Description

The Treasury of Lives ( https://treasuryoflives.org/ )  a digital humanities resource dedicated to the biographies of Tibetan, Inner Asian and Himalayan people.  To date, the Asia Program has not supported this organization, although we  have been in conversation with its executive director Alex Gardner for several years and  think highly of its work.  Originally initiated as a project of the Rubin Foundation, the Treasury was spun off as an independent non-profit four years ago.  Since then, it has been  expanding its content and features as well as audience engagement.   The attached request more fully narrates its trajectory and relates how COVID-19 is endangering its ability to receive and implement a three-year grant of $350,000 awarded by the NEH in April.  The NEH grant would allow the Treasury  to add new biographies and geographic data and revamp its technical infrastructure to better link with other projects such as the Buddhist Digital Resource Center.
Given the fact of the $350K NEH grant, this recommendation of an emergency grant of $5,000 to the Treasury may seem a little unusual.  In a nutshell, a university subscription service the Treasury was putting into place to support staff salaries and operating costs has suddenly been derailed by the pandemic, as universities begin belt tightening.  (The Rubin Foundation provides it space rent-free at the Rubin Museum.)  Without the ability to pay the portion of staff salaries not covered by the NEH grant, the Treasury cannot manage the NEH project.  A Catch-22 situation.  
The recommended grant, to be drawn from the Asia Program’s 2020 allocation, would help make up for the Treasury of Lives’ shortfall in revenue due to the pandemic and enable it to maintain its staff of two so that it can begin the NEH grant work on July 1.