Taken together, grantmaking across our four program areas and the Office of the President made clear that even as the scope of what we support remains expansive, our focus as a forward-looking social justice philanthropy continues to be directed, purposeful, and pristine.

With the conclusion of the year came Mellon’s newest commitment: $500 million for the Monuments Project, representing our unprecedented investment to reshape the American commemorative landscape to better convey our country’s complex history. By doubling the initial commitment we made when launching the initiative in 2020, we at Mellon recognize the significant collective and collaborative effort that developing new American monuments and memorials requires. Over the past twelve months, Monuments Project grantees—including PRX, which launched the podcast “Monumental”; the Trust for the National Mall, which supported six new ephemeral monument installations in the heart of our nation’s capital; and nine American municipalities that are exploring how best to tell the American Story in their civic spaces—demonstrated the determination and dedication that reimagination of our commemorative landscape demands, and that continues to both inspire up and galvanize us as we lead this work.

Partnerships with key allies further augmented the impact of our funding across 2023, and were made and reinforced in support of our shared vision of a more just future for the United States. These included partnerships not only with long-standing peer organizations like the Ford Foundation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, but also with new ones such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the US Department of the Interior, as Mellon supports a comprehensive oral history project for the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative; Washington National Cathedral, which revealed this past fall the new Mellon-funded stained glass windows created by Kerry James Marshall; and nonprofit institutions and government leaders both in the Puerto Rican diaspora and in the archipelago of Puerto Rico itself, where we at Mellon gathered in community this past spring to convene our Letras Boricuas fellows, celebrate the milestones of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellows program, and expand the transformative reach of our Puerto Rico initiative.

Central to our robust and meticulously made partnerships was Mellon’s effort to preserve the legacy of Emmett Till through the establishment of the new Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Glendora and Sumner, Mississippi, and Chicago, Illinois. This essential and long overdue National Park Site, which was signed into creation by President Biden at the White House this past July, is in part the result of Mellon’s instrumental role in supporting as a collective partnership the National Park Foundation, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, and the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute. We are proud to have led and sustained this collaboration, and honored to have helped ensure that Emmett Till’s and Mamie Till-Mobley’s stories remain urgent, alive, and accurately understood by generations of Americans to come.

As we look to 2024, we at Mellon are determined to further hone our institutional focus as a social justice philanthropy, and to fortify our mission as the leading funder of the arts, culture, and humanities in the United States.

The imperative to do both seems likely to increase in the year ahead. The issues that lie at the heart of our mission are frequently assailed in public discourse, and the impediments to meaningful justice in our country are even firmer than they were when we reoriented our work three years ago. Book banning and the criminalization of learning and knowledge remain on the rise; the humanities in higher education are distrusted, disparaged, and often institutionally undernourished or deprioritized; diverse leadership on college campuses and the values of the liberal arts continue to be attacked; the question of who is American, and who gets to have a voice in American public spaces, is constantly contested; and the words and work of artists, writers, scholars, and culture-makers, whose thinking and creating are much needed antidotes to these ordeals, continue to be repressed.

In the face of these challenges, the values that this Foundation champions—those of unencumbered empathy, rigorous inquiry, curiosity and openness, beauty and creativity, and astonishing revelation—are the most potent we possess to counter fear, hatred, and despair.

Entering 2024, we will never cease to use them to combat these forces of dehumanization. We will never stop believing in these values and the power they hold, and we will never cease to celebrate, and to honor, the promise of humanity that they illuminate.