose that engagement with the humanities-history, ethics, literature, philosophy-can foster productive debate and help us talk, listen and disagree. The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, in public speeches has urged that, ‘‘‘shared learning with open dialogue is more likely to lead to pacific relations between peoples of the world than any other circumstance. Knowledge is unifying ‘."

Practicing Democracy: Seeking Common Ground will gather together people with different opinions and ideological approaches for a series of public discussion forums that will strive to produce real and respectful debate. In 2010, discussion forums will focus on issues of the environment, sustainability, development and transportation. MHC will use a shared humanities experience-hearing a scholar speak, reading a short story, essay or poem; watching a film; or participating in or attending a performance, for example-to engage participants in these topics and make information sharing possible. Trained facilitators will encourage participants to share their personal experiences and express their different opinions, relating them to the ideas of the humanities work.

MHC will experiment with a variety of formats for producing effective civic dialogue through Practicing Democracy: Seeking Common Ground. The goal of the program is to determine processes that are effective methods of creating meaningful dialogue among fellow Marylanders.

For Practicing Democracy MHC will partner with non-profit and for-profit organizations across Maryland-governmental, civic, religious, arts-oriented, environmental, educational, economic, business-orientated and community-focused-and those that have a track record of bringing people together who have diverse points of view.

MHC will develop, test and evaluate a variety of formats and processes, noting procedures, assessing short term results and evaluating changes in behavior of participants. As a result of this series of programming, MHC will develop a toolkit of processes and materials that other organizations can use to create their own dialogues.

Boeing invests in community-based programs around the world that target those interdependent focus areas that comprise the barometer of a community's vitality. They are: environment, health and human services, arts and culture, education and civic awareness. More than $142.9M was provided by the company and its employees during 2009 to improve lives and communities worldwide. Additional information can be found in the 2009 Corporate Citizenship Report at www.boeing.com/companyoffices/aboutus/community/2009_report/index.html.

The Maryland Humanities Council is a statewide, educational, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The purpose of MHC is to stimulate and promote informed dialogue and civic engagement on issues critical to Marylanders. For more information about MHC, please visit www.mdhc.org.

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