The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced inaugural grants totaling $15 million through its Humanities in Place program, which is focused on how and where the stories of our histories and communities are told across public experiences.

The program aims to support a diverse array of bold, innovative organizations and places that are rethinking past practice and creating new approaches for how to collectively understand, uplift, and celebrate more complete stories about who we are as a nation — both within distinct communities and as a broader society. To that end, grants ranging from $150,000 to $3.5 million were awarded in support of nineteen projects and organizations for work that includes or incorporates historic and community spaces, museums, and other institutions; media; and conveners of cultural heritage and public experiences as spaces of learning, expression, and exchange.

Since the program’s inception in December 2020, program officer Justin Garrett Moore has developed a three-fold strategic approach that will guide the program in its work: "keeping and shaping our places" by supporting projects and initiatives working to better identify, document, create, and care for our places, as well as supporting innovative ideas and actions for designing a more just present and future; "evolving our institutions" by catalyzing efforts to support the evolution and sustainability of institutions focused on advancing social justice through place-based approaches; and "promoting greater engagement and understanding" by funding projects and programs with a place-based focus that promotes greater access, interaction, and exchange of stories and experiences.

Grant recipients include the African Futures Institute (Accra, Ghana); Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (San Francisco); Black Reconstruction Collective (State College, Pennsylvania); Historic Clayborn Temple (Memphis, Tennessee); Lower East Side Tenement Museum (New York City); the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice (Durham, North Carolina); and Zócalo Public Square (Santa Monica, California).

"This vital program is now fundamental to the architecture of the Mellon Foundation itself," said Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, who conceived of and launched Humanities in Place. "With the creation of Humanities in Place, we have begun to address the urgent need to expand the range of voices centered and celebrated in our public spaces and to better fulfill our mission as a social justice philanthropy."

(Photo credit: Monument Lab)