“Hear New Voices.” A Look at Mellon’s Latest Move to Reimagine America’s Cultural Landscape

Mellon’s funding a fellowship program at the National Park Foundation. Photo: Oleksandr Koretskyi/shutterstock

Earlier this year, Time magazine named Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander one of the 100 most influential people of 2022. Alexander, wrote playwright Lynn ​​Nottage, “has put real investment into creating spaces that reflect the country’s rich diversity, and rethinking how we can embrace our cultural narratives, whether through physical monuments or the ways in which we tell our stories.”

Alexander’s inclusion was a big deal. While I can’t say for sure, odds are it was the first instance that the magazine featured a foundation leader in its list, underscoring the extent to which the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, philanthropy’s largest humanities funder, is spearheading efforts to reimagine the country’s cultural landscape amid profound demographic and social change.

Mellon was on this path before Alexander took the helm in 2018. The previous year, it launched the National Park Service Mellon Humanities Fellowship program with the goal of “telling a more comprehensive story for all Americans at the country’s parks, monuments and historical sites.” The $985,000 in funding, which flowed to the National Park Foundation (NPF), the 501(c)(3) partner of the resource-starved National Park Service (NPS), supported four postdoctoral scholars who explored how parks are impacted and/or informed by things like the civil rights and labor movements.

Now comes word that Mellon has awarded NPF a $13.4 million grant to expand the program to 30 fellows whose work will “consider the complex histories of the sites with which the fellows are affiliated.” These efforts will inform engagement efforts by NPS as the system welcomes an influx of visitors after a low point in 2020 — in 2021 alone, an astonishing 297 million people visited NPS parks.

“Our national parks are treasured public spaces — not only where we go to bask in the beauty of nature and make lifelong memories with family and friends, but also where we can reflect on our collective past and learn more about the country we call home,” Alexander said. “With this expansion of the National Park Service Mellon Humanities Fellowship, we have the opportunity to hear new voices and understand new perspectives in our historic sites and public lands throughout the United States.” 

Make no mistake, the gift is prototypically Mellon, as it advances Alexander’s goal of honoring and promoting unacknowledged cultural narratives. But it also reflects a belief among a certain segment of funding leaders that philanthropy can cultivate a more inclusive, representative and empathetic body politic.

Surfacing “overlooked histories”

The foundation has demonstrably ramped up its efforts to promote untold stories on Alexander’s watch. In 2020, Mellon announced that it would place a new focus on social justice in its grantmaking and created a new program, Humanities in Place, that sought to “bring a variety of histories and voices into public, media and memorial spaces, widening the range of complex public storytelling.” Later that year, Mellon announced its largest commitment to date — a $250 million initiative conceived by Alexander to make the nation’s commemorative landscape more representative of the country’s population.

And last June, Higher Learning Director Phillip Brian Harper told me that Mellon’s higher ed grantmaking aimed to support “the recovery and publicization of the suppressed place-based histories of marginalized people.” 

Mellon’s efforts to reimagine monuments and national parks are particularly resonant because most readers can interpret this work through the lens of personal experience. I’ve been to dozens of national parks. I recall gazing into the depths of the Grand Canyon and walking the Civil War battlefields of the Shenandoah Valley. What I don’t necessarily remember is learning about the unsung individuals whose compelling stories took place off-stage. 

These are precisely the “untold perspectives and new voices” that Mellon sought to unearth when it launched the NPS Mellon Humanities Fellowships five years ago. Examples of funded projects include creating an expanded reading list on the history of slavery for New York’s Martin Van Buren National Historic Park and a partnership with the César E. Chávez National Monument to develop an oral history plan for collecting Latina and Filipina immigrant women’s stories.

It’s worth noting that Mellon’s latest $13.4 million grant is pretty large, even by the foundation’s standards. A scan of Mellon’s grants database shows only three grants exceeding that figure between 2020 and 2022.

How philanthropy backs NPS

The other intriguing takeaway from the announcement is the fact that Mellon is ramping up support to a beleaguered federal agency, thereby raising the familiar narrative that philanthropy is once again filling gaps stemming from Congressional parsimony.

That narrative has some truth to it. In February, NPS announced that Americans were visiting some of the nation’s most iconic national parks in record-breaking numbers. And yet, “nearly 3,500 park staff positions, or 16% of the Park Service’s staffing capacity, have been eliminated over the last decade, due to inadequate investments by Congress,” said Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association. All the while, the nation’s parks continue to grapple with crumbling infrastructure, overcrowding and pressing conservation needs.

That being said, the Mellon news isn’t a textbook case of philanthropy throwing the federal agency an urgent financial lifeline. As IP’s Tate Williams noted back in 2017, national parks have always relied on donations to pay for planning, management and upkeep, and in recent years, the service has built out a sophisticated fundraising operation to compensate for inadequate congressional support.

Williams looked at how the NPS and NPF’s Centennial Campaign, which started its quiet phase in 2013, had raised approximately $460 million in four years. The effort resembled a big-ticket university fundraising effort, both in terms of its massive windfall — high-profile donors included David Rubenstein and Roxanne Quimby — and concerns about conflicts of interest and the commercialization of public services, particularly as it applied to an influx of corporate support.

Speaking to Williams about the system’s increasing reliance on private dollars, Will Shafroth, NPF’s president and CEO, could have just as easily been a trustee of a public university getting squeezed by funding cuts. “The government’s not going to just give the park service billions of dollars to go do this in the near term, so we have to step up and try to accelerate that,” he said. “The system is in dire need of some big investments.”

Small investments are also greatly appreciated. The system encourages visitors to cap off that transcendent visit to Zion or the Grand Tetons by making gifts to the NPS, the NPF and over 450 “Friends Groups” affiliated with particular parks.

Of course, Mellon’s support isn’t bankrolling NPS staff positions or paying for site maintenance. But it’s doing something just as important, as its funding will enable the service to integrate untold stories into social media campaigns, lesson plans and exhibitions across the country.

Strengthening the civic and cultural fabric

By providing a generous amount of funding for a federal agency to promote overlooked stories, the fellowship expansion is a distinctly Mellon endeavor, as I noted above. But zooming out a bit further, Mellon’s efforts to reimagine national parks and monuments have much in common with other U.S.-based funders’ efforts to amplify historically underrepresented voices.

I recently reported on higher ed grantmakers working to boost civic engagement and democracy. Carrie Davis, the Joyce Foundation’s democracy program director, told me that Joyce’s efforts to improve racial equity and economic mobility in the Great Lakes region include “ensuring that the next generation has a voice in making decisions about elected officials impacting their future.”

In the journalism space, a big takeaway from IP’s white paper on the state of giving for journalism and public media was the extent to which funders are ramping up support for historically underfunded outlets serving BIPOC and immigrant communities, as well as individuals who identify as LGBTQ+.

All of these efforts share the belief that when institutions in the public square — monuments, national parks, legislative bodies, journalism outlets — reflect the past and present experiences of historically underrecognized people, individuals will feel empowered, heard and ultimately engaged in civic and cultural life. It’s a lofty approach that flies in the face of philanthropy’s alleged obsession with performance measurement. The funding leaders who adhere to this belief (thankfully) know that some things can’t be plugged into a spreadsheet.

In related commentary, I encourage readers to check out a guest post by Uma Viswanathan, the founding executive director of New Pluralists, looking at how philanthropy can foster a culture of pluralism in America; and IP editor David Callahan’s chat with author and professor Steven Teles about how philanthropy can curb polarization.