The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is one of the biggest philanthropic supporters of the arts and humanities, announced on Tuesday that all its grant making would now be driven by a focus on advancing social justice.
Elizabeth Alexander, a former Ford Foundation official who took over as Mellon’s president in March 2018, has been working to refresh the philanthropy’s approach in recent months. Mellon’s announcement came one day after the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, another of the biggest grant makers in the United States, unveiled a major new focus on race and justice.
To show what’s different about its new approach, Mellon on Tuesday announced a $5.3-million grant to the Million Books Project at Yale University’s Justice Collaboratory. The project plans to provide 1,000 prisons and juvenile facilities with 500-book collections to ensure incarcerated people have access to literature. Sending money to prisons and other nontraditional venues is a hallmark of Mellon’s new approach; money to colleges and universities will focus on work that advances inclusion.
The new grant-making strategy will be accompanied by an increase in spending. Mellon plans to make $500 million in grants this year, an increase of $200 million over its planned budget.
Among the other key elements of its new approach, Mellon said its grants that:
- Advance public knowledge will support efforts to preserve a diverse range of culture and make it broadly accessible.
- Promote arts and culture will foster connections among artists from diverse backgrounds.
- Spread the humanities locally will explore ways to bring a variety of histories and voices to public memorials, museums, and public events.
Alexander, a former humanities professor who served on the Pulitzer Prize board and recited her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, talked with The Chronicle of Philanthropy about the changes.
Did the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed inform the foundation’s new approach?
We are in a very extraordinary moment. We moved from the Covid-19 pandemic, in which so much inequity having to do with race and economics has been laid bare, to these particular horrific racial killings that have blown up in a large way. But it exists on a continuum. That is something that, to someone who has studied African American history, is not a surprise. It goes back to Rodney King. It goes back to Trayvon Martin and to Emmett Till.
So we’ve been working on this strategic plan for a very long time, but we didn’t change anything because of this moment.
I hope that maybe our work shines in a particular way because more people are aware that we do live in a society where racism is an open wound, where injustice persists, and where we are still perfecting a fair and just society.
Will the increased flexibility and general operating support foundations have provided during the pandemic be a permanent feature of philanthropy?
The short answer is yes. We’ve been very flexible with all of our grantees about finding the best ways for them to be able to use the funds that they need now.
And we increased our payout this year by $200 million. All the sectors in which we work, particularly in arts and culture, are feeling the economic crash that came as the result of the pandemic. Even those arts organizations with wealthy boards and endowments are hurting because it’s not yet clear how we get back to business.
It’s not going to be business as usual. We’ve undertaken an ongoing foundationwide evaluation of how we do business.
I don’t want our process to be onerous. I don’t want anything about our process to be needless. I don’t want anything about our process to put us in a position of seeming superior to the people whose work we are supporting.
But I don’t think it should be super-easy to earn a grant because there’s a lot of amazing and worthy work out there. It shouldn’t be just “send us a Post-it note, and here’s your check.”
There have been increasing calls for foundations to spend more of their endowments. Isn’t that sort of wealth redistribution in the service of social justice?
Ever since I came into philanthropy, I’ve been describing it as wealth redistribution. The important question is not “Do you give out money?” but “How do you give it out?” Who do you give it to? What are the equity principles behind that? What are the ways in which the people whose work we support are thinking about the communities that they serve?
What does it mean for a potential grantee that you now place social justice at the center of your work?
There’s no social-justice litmus test. It’s not like these people were in, and now they’re out. There are some people who have gotten huge amounts of money from the Mellon Foundation over time. It is not that they are now cut off, but it is that there also are a lot of groups that have never received Mellon funding who are doing extraordinary work.
We are looking to support work that is contributing to a more fair and just society. And there myriad ways of interpreting that.
For instance, the Academy of American Poets’ Poet Laureate fellowship has understood poets as having a role in their society. Not just to write their beautiful poems, but to creatively move poetry into the community. There are many different ways organizations can think about how their work can contribute to our system in a fair and just way.
What contributions have the humanities made to the mass protests?
