Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration

FAIN: CZ-50028-04

Copiah-Lincoln Community College (Wesson, MS 39191-9757)
Carolyn V. Smith (Project Director: June 2003 to June 2006)

Endowment to provide partial support for the educational director of the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration.

Copiah-Lincoln Community College seeks a $100,000 Challenge Grant: Special Initiative for Local History to help provide long-term support for the annual Olympic Award-winning, humanities based Natchez (Miss.) Literary and Cinema Celebration, begun in 1990. Copiah-Lincoln will raise $100,000 in matching funds from non-federal sources for a total of $200,000. This sum will be used to create an endowment to help provide a secure fiscal base for the event's new educational director. The current educational director is about to retire, and since she is primarily a volunteer who has willingly not been paid appropriately since the project began, without new funding for the directorship, the event will be severely diminished in size and scope or even discontinued. New funding plus continued partnerships with other educational institutions, including an historically Black university, will result in a continuance and growth of a significant event based on local history.