On May 1st, CFF partnered with Mellon Foundation and Philanthropy New York to host a briefing titled, Elevating and Preserving Black, Indigenous, and Immigrant Foodways through Arts and Humanities Funding.
The session featured an overview from two program officers at Mellon who participate in the foundation’s internal “food cluster” group that collaborates on supporting food-related projects in the arts and humanities. They offered an explanation of what it means to fund food work from an arts and humanities perspective, and specifically with a social justice lens.
While Mellon doesn’t fund standalone food access, nutrition, or agricultural efforts, we do fund the research, education, community activities, social art practice, and narrative change work that lead to food sovereignty: in other words, we fund the knowledge needed to address root causes of injustice and chart paths to alternative systems.
Maria Sachiko Cecire, Mellon Foundation
We then heard from two of Mellon’s grantees from two different program areas: Higher Learning, and Humanities in Place. Think!Chinatown demonstrated the power of a community-based organization focusing on art, storytelling, and neighborhood engagement. And the Dillard University Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture illustrated how vital, and how rare, it is to bring this education and perspective to institutions of higher learning. Dillard is one of two HBCUs in the nation with a food studies program.
The Mellon program officers then offered some questions for a moderated conversation, before opening up to Q&A for everyone.
For funders on the call, Mellon offered to answer questions or host a discussion group within CFF moving forward for anyone who would like to think more about incorporating arts and humanities into their funding. And for grantees, they spoke about the process for getting Mellon funding, and recommended looking through their grant program areas and strategies before submitting something through their inquiry portal.
The slides from each presentation are visible in the video below, but you can also download the slides shared from Think!Chinatown and Dillard University’s Ray Charles Program here, as well as the speaker bios. See below for additional resources mentioned and shared as part of this meeting.
The following time markers can be used to jump around to different sections of the video:
- 0:17 – (*after no sound) Welcome and intro by Adam Liebowitz, CFF Director
- 3:20 – Maria Sachiko Cecire, Mellon Foundation (Higher Education)
- 9:30 – Justin Garrett Moore, Mellon Foundation (Humanities in Place)
- 18:00 – Yin Kong, Think!Chinatown
- 30:30 – Zella Palmer, Dillard University Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture
- 46:00 – Moderated conversation with all four speakers
- 54:30 – Q&A (starting with Mellon funding)
Resources
Think!Chinatown shared links to their video format storytelling projects: “Shopping in Chinatown” and “Everyday Chinatown”
Dillard University encouraged folks to check out the Dillard Ray Charles Program YouTube page to learn more about their work and watch previous lectures