Greetings,

We are excited to share this funding opportunity from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The ACLS Digital Justice Grants program is designed to promote and provide resources for projects that diversify the digital domain and advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice. More information about the award can be found in the synopsis and links below. For a full list of currently open opportunities that have been announced through our office, please visit our Current Opportunities web page. As a reminder, our Research Development team is available to provide proposal development support to FAS ladder faculty.

ACLS Digital Justice Grants

• OSP Deadline: October 27, 2026 at 9:00 AM ET
  Departments or areas may require additional time for proposal review and submission. Please discuss a timeline with your grants administrator.
• Sponsor Deadline: November 3, 2026 at 5:00 PM ET
• Award Amount:
  • ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants: $10,000 - $25,000
  • ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants: $50,000 - $100,000
    Grant projects must begin between July 1, 2027 and December 31, 2027, with a workplan that lasts from 12-18 months. 
  • Direct administrative costs, such as office expenses and an honorarium for office assistance, are allowed. Grant funds may not be used for indirect costs. This falls short of the 15% overhead required by FAS policy. Please discuss this with your grants administrator before preparing an application.

Program Overview

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grants program, made possible by the Mellon Foundation, supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. In this way, the program seeks to address the inequities in the distribution of access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects. All grantees will have the opportunity to collaborate with the Nonprofit Finance Fund on developing a long-term financial plan for their projects. Two types of grants are offered: 

• Digital Justice Seed Grants for projects at early stages of development 
• Digital Justice Development Grants for projects that have advanced beyond the start-up or early phases of development 

Priority Areas

• Critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.
• Seed Grants: Explore or experiment with new materials, methodologies, and research agendas by way of planning workshops, prototyping, and/or testing products.
• Development Grants: Advance beyond the prototyping or proof-of-concept phase and articulate the next financial, technological, and intellectual phases of project development.
• Cultivate greater openness to new sources of knowledge and strategic approaches to content building and knowledge dissemination.  
• Engage in capacity building efforts, including but not limited to: pedagogical projects that train students in digital humanities methods as a key feature of the project’s content building practice; publicly engaged projects that develop new technological infrastructure with community partners; trans-institutional projects that connect scholars across academic and cultural heritage institutions.

Eligibility Criteria

• At least one of the project’s principal investigators must be a scholar in the humanities and/or the interpretative social sciences.
• Seed Grants: Projects must be within the start-up or prototyping phase of development.
• Development Grants: Projects must demonstrate evidence of significant preliminary work as well as a record of engagement and impact with scholarly and/or public audiences.
• If an applicant has two distinct projects that each meet the respective eligibility requirements for the Seed and Development grants, that applicant can submit two separate applications for each project; however, applicants cannot be awarded both grants.
• Projects must be made as widely available as intellectual property constraints allow, ideally with the most liberal open-source and Creative Commons license that is appropriate for the underlying content.
• An institution of higher education in the United States must administer awarded grant funds.
• ACLS grants may not support projects whose sole or primary focus is the production of creative works (e.g., novels or films), textbooks, straightforward translations, or purely pedagogical projects.
• Applicants must commit to making any software developed with grant funds available pursuant to an open-source license and in a public repository (such as GitHub or Sourceforge), and making any digital content broadly available. 

Application Materials

• Application prompts (please see Application Requirements for Seed Grants or Development Grants for details)
• Bibliography
• Project Timeline
• Budget
• Budget Description
• Project Staffing
• Institutional Verification 
• Intellectual Property Agreement, to be opted into as part of the program's eligibility confirmation
• Statement of Support from Community Partner(s) (if applicable)
• Appendix (if applicable)

Selection Criteria

• The project’s critical engagement with the interests and histories of people of color and/or other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.

• Seed Grants: The feasibility of the project plans, as well as a realistic assessment of how risks and challenges will be managed.

• Development Grants: The feasibility of development, extension, and/or renewal plans, including (where appropriate) reflections on intentional sunsetting and data stewardship beyond the grant term.

• The proposal’s analysis of the various technological, financial, and/or institutional supports (or lack thereof) and how grant funds might complement, or in some cases, completely underwrite, these gaps in support.

• The project’s potential to bolster the ecosystem of digital scholarship within and/or outside the project’s home institution, whether by (yet not limited to) its intellectual contributions, innovative use of existing technology, and/or networks of skills-building and sharing.

• The project’s clarity with respect to how it will engage its longstanding or new primary audiences and/or beneficiaries.

• The strategic and intentional use of specific digital tools and methods, as well as the anticipated impact and clarity of the project’s digital deliverables.

Additional Information and Resources

 

 

 

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