Limited Submission Opportunity: Mellon Foundation Higher Learning 2024 Call for Concepts
OBJECTIVES:
The Mellon Foundation calls for concepts for research or curricular projects in three distinct humanities-grounded and social justice-oriented categories. This call underscores the Mellon Foundation’s commitment to building more just communities empowered by critical thinking and aims to address what we believe to be a growing imperative for justice-centered research, curricula, and academic initiatives in institutions across the nation. The three categories are:
Cultures of US Democracy
- Projects that consider the circumstantial conditions that enable U.S. democratic practices to flourish, including how those can best be achieved, nurtured, and sustained within an increasingly complex and fractured society.
Environmental Justice Studies
- Projects that focus on specific systems (such as food, water, or health), ones that engage interrelated systems in a given community/locale, and ones that come at this topic through discrete analytical or disciplinary lenses.
Social Justice and Disciplinary Knowledge
- Projects that best exemplify how specific disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields of study are equipped to reckon with issues of social justice, given the particular investigative and analytical methods they deploy.
FUNDING INFORMATION:
$250,000 to 500,000 for a duration of up to three years.
ELIGIBILITY RESTRICTIONS:
This call is open to all accredited, non-profit, four-year degree-granting institutions in the US that offer liberal arts education. Institutions are limited to submitting no more than three concepts. Finalists will be selected, and invitations for full proposals will be issued during the summer of 2024, with final grant recommendations presented for prospective Foundation approval no later than November 2024, for a December 1, 2024 start date—and potentially sooner.
Requirements concerning the PI:
- Faculty member or dean in a program or department in the humanities or humanistic social sciences, or the institution’s provost;
- Should have the support of the institution’s senior academic leadership.
INTERNAL SELECTION PROCESS:
Interested investigators should submit the following materials via InfoReady Review by DATE: 11/21/2023
- Questions outlined in InfoReady Review application;
- A letter of support from the appropriate department chair or dean;
- A brief concept note (limited to 500 words) describing the nominee’s ideas for a potential project, including the rationale and specific activities it might involve. The note should clearly state the necessity of the planned work, its goals, potential impact, and the fitness of the institution and/or network to the proposed work;
- Budget for the project of up to $500,000;
- Up-to-date CV or biosketch for the proposed nominee.
A faculty committee drawn from both campuses will review internal proposals and select nominees. Foundation Relations will work with the nominees to develop and submit the institutional nomination letter and applicant materials by 11/30/2023.
For more detailed guidelines, see also this link. Please feel free to contact Cecilia Lalama, in the Office of Foundation Relations, at clalama@bu.edu if you have any questions about the opportunity or the foundation.
DEADLINES:
Internal Materials Due: Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Sponsor Deadline for Registration Forms: Thursday, November 30, 2023, 3 p.m. ET
Sponsor Deadline for completed applications: Thursday, February 15, 2024, 3 p.m. ET