Bishop Museum

Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, a tax-exempt nonprofit in Honolulu, Hawaii, acts as a prime recipient of federal grants for research, cultural preservation, digitization, and educational programming, with no direct federal contract prime awards in its recent footprint. The museum competes in open federal grant programs across science, humanities, education, and cultural funding streams, drawing from 35 distinct federal agencies across 146 awards since 1981.

The museum's capability portfolio centers on biodiversity research, cultural heritage preservation and digitization, educational curriculum development, and conservation science. Representative recent work includes a $538,774 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS, CFDA 45.308) to digitize and preserve approximately 15,000 pages of fragile Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948 through high-resolution imaging and optical character recognition, with performance running through August 2028. A $697,754 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (CFDA 10.912) supports development of native seed producer networks to eliminate conservation bottlenecks in Hawaii through October 2027. A $598,628 National Science Foundation award (CFDA 47.074) funds the BIORETS: Research Experiences for Advancing Curriculum on Hawaiian Ecosystem Sciences (REACHES) program, training eight high school and community college teachers annually in Hawaiian ecosystem sciences, land snail ecology, and place-based research—with the University of Hawaii at Manoa as a sub-grantee—running through February 2027. The museum also holds a $400,000 Department of Defense Cooperative Agreement (CFDA 12.610) through September 2034 under the REPI Challenge program to support compatible-use planning and joint land-use studies near military installations in Hawaii.

Customer concentration clusters around research and cultural agencies. The top five customers by award count account for 39% of awards, led by the Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (22 awards, $933 thousand combined potential value), the National Science Foundation (12 awards), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (8 awards), the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (8 awards), and the Department of the Navy (7 awards). The top customers by dollar value show similar concentration, with NOAA (22 awards, $933 thousand), the Department of the Navy Installations Command (4 awards, $258 thousand), the Smithsonian Institution (2 awards, $43 thousand), the Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service Region 1 (3 awards, $22 thousand), and the Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Wildlife Services (1 award, $18 thousand) together accounting for 41% of combined potential value.

The museum sits on five named Indefinite Delivery contracts, including DOCAB133F07CQ0051 (2 task orders, $150 thousand combined potential value) and four additional Navy and Army IDICs with one or two task orders each. Activity has been episodic rather than linear—six awards in 2021, three in 2022, seven in 2023, eight in 2024, and one in 2026—with a small recompete exposure: four awards (combined potential value not specified in source) reach ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months. The museum operates exclusively as a prime grant recipient with no subcontract footprint in the source data. Its award categories cluster in Museums (16 awards), All Other Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (14 awards), Environmental Consulting Services (6 awards), and Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services (5 awards), with PSC activity weighted toward Special Studies/Analysis work in scientific data, archeological/paleontological, and endangered-species domains.