Assistance program
Museums for America
$201.1 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Institute of Museum and Library Services
- Assistance
- Project Grants;Direct Payments for Specified Use
- CFDA number
- 45.301
- What it does
- Museums for America (MFA) is designed to strengthen the ability of individual museums to serve the public more effectively by supporting high-priority activities that advance their missions, plans, and strategic goals and objectives. MFA has three program goals—Lifelong Learning, Community Engagement, and Collections Stewardship and Access—with three associated objectives each. Museums Empowered: Professional Development Opportunities for Museum Staff, a special initiative of the MFA grant program, supports using the transformative power of professional development and training to generate systemic change within museums of all types and sizes. It has four program goals—Digital Technology; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Evaluation; and Organizational Management—with two associated objectives each. Inspire! Grants for Small Museums, a special initiative of the MFA program, supports small museums of all disciplines in project-based efforts to serve the public through exhibitions, educational/interpretive programs, digital learning resources, policy development and institutional planning, technology enhancements, professional development, community outreach, audience development, and/or collections management, curation, care, and conservation. It has one program goal—to build the capacity of small museums to provide museum services to their communities—with three associated objectives. Please see the Notice of Funding Opportunity for details of these grant programs' specific goals and objectives.
- Who benefits
- Public and private non-profit museums. Through activities and projects funded, beneficiaries include the general public.
- Who applies
- An applicant to Museums for America or its initiatives must meet geographic and governance criteria and qualify as one of the following types of organizations: 1. A museum that, using a professional staff, is organized on a permanent basis for essentially educational, cultural heritage, or aesthetic purposes; owns or uses tangible objects, either animate or inanimate; cares for these objects; and exhibits these objects to the general public on a regular basis through facilities that it owns or operates. 2. A public or private nonprofit agency that is responsible for the operation of a museum that meets these criteria. Applicants should consult the Notices of Funding Opportunity for MFA and the special initiatives for more details.
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments