West Virginia Humanities Council, Inc.

The West Virginia Humanities Council provides community-based lifelong learning opportunities to enrich the lives of all West Virginians. The Humanities Council re-grants program is designed to offer financial support for public humanities programming developed and implemented by nonprofit organizations throughout the state. The Council is committed to supporting projects that stimulate meaningful dialogue, attract diverse audiences, and encourage discovery of the humanities in interesting and exciting ways. In hundreds of programs made possible by the Humanities Council each year, citizens and scholars explore the heritage of our state and gain new perspectives on the human condition - past, present, and future.
We believe that the humanities are indispensable because they engage us in the basic questions of human existence, who we are, what we value. The humanities encompass the range of human experience. Through the humanities we discover meaning that illuminates our individual lives, as well as the connections that bind people and cultures together. The work of the West Virginia Humanities Council is to broaden the humanities experience of all West Virginians.

An important goal of the Council is that West Virginians come to understand and appreciate the value of the humanities in daily life. To achieve this, we are committed to creating communities of scholars and citizens in which the meaning of the humanities is explored; to serving all West Virginians, particularly those not traditionally served by other cultural and educational institutions; to achieving broad citizen participation; to fostering a humanities network linking scholars and organizations; and to advocating for the humanities among policymakers and the public.
A vital part of our mission is to provide leadership to humanities groups, institutions, schools, and individuals. We have worked to establish the Council as the standard bearer for the humanities in West Virginia. We respond to a diversity of needs through technical assistance, dissemination of information, advocacy, distribution of our quarterly publication People & Mountains, grants, advisory support, and program delivery.

The Council staff is a committed, well-established group, with average tenure of employment exceeding five years. There is occasional turnover at all levels, but top leadership has been remarkably stable. Veteran executive director Charles Daugherty left in 1996 after nearly twenty years, and Ken Sullivan, the present director, began work in 1997. Our philosophy has been to remain a streamlined operation with a small, highly professional staff.

We see our Council evolving over the next three and five years toward a bigger, better version of what it is today. We will seek overall growth and particularly to grow the portion of our resources devoted to our product, the humanities services we provide to the citizens of West Virginia.