I’m a professor in the field of African American studies. What that means is that I have always understood institutions as important and imperfect. I have always been thinking about how do we make institutions more inclusive. So I don’t necessarily see a dichotomy between the institution and the street. That’s not my lived reality, and that’s not my experience of how you bring together the best ideas and minds.
You’ve got to bring a lot of different people to the table to find the best solutions to move society forward.
If colleges and universities want to demonstrate a commitment to social justice, should they take down statues of white supremacists or rename schools, as Princeton recently did by removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs?
We’re not necessarily the ones to take things down. We really want to support people who are building something.
We’ve been making grants to erect memorials, to support memorial and teaching spaces that tell other histories that have not had a space that Confederate monuments have.
I took my whole board last year to Alabama, where we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which we supported in a huge way, that tells the story of lynching and of slavery.
We supported a memorial in Central Park, which was built over a free black community called Seneca Village, to the Lyons family, who were very important to abolition.
And we supported the Arab American National Museum, outside of Detroit, which is the only such museum in the country.
We need to ask how we tell the stories of these Americans in a teaching space. We have been thinking about surfacing stories, telling the history in a way that is very powerful, very inspiring, and necessary to say who we really are.
Part of the strategy is to provide greater access to knowledge. Can you provide some examples of the kind of programs Mellon will support?
This part of the strategy addresses whose lives are recovered and whose objects are kept safe so that they can be studied and narrated later on in history.
One example is a grant we made to archive the lives of the LGBTQ community in Alabama. This was a project that came to us over the transom. These folks were telling the story of queer people in the South and all these things that didn’t have a place to go. Without those, we don’t have a complete story of that part of the country or of those people.
I also want to do more work with public libraries, thinking about what kinds of archives that they may have. I’m not talking about funding public libraries to keep the doors open. That’s very important, but that’s not what we’re doing. We want to find public libraries where there is a dynamic opportunity for knowledge sharing.
How will college campuses look different if your vision is fulfilled?
I hope we will have more institutions or initiatives within institutions that are recognized as being central, powerful, and influential. Ethnic studies at its best will be at the center of more college educations again, which is just a way of saying we’ve got to learn about everybody in this place where we are, we’ve got to learn about history with a critical acumen.
There are people whose full potential is waiting to be developed further. Higher learning will really transform their lives. At Mellon we believe that a powerful and beautiful college education is transformative. But we know that it is not equitably distributed.
Critical consciousness is the gift of enlightenment. It means you’ll be able to have more students who, when they go out into their work lives and their community lives and their family lives, they can ask, Who is here and who do I bring into the room with me? And what perspective did I forget to consider? And how can I consider that so that I can make a well-rounded decision?
We also do that with prison higher education. These are men and women who in the time that they are in prison we hope are enriching themselves because when they are released, we’re all a society together. We are one community. We have to be thinking about what people can contribute to building their communities.
What do the pandemic and the calls for racial justice tell us about the relative importance of STEM learning and the humanities?
If you look at the pandemic, we need doctors and public-health people. We need scientific researchers to make a vaccine. All of those STEM skills are crucial.
But we also need humanists to help us understand what we’ve been going through as a society. We need artists to chronicle what we’ve been going through.
The last five months have been very fearful times, times of heightened emotion. It’s been beautiful to see a lot of our arts and culture grantees, even as they are looking straight into the abyss, not having the resources they need and not knowing what reopening looks like, those musicians and dancers and poets are making offerings that have been helping people get through.
We’re going to need to make a bigger kind of sense of it as a society, as we come out on the other side of it. People talk about humanities as being fragile or endangered. I don’t listen to that noise because the power of the humanities is literally the eternal power of human beings — of making art and culture and understanding themselves through stories. That is a human need, across time and place.
Do you see the momentum behind the public outcry for racial justice gaining?
Frederick Douglass always answers everything for us. He said power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. Nothing is going to change just because the wheels are turning now.
We are in the midst of a mass movement with very broad-based support. And that is powerful and wonderful, but I can never step off of the fact that countless Black people had to be dehumanized and murdered by people who are paid by our taxes to protect them for us to come to this moment.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.