The Mellon Foundation invites community-based archives in the United States and its territories to submit applications for general operating support.
Donor Name: Mellon Foundation
State: All States
County: All Counties
Territory: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 03/12/2025
Size of the Grant: $10,000 to $100,000
Grant Duration: 2 Years
Details:
Through this program, direct support will be provided to community-based archives that represent and serve communities marginalized due to oppression.
These grants may provide support in one or more of the following areas of need:
- Operational costs, including staff, space, and utilities.
- Collections care, including the acquisition of new materials, physical and digital storage fees, and access and preservation efforts.
- Programming activities, including events, exhibitions, and increased community usage.
For the purposes of this call, community-based archives are defined as organizations that gather and share materials as members of under-documented communities to preserve and celebrate their collective histories. These archives serve to affirm and uplift their community’s existence and identity, to help combat patterns of misinformation, and to provide a trusted environment for the perpetuation of community traditions, art forms, and languages, among other forms of empowerment. Formed as counter responses to a long legacy of oversight and extraction by mainstream cultural heritage institutions and by the academy, these archives are essential to the creation of a more inclusive and multivocal American story.
Funding Information
Awards will range from $25,000 to $100,000.
Grant Period
Grant periods would begin August 1, 2025 and end on July 31, 2027.
Eligibility Criteria
Organizations that respond to this Call for Proposals must:
- Be located within the United States or one of its territories.
- Have 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status or be a federally recognized Indian tribe.
- Have an archive or an archiving initiative with an annual operating budget of at least $12,500 and no more than $1 million. In-kind donations towards occupancy costs may be used to calculate the total operating budget. This call is open to both standalone archives and community-based organizations with an archiving initiative.
- Have an established and actively collecting archive that has been in operation for two or more years. This funding cannot be used to create a new archive.
For more information, visit Mellon Foundation.
