Inquiries and Guidelines

Inquiries

The Foundation encourages institutions to consider their ability to contribute to and sustain programs they seek to launch with Foundation support.  Institutional eligibility is determined by staff on the basis of criteria established over several decades.  For grants in the collaborative/cross-institutional category of the higher-education program, staff pay special attention to inquiries that link the projects of existing grantees to institutions not previously supported by the Foundation.  

Initial approaches to the Higher Learning program, including emails, must come from a senior academic officer. Visits to the Foundation by corporate and foundation relation officers unaccompanied by senior academic officers will not be considered. 

The Foundation makes grants to institutions and organizations, not to individuals.  All grants result from invitations issued by the Foundation to institutions with which staff have engaged in preliminary exchanges.  Uninvited applications cannot be considered. Inquiries about possibilities of support may be sent via the Foundation's grantee portal at  https://mellon.fluxx.io. Inquiries should not be sent to more than one Foundation program.

The Foundation does not fund overhead, indirect costs, and capital costs (construction, renovation, equipment).  In addition, the Higher Learning program does not fund projects in the social sciences or STEM fields, endowment management fees, one-off conferences, and undergraduate tuition or scholarships, financial aid, or study abroad opportunities.  Generally, the Foundation expects research universities to cover general operating costs and equipment, including graduate student tuition.