Phillip Brian Harper
Program Director, Higher Learning
Higher Learning Institutions Invited to Submit Concepts Exploring Democracy and Environmental and Social Justice
LocationNew York, New York
Grantmaking areaHigher Learning
DateOctober 24, 2023
Today, the Mellon Foundation announced a call for concepts to institutions of higher learning considering research or curricular projects in three distinct humanities-grounded and social justice-oriented categories:
Cultures of US Democracy
- Projects that consider the circumstantial conditions that enable U.S. democratic practices to flourish, including how those can best be achieved, nurtured, and sustained within an increasingly complex and fractured society.
Environmental Justice Studies
- Projects that focus on specific systems (such as food, water, or health), ones that engage interrelated systems in a given community/locale, and ones that come at this topic through discrete analytical or disciplinary lenses.
Social Justice and Disciplinary Knowledge
- Projects that best exemplify how specific disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields of study are equipped to reckon with issues of social justice, given the particular investigative and analytical methods they deploy.
This call underscores the Mellon Foundation’s commitment to building more just communities empowered by critical thinking and aims to address what we believe to be a growing imperative for justice-centered research, curricula, and academic initiatives in institutions across the nation.
“In alignment with Mellon's broader mission, we seek to underline the humanities' essential role in responding to some of our country’s greatest challenges, past and present,” said Phillip Brian Harper, Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Program Director. “Projects supported through this call will not only affirm the intrinsic value of the humanities, but also demonstrate their unique capacity to help build a more equitable society for all.”
This call is open to all accredited, non-profit, four-year degree-granting institutions in the US that offer liberal arts education. As always, Mellon’s Higher Learning program seeks to support institutions with a demonstrated record of excellence in the humanities, and particularly welcomes concepts from institutions that are minority-serving (MSIs) and/or have not received Mellon funding in the last five years.
Institutions interested in being part of the process or learning more are encouraged to register here by 3:00 p.m. EST on Thursday, November 30. For eligible registrants, applications will be due by 3:00 p.m. EST on Thursday, February 15. This call serves to reaffirm the Foundation’s process for inviting proposals for grants ranging from $250,000 to $500,000 for a duration of up to three years.
Institutions are limited to submitting no more than three concepts. Finalists will be selected, and invitations for full proposals will be issued during the summer of 2024, with final grant recommendations presented for prospective Foundation approval no later than November 2024, for a December 1, 2024 start date—and potentially sooner.
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About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty and empowerment that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and guided by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.