Community Connections

In recognition of the mutual benefits gained by exchange across university and community spaces, the Simpson Center is piloting a new form of support for community connections during the 2024-2025 academic year.

This support is offered through two pathways: 

1. UW faculty across the tri-campus may request funding for events on campus that feature speakers from cultural and educational institutions in Bothell, Seattle, Tacoma, and their immediately surrounding areas; and
2. local cultural institutions may request funding to support events off-campus that feature UW faculty as speakers. 

These microgrants offer focused support for speaker costs and are intended to encourage ongoing efforts by UW faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to meaningfully connect with communities beyond our campus—through publicly-engaged and community-based forms of scholarship; partnerships with tribal museums, local historical societies, and other cultural sector entities; collaborations with educators across institutional boundaries, and more—to strengthen relationships between the university and our communities. 

Over the years, the Simpson Center has built relationships with many local cultural and educational institutions. A partial list would include the Alliance Française de Seattle, the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, Elliott Bay Books Company, Freedom Education Project Puget Sound and prison-based higher education programs at the Monroe Correctional Complex, Folio, Hugo House, Humanities Washington, KEXP, the Northwest African American Museum, the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society, Seattle Arts & Lectures, the Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Asian Art Museum, the Seattle District Community Colleges, the Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Symphony, the Tasveer Film Festival & Market, Town Hall Seattle, and Wa Na Wari.

We are interested in the creative ways the connections between the humanities at the University of Washington and our local communities might be deepened through the open exchange of scholarly and community expertise. 

Eligibility & Funding Available

We seek to support a variety of academic departments, partner institutions, and activities across the academic year, through two funding pathways. 

Pathway 1: Tenure-track faculty and teaching faculty may request small discretionary grants to support the speaker costs associated with events on campus featuring colleagues from local cultural institutions. Our standard honorarium for this category is $500. 

Pathway 2: Cultural institutions may request funds to support speaker costs associated with events off campus featuring the scholarship of UW faculty. Because the University of Washington cannot pay its own faculty honoraria, we offer them research budgets for speaking at your event.  Our standard allocation for faculty speakers in this category is a $500 research budget. 

Please note that only tenure-track faculty and teaching faculty in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts Divisions of the College of Arts & Sciences will be considered eligible to serve as invited speakers for your event. If there are any questions about eligibility, please contact Rachel Arteaga, Simpson Center Associate Director, at rarteaga@uw.edu. 

While we recognize that flexible funding to support event, hosting, venue, and travel costs will likely be of interest to many potential applicants, our current capacity limits us to focusing very directly on speaker fees. 

Scheduling Note

The Simpson Center does not offer support for community-engaged events on or off campus that directly conflict with events we are organizing for our core programs and funded projects.