Humanities DC and oral-history partners urge restoration of $200,000 for DC Oral History Collaborative

Rebecca Lemosotero, executive director of Humanities DC, urged the Committee on Human Services to reinstate $200,000 in funding for the DC Oral History Collaborative, saying the program’s funding “was cut by a 100%” last year and that community demand has grown: “For our oral history interviewing grants, we received 51 applications this year, but could only fund 14,” she told the committee.

Jasper Collier, manager of the collaborative since 2017, described how the loss of programmatic funds forced the project to scale back trainings, quarterly meetups, and educator seminars that helped residents and teachers collect and preserve local histories. Collier said restoring the funding would allow the program to hire or retain the FTE that supports grant-making and to resume public humanities programming that engages marginalized voices across the District.

Director Richard Reyes Gavilan acknowledged the program’s value and said DCPL can continue to support already-collected histories but that the collections budget constraints limit the library’s ability to expand the program: “What the funding loss limits us from doing is to expand the collection, create, collecting new histories,” he told the committee. Gavilan said the oral history line sits within the broader collections budget, creating a tradeoff between purchasing materials and funding community collecting.

The committee asked staff to include clear budget language if federal grant funds materialize that would allow DCPL to restore certain adult‑learning positions and programs. The hearing record closed for written testimony at 5 PM on 04/29/2026.