The Home Fire Campaign

Keep the Home Fires Burning

Whether North Dakota is still your home or the home you came from, you can help shape its future.

Women smiling together around a table at a Brave Conversation

A woman in a pink sweater talking warmly across a table at the Kate Bowler Brave Conversation

An audience member speaking into a microphone at the Kate Bowler Brave Conversation

If you grew up in North Dakota or made a life here, you know what it feels like to stand under a wide sky, to be known by name, and to belong to a place that shaped who you are. Some of us are still rooted here. Some of us have carried the prairie with us to other places. Either way, a part of North Dakota goes with us.

The Home Fire Campaign is a way to honor that. It is a community of North Dakotans, near and far, who help keep the flame of learning, curiosity, connection, and creativity burning across the state through the North Dakota Council on the Arts and The Study ND.

Two Ways to Tend the Fire

Every fire needs two kinds of care. It needs fuel for tonight, and it needs someone who thinks ahead to the long winter. The Home Fire Campaign offers both. You may give to one, or to both.

Attendees laughing together around a table at a Brave Conversation

Fuel for tonight

The Today Fund

Warmth for right now.

Gifts to the Today Fund go straight to the work happening across North Dakota this year. They help the Council on the Arts and The Study ND meet the needs in front of them, in the towns, classrooms, and living rooms where people are gathering right now.

Your gift might:

bring a Study Club to a small-town library
bring a living history presentation to a North Dakota community, so audiences can meet figures from the past
help a master folk artist teach an apprentice, so a craft passes to the next generation
send high school students to stand up and recite poetry in Poetry Out Loud
place an artist in residence in one of North Dakota's state parks

Donate for Today

A full room gathered for a Brave Conversation, seen from above

For the long winter

The Tomorrow Fund

A fire that never goes out.

The Tomorrow Fund is the North Dakota Arts & Humanities Endowment. It is built to last. The gifts that go into it are never spent. They are invested, and only what they earn goes out into the world.

For now, every dollar it earns goes back into the fund, helping it grow. Once it reaches $2 million, it begins to give each year, and it keeps giving for as long as there is a North Dakota. This is a gift for the generations who will come after us.

You can also name the Tomorrow Fund in your will or estate plan. It is one of the most lasting gifts a person can give, a way of saying: I was here, this place mattered to me, and I want it to matter to the ones who come after.

Donate for Tomorrow

How Your Gift Is Cared For

Both funds are held by the North Dakota Community Foundation, which has cared for the charitable gifts of North Dakotans since 1976.

Every gift is shared equally between the North Dakota Council on the Arts and The Study ND. Gifts can also support the work the two create together, like living history, where history steps onto the theater stage.

The Endowment is built entirely by private gifts, from people who love this place. No government money goes into it, and no government can reach in to take it out.

Two Homes for the Same Fire

The North Dakota Council on the Arts is where creativity finds a home. Since 1967, it has stood beside the artists and arts organizations who make North Dakota sing, paint, dance, and tell its stories. Through music, theater, visual arts, and traditional arts, it keeps creative life close at hand, in schools, on community stages, and in galleries across the state. Come for a mural, a poetry recitation, a residency, or a master artist teaching an apprentice the old ways, and stay for the beauty. At the Council, creative life belongs to every North Dakotan.

Visit the North Dakota Council on the Arts

The Study ND (formerly Humanities North Dakota) is where curiosity finds a home. Since 1973, through history, philosophy, literature, and civics, it has been a home for lifelong learners who believe reflection, curiosity, and conversation still matter. Come for a dialogue, a class, a lecture, a book talk, a Study Club, a living history performance, or an episode of the podcast, and stay for the company. The Study ND also brings civics education to high school students, helping the next generation of North Dakotans understand how their democracy works. People gather here not for easy answers, but for the timeless search for meaning. At The Study ND, there is room for thought and room for you.

Visit The Study ND

Together they are part of what North Dakota is: homes for ideas and creativity that bring people together across distance, difference, and generations.

A full room gathered at a Study ND event

Wherever You Call Home

You may not live in North Dakota anymore. Your days may be far from the fields, rivers, and small towns that raised you. Yet the questions and education that shaped you are still alive here, in classrooms and libraries and living rooms across the state. So are the songs, the stories, the paintings, and the people who make them.

What do you want North Dakota to look like in fifty years? What stories should still be told in Williston and Wahpeton and Watford City?

Keep the Home Fires Burning.

Give to the Today Fund Give to the Tomorrow Fund

Other Ways to Give

To give by check, make it payable to the North Dakota Community Foundation, write "Today Fund" or "Tomorrow Fund" on the memo line, and mail it to:

North Dakota Community Foundation
PO Box 387
Bismarck, ND 58502-0387

To give stock or make a gift from your IRA, please contact us. We would be glad to help.