The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has recently awarded several grants totaling more than $7 million focused on historic preservation, the arts, humanities, education, knowledge sharing, and amplifying the voices of marginalized communities.

The Sovereign Equity Fund has received a two-year, $2.4 million investment in its Cultural Foodways Fund from the Native American Agriculture Fund in collaboration with Mellon to support grants to tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) that center Indigenous food knowledge research and education as part of a larger effort to reclaim and revitalize the intersection of Indigenous cultural identity and foodways.

Lyrasis, a capacity-building nonprofit, has announced a $1.5 million renewal grant to expand its Performing Arts Readiness project to boost access to knowledge sharing and capabilities around emergency preparedness and response for arts organizations.

Invest in Open Infrastructure has received a $1 million grant to expand the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services to promote their adoption for research and scholarship.

Georgia State University (GSU) was awarded a $669,000 grant to establish a literary journal, Beyond Bars, written by, for, and with members of Georgia’s incarcerated community in collaboration with GSU’s Prison Education Project and Common Good Atlanta, to help open doors for incarcerated writers and editors.

The WeGOJA Foundation (formerly the South Carolina African American Heritage Foundation) has received a two-year, $750,000 grant to expand its staff and develop resources to help advocates of historic preservation acquire state historical markers and listings on the National Register of Historic Places and access preservation planning and restoration expertise.

As part of Mellon’s Humanities in Place program, the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston was awarded a three-year, $500,000 grant to help fund the addition of film and media to museum exhibits. To date, the foundation has provided IAAM grants totaling more than $2 million in support of the museum’s construction and to establish its curatorial department.

The University of Connecticut has received a $250,000 grant for its Design Justice AI program, a multi-institution effort guided by the university’s Humanities Institute, which engages scholars from around the world to address issues of bias in the development of artificial intelligence.

(Photo credit: WeGOJA Foundation)