Building on the ALBC’s original focus on early education, professional scholarship, online access, publications, public programs, and community-based programming, the foundation will offer support, sponsorship, expertise, and encouragement to non-profit initiatives devoted to sharing knowledge, preserving historic sites and artifacts, and engaging diverse audiences on the subjects of leadership, freedom, equality, and opportunity.
In the period immediately preceding and following the sunset of the ALBC in the summer of 2009, historians Jean Soman of Florida and Orville Vernon Burton of South Carolina, respectively, served as interim chairs of the Foundation.
The foundation announced its new board and extended mission on February 10, 2011, at an introductory event at the Willard in Washington, the hotel where Abraham Lincoln and his family resided in the ten days immediately preceding his inauguration as President 150 years earlier in 1861[2] The foundation also announced that it had committed in its initial round of funding to co-sponsor and provide financial support for two planned Washington-based activities and one Lincoln-related historic site in Pennsylvania.
Since its inception, the Foundation has awarded several hundred thousand dollars worth of grants to educational, performance, research, and programmatic activities in a number of states.
The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation has issued a call for further requests for support, sponsorship, and endorsement, and announced that it would consider such proposals at its regularly scheduled quarterly meetings.