Last year, we at the Mellon Foundation looked directly at American society and asked how we could make it more just. As demonstrated across all four of our program areas—Higher Learning, Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge, and Humanities in Place—and through my grantmaking portfolio as Mellon’s president, we are a forward-looking social justice philanthropy, a leading voice in the arts, culture, and humanities, and a problem-solving foundation determined to right historic wrongs in the fields we fund. In 2022, we considered the impacts of the early pandemic phases and sustained democratic upheaval in the United States, and asked how we could best work together, best support our new and ongoing grantees, and best achieve, collectively, justice in our country in the years ahead.

To do that, we knew we had to get out—out of our Zoom boxes, out of New York City, and out across the land. With rigorous reflection and subsequent action, we upheld a razor-sharp precision in our focus and our funding. We updated and expanded our physical infrastructure, our best practices, and our collaborative partnerships. Just as we looked at the state of our country with a critical eye and interrogative resolve, so too did we look at how we at Mellon operate as an organization. We looked inward, so we could open outward.

As we opened our doors, the velocity of our determination to do more, and to do better, drove our grantmaking. In Puerto Rico, we reinforced our commitment to funding arts, culture, and humanities institutions and organizations in both the archipelago and the diaspora, including the second cohort of our literary fellow program, Letras Boricuas. Crucially, we also deployed emergency funds in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona. Emergency grantmaking was central to our expansive funding strategies in 2020 and 2021; in 2022 it became more targeted and intentional, so we can continue being responsive and impactful when emergencies among our grantee communities arise.

We built upon our work in the dynamic borderlands of the United States and Mexico, highlighting Arts and Culture and Higher Learning grantees throughout the region in a public program on Humanities and the Border, and affirming our support for indigenous grantees such as the Seven Generations Signature Initiative and the Firekeepers, a program under the auspices of our Public Knowledge grantmaking area that champions indigenous memory keeping. And from Acadia to Zion, under the auspices of Higher Learning and Humanities in Place, we funded postdoctoral fellowships in US national parks, centering multivocality and illuminating the many different stories present in these vital public spaces.