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Our flagship grant program highlighting the diverse voices, cultures, and experiences of the commonwealth.
Our grantees are doing innovative work around the commonwealth—check out a small selection of projects below.
In 2025, we awarded $600,000 in Expand Massachusetts Stories grants to 34 organizations. We asked our grantees to respond to the prompt “Promises of the Revolution.”
This year, as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our grantees will share documentary films, oral histories, museum exhibitions, teaching curricula, and community programs, all of which address core American ideals of freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.
In 2026, we will pause opportunities for funding for Expand Massachusetts Stories until this fall, when we expect to resume support for larger humanities projects. The planning, funding, and schedule for those opportunities are all front of mind for our team. We encourage you to share your ideas with our program officers to help inform our future decisions. We are actively seeking funding partners so that we can deliver more resources to humanities organizations. For the latest news about EMS, sign up for our newsletter.
Sharing best practices for storytelling is central to our work at Mass Humanities. In 2024, we held a series of gatherings in Worcester, Holyoke, and Boston to bring together our grantees and share strategies for engaging with Massachusetts communities.
The past to the present. To each other. To a diverse Massachusetts.
About the people and places that make Massachusetts.
In community with likeminded storytellers and change agents
Oral histories, films, archives, exhibitions, curricula and more.
There are three tracks within Expand Massachusetts Stories:
To apply for an EMS grant, visit our grants page, where you can:
Curious where to begin? Visit our News & Stories page, where you can read stories and watch videos highlighting recent EMS projects.
You can also search our grants database by year, location, and theme to get a better sense of what types of projects have received funding in the past.
In 2024, Mass Humanities hosted a series of workshops and receptions under the theme “The Future of Storytelling.” Staff, board members, community partners, and grantees gathered in Worcester, Holyoke, and Boston to share their narrative approaches and collaboratively envision what the future landscape of storytelling might look like in Massachusetts.
Mass Humanities
66 Bridge Street,
Northampton, MA 01060
Mass Humanities
130 Race St, #203
Holyoke, MA 01040
