Donations
There are many ways to read a book, and your support helps make those ways available to people across Maine: children under five, adults learning how to read, inmates at Maine’s prisons and jails, and residents of the state’s most rural communities, among many others. The Maine Humanities Council creates communities through opening up a shared world of ideas, whether it’s a Winter Weekend discussion of War and Peace or a New Books, New Readers discussion of Frog and Toad Are Friends. The power of books is the power to connect, inspire, and delight.
There are five ways of giving that can help us reach all of Maine:
Annual Fund
Annual Fund gifts support the programs that need financial help the most, having an instant impact the year that they are given. A $100.00 gift can provide 12 books and an Activity & Resource Guide for a Born to Read early childhood educator to use in an infant/toddler classroom, or pay for part of the fee for a scholar, who makes a Let’s Talk About It discussion a powerful experience of the mind and not just a book group.
MHC Circle
The MHC Circle is the MHC’s major donor group with a starting donor level of $1,000. It helps to sustain the MHC’s work across Maine, reaching people who do not ordinarily or easily have access to the humanities. MHC Circle contributions help fund essential programs like Born to Read and New Books, New Readers. MHC Circle members receive advance notice of special events and information about Council activities, publications, and projects.
The Fund for Literature & Medicine
Though the health care system may be in crisis, we still look to our health care providers for comfort as well as cure when we are ill or dying. Their ability to listen to us, to empathize and to talk to us about our concerns and fears, can be almost as important as their ability to cure. Indeed their attention itself is healing when there is no cure. But some of the most skilled health professionals lack these abilities, and in their stressful and demanding environment, they have few opportunities to develop them.
That is where Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® makes a difference.
This program has increased health professionals’ empathy, improved their communication and interpersonal skills, developed their cultural competence, and increased their job satisfaction—all resulting in better patient care.
Literature & Medicine is deceptively simple: it brings together health professionals in hospitals for facilitated discussions of readings that illuminate issues central to their work of caring for people. This opportunity to reflect on professional roles and relationships through the lens of literature, in community with colleagues, has been significant.
Literature & Medicine has been in 28 Maine hospitals, rural and urban, large and small, and has also been in 25 other states. It has made a place for itself and created a demand.
Now all it needs is your help.
To continue Literature & Medicine in hospitals across Maine, the Fund for Literature & Medicine was created in honor of Victoria Bonebakker, founder of program, on the occasion of her retirement from the Maine Humanities Council. By meeting its goal of $50,000 in new money (each gift will be matched 1:1), the Fund will enable the Maine Humanities Council to support Literature & Medicine in Maine for many years to come.
Your gift will make a tremendous difference in the lives of Maine’s health professionals and their patients—including you or someone you love. Please give as generously as you can.
Restricted Giving
You may restrict your gift to any program that you wish. Winter Weekend sponsorships, for example, are restricted to New Books, New Readers, where a $100.00 gift provides books to two new adult learners for one series (such as “Resolving Conflict” or “Community”), and gives the donor the first chance to sign up for the upcoming Winter Weekend.
Planned Giving: Humanities Tomorrow Society
Imagine a world in which everyone loves books...
The Maine Humanities Council has been at work for more than 30 years to help bring books and discussion to Maine and its people statewide. Our mission is “to engage the people of Maine in the power and pleasure of ideas, encouraging a deeper understanding of ourselves and others, fostering wisdom in an age of information, and providing context in a time of change.” We do that through sharing books and ideas with people who love books, and with those who are just beginning to learn to love books, including children under five and low-literacy adults. Books can connect people, communities, and ideas, leading to enrichment of all lives.
The Humanities Tomorrow Society honors the legacy that is established when Maine Humanities Council friends make gifts through wills, estate plans, charitable trusts, or gift annuities. These gifts ensure that humanities programs involving books and ideas will be offered to Mainers for many years to come. Planned gifts are important for the Maine Humanities Council’s future program success and financial stability. Making a planned gift today not only means an investment in the Council’s future but can also mean, through charitable trusts and gift annuities, financial benefits for you and your family. For many people, a planned gift can be a much larger one than they could make during their lifetimes. As is the case with all qualified donations, significant tax benefits can result, reducing income and estate taxation. Humanities Tomorrow Society Members know that they are making a significant difference in the Maine Humanities Council’s future, keeping books and ideas a part of the future of thousands of Mainers statewide.
Download: Policy on Acceptance of Gifts, Sample Bequest Language, Humanities Tomorrow Society brochure.
For more information about making a gift to the Maine Humanities Council, please contact Diane Magras, Director of Development at (toll-free) 1-866-MEreader (1-866-637-3233) ext. 208, (local) 207/773-5051 ext. 208, or diane@mainehumanities.org.
