For background information, please see the following pages:
- About Us, for the history and exploits of Purple
- Lesbian Legacies Endowment Fund, for the origin and rationale of the endowment
- Lesbian legacies in the MSU Special Collections, for an intro to the extensive holdings
- Ways to Contribute, both to the fund financially and to the collections themselves
TRAVEL GRANTS can be issued under the Lesbian Legacies Endowment beginning in Fiscal Year 2023 (July 1, 2023–June 30, 2023), since gifts to the endowment have recently exceeded the operational minimum of $50,000. The endowment’s expendable sister fund is also available to cover such grants. The grants are administered under the MSU Libraries’ relatively new Visiting Scholars Program; this is where interested candidates should apply. However, the window for grant applications during Fiscal 2023 closed on February 3, 2023.
We actualized the endowment (met the minimum balance requirement) too late for the Lesbian Legacies Endowment to be listed explicitly under the Visiting Scholars Program this year. Beginning in July for Fiscal Year 2023, Special Collections hopes to list awards specifically with the parameters agreed to in the endowment paperwork, and the Lesbian Legacies Endowment will be included. In the meantime, candidates whose projects accord with ours should mention the Lesbian Legacies Endowment in queries to the Visiting Scholars Program.
Here is information on simply visiting the MSU Libraries, in case you are considering coming to view some of the materials in the collection.
These guides to using Special Collections, prepared for the general LGBTQ+ holdings and the archival subset of those holdings within MSU Libraries Special Collections, will give you a sense of how one goes about it:
https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/spclgbtq
https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/spclgbtq/archives
