2007 -- The Center receives a second, three year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to promote international programs at St. Mary's College and to develop the Democracy Studies minor.

2006 -- The Center meets its Year 2 NEH challenge grant hurdle by raising $425,000.

2005 -- The Center meets its Year 1 NEH challenge grant hurdle by raising $125,000.

2004 -- The Center and Historic St. Mary's City are awarded $148,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Landmarks in American History program. Funding will allow ninety K-12 teachers to come to St. Mary's for two weeks during the summer 2005 to study "Life, Liberty, and Opportunity: The Struggle of Freedom in Tidewater Maryland: 1634-1865."

2004 -- The Center kicks off its challenge grant period with contributions from the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, the Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Thomas and Helen Daugherty, Ben Bradlee and the alumni and friends of St. Mary's College of Maryland.

2004 -- The Center is awarded a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) We the People challenge grant. The Center has until the end of 2008 to raise $1.5 million to meet the grant.

2003 -- Center receives a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct international student exchanges between St. Mary's College of Maryland and the developing democratic countries of Senegal, The Gambia, Brazil, and Thailand.

2002 – The Mellon Foundation provides a planning grant, enabling the College to assess prospects for its International Education Program, the focus of which is to bring foreign students from emerging democracies to the United States to study democratic principles. (at right: "Meet the (Student) Press," the editors of the Point News quiz the St. Mary's County Delegation to the General Assembly in Annapolis about the 2003 session)

2002 – A grant from the Library of Congress allows the Center to implement the Library’s Leadership Program, in this case enabling 20 Russian leaders to come to Maryland to study democracy in American government and society.

2001 – Terry Meyerhoff Rubenstein, trustee of the College and executive vice president of the Joseph Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds, contributes the launch gift to the Center. Part of the contribution is for the William Donald Schaefer internship Program for Government Service.

2001 – Trustee Tom Daugherty and his wife, Professor Helen Ginn Daugherty, pledge an endowed chair in the social and historical sciences; this faculty chair will be of particular importance to the Center. Prior to the completion of the endowment an annual stipend of $10,000 per year to support a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democracy.

2001 – Important gifts in support of both the Center and the Schaefer Internship Program for Government Service are received from the following: Baltimore philanthropist Henry Rosenberg; College trustees William Donald Schaefer and Thomas Penfield Jackson; prominent Maryland businessman Brice Phillips and his wife, Shirley; and Robert Stewart, father of alumna Eleanor Stewart ’98.