(a) The endowment may award grants and loans on a competitive basis to public agencies and nonprofit organizations, including museums, to encourage development of a systematic and coordinated assemblage of buildings, sites, artifacts, museums, cultural landscapes, illustrations, written materials, and displays and interpretive centers to preserve and tell the stories of California as a unified society and of the many groups of people that together comprise historic and modern California. In addition to preserving and interpreting California’s missions, gold rush and pioneer sites, and other examples of early European exploration and settlement, the endowment shall give priority to funding projects to preserve, interpret, and enhance understanding and appreciation of the state’s subsequent cultural, social, and economic evolution. For example, it may fund projects involving buildings, including the acquisition of any interest in real property, structures, ships, historic cemeteries, site areas, places, trails, artifacts, artistic expressions, illustrations, written materials, or collections of artifacts, historic districts, cultural landscapes, illustrations, and written materials, including, but not limited to, the following:

(1) Projects that preserve, display, demonstrate, or interpret the contributions of the many unique identifiable ethnic and other communities that have added significant elements to California’s culture, including, but not limited to, their architecture, landscaping, urban forms, recreation, food and drink, styles, literature, artistic expressions, and pastimes.

(2) Projects that preserve and demonstrate culturally significant aspects of the changing ways that ordinary or particularly creative people lived their daily lives during the course of California history, including, but not limited to, representative or exceptionally expressive residences, recreational facilities and equipment, farms and ranches, transportation technologies, and innovative shopping arrangements.

(3) Projects that preserve, display, demonstrate, or interpret the industries, technologies, individuals, groups, and commercial enterprises that built California’s enormous economic strength, including, but not limited to, aircraft construction, banking and finance, electronics and related technologies, medical technologies, petroleum production and refining, movie and television production, and agriculture.

(4) Projects that preserve, display, demonstrate, or interpret California’s contribution to the national defense during the state’s history, including facilities and artifacts from closed military bases, and including projects about the social, demographic, and other changes that resulted from these national defense activities.

(5) Projects that preserve and promote understanding and continuity of California’s living cultural heritage and folklife that is deeply rooted in and reflective of its distinct cultural communities, including, but not limited to, public programs, recordings, exhibitions, apprenticeships, publications, ethnographic documentation, and archival preservation.

(6) Projects that preserve, display, demonstrate, or interpret California’s geologic and oceanographic history, including, but not limited to, its assemblage from Jurassic and earlier archipelagoes and ophiolitic remnants through subduction processes, and the expression of global tectonic forces in its mountains, basins, and faults.

(b) The endowment shall fund projects relating to the archaeology, history, or culture of California’s Native American population that are sensitive to the sovereign status of the tribes and that respect the cultural and spiritual traditions of those tribes.

(c) The endowment shall give priority to funding projects that preserve, document, interpret, or enhance understanding of threads of California’s story that are absent or underrepresented in existing historical parks, monuments, museums, and other facilities, and to achieve careful balance geographically, among communities and organizations of large and small size, and among diverse ethnic groups. The endowment may create financial and other incentives to support projects described in this subdivision, including, but not limited to, technical assistance, funding set asides, and preferential match requirements.

(d) The endowment shall ensure that California’s historic and cultural resources are accessible and available to the people of California, especially traditionally underserved communities, by encouraging programs including, but not limited to, traveling exhibitions, illustrative publications, exchanges, Web sites and digitalization of materials, and programs in conjunction with school districts to bring school children into contact with these materials, and may fund projects for these purposes.

(Added by Stats. 2002, Ch. 1126, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2003.)