The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies. To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.

The Foundation makes grants in five core program areas:
 

Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities
 

Through the program in Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities, the Foundation assists select colleges, universities, and research institutes in the work of training scholars and producing scholarship in the humanities broadly conceived, and thereby contributing to culture and society. In practical terms, this means helping institutions and professional organizations respond to the economic, demographic, financial, and technological challenges affecting higher education, supporting initiatives designed to enhance the learning experience of both undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities, and fostering collaborations within and among institutions that support disciplinary innovation, foster practices of diversity and inclusion, and promote the social value of the humanities.

New areas as well as strengthened emphases include:

• Capacious and innovative curricula in the arts, humanities, and humanities-related social sciences, and productive relationships between the arts and humanities and the natural and social sciences
• Faculty growth as teachers, scholars, and academic citizens across the stages of a professorial career
• Programs that scale up training for humanistic engagement with the digital
• Reforms of doctoral education that broaden the intellectual and professional preparation of students
• Programs that introduce faculty and graduate students to effective pedagogies, the science of cognition, and to scholarship on student learning
• Assistance to less well-endowed liberal arts colleges in planning for their intellectual and financial futures
• Research on broad structural questions in higher education
• Initiatives that involve humanities scholars in grand challenge questions that require interdisciplinary collaboration
• Collaborations among research universities, liberal arts colleges, and other cultural and educational institutions in their communities
• Commitments of faculty and students to the public humanities

 

Arts and Cultural Heritage

The Arts and Cultural Heritage program seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and conservation practices in the arts, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for these disciplines. The program supports the work of outstanding artists, curators, conservators, and scholars, and endeavors to strengthen performing arts organizations, art museums, research institutes, and conservation centers. Alongside our continued commitments to exemplary programs in the performing arts, art history, and conservation, new areas and strengthened emphases include:
 

• Programs that strengthen the creation and preservation of, as well as scholarship about, new media and multidisciplinary arts
• Initiatives that broaden public access to and understanding of the arts
• Research, training, and recruitment programs that enhance diversity and inclusion in arts organizations
• Collaborations between institutions of higher education and the arts
• Efforts to address vulnerabilities distinctive to the arts, such as the financial health of small arts organizations and emergency preparedness and response

 

Diversity

The Diversity program seeks to help diversify the next generation of college and university faculty through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and other pipeline programs; it also aims to strengthen institutions that improve educational attainment of historically underrepresented groups. More generally, the Diversity grantmaking area supports projects or research focused on the relationship between diversity and learning. New areas and strengthened emphases include:
 

• An initiative to increase representation of the Latino/a population in PhD programs and the professoriate
• Programs to increase the percentage of MMUF fellows who enroll in PhD programs
• Partnerships between strongly performing HBCUs and neighboring institutions capable of contributing to curricular enhancement
• Support for organizations that employ traditional and non-traditional means to help colleges and universities diversify their student population
• Research to increase understanding of diversity and efforts at diversification and inclusion
• Support or co-sponsorship across program areas of projects that promote diversification or seek to advance evolving understandings of diversity’s role in democratic societies

 

Scholarly Communications

The Scholarly Communications program assists research libraries, archives, museums, universities, presses, and arts organizations that seek to realize this potential, and thereby to further our collective understanding of societies and cultures around the world. The Scholarly Communications program promotes the common good by supporting the creation, dissemination, use, and preservation of original sources, interpretive scholarship in the humanities, and other scholarly and artistic materials. The program aims to develop the sustainable tools, organizations, and networks of scholars and other professionals needed for these purposes. New areas and strengthened emphases include:
 

• A multi-pronged plan to assist the evolution of academic publishing in the Internet age
• Preservation of digital scholarship and collections, with a special emphasis on born-digital publications
• Support for digitizing Hidden Collections and making them broadly accessible
• A global collections initiative to provide access to non-English language resources

 

International Higher Education and Strategic Projects
 

In its initial phase of development, the International Higher Education program will stress partnerships with institutions already supported by the Foundation, especially on issues of global grand challenges.
 

The program's overarching purpose is to help these institutions become durable and capable of contributing to social cohesion, as well as to assist them in constructing educational systems that serve the interests of society at large. In order to bolster the capacities of academic and cultural institutions and of the people working within them, the program will provide professional and financial resources in support of teaching, learning, scholarship, and effective scholarly communication, and will encourage its grantees to find ways to share the benefits of this work with the public at large.

New areas and strengthened emphases will include:
 

• Programs that engage scholars in all academic disciplines in the joint study of core problems affecting their own societies
• Initiatives that mobilize humanistic scholars and artists to participate in interdisciplinary and international collaboration on grand challenge questions
• Projects that share the benefits of teaching, learning, and research in the humanities and the arts with the public
• Coordination of international grantmaking across all program areas in order to heighten the salience of global contexts to all our grantmaking

 

Investment Overview

The Foundation was created in 1969 with $273 million in assets following the consolidation of the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation. The assets of the new organization were augmented with additional funds from the estate of Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and, by 1970, the Foundation had assets of $700 million. By 1980, the last year the Foundation received a payout from Ailsa Mellon Bruce's estate, its assets had grown to $880 million. Since 1969 the Foundation has paid out over $5 billion in grants. Its endowment totaled approximately $6.1 billion at the end of 2013.