Mellon Foundation Call for Proposals to Community-Based Archives 2025 (up to $100,000) – YOA

Deadline: March 28, 2025

The 2025 Call for Proposals to Community-Based Archives is now open. Through this program, direct help can be offered to group-based mostly archives that signify and serve communities marginalized due to oppression.

For the needs of this name, group-based mostly archives are outlined as organizations that collect and share supplies as members of underneath-documented communities to protect and have a good time their collective histories. These archives serve to affirm and uplift their group’s existence and id, to assist fight patterns of misinformation, and to present a trusted surroundings for the perpetuation of group traditions, artwork kinds, and languages, amongst different types of empowerment. Formed as counter responses to a protracted legacy of oversight and extraction by mainstream cultural heritage establishments and by the academy, these archives are important to the creation of a extra inclusive and multivocal American story. 
 
Over the course of three open calls for proposals from 2019-2021, the Foundation awarded practically $5 million to 46 group-based mostly archives. As Mellon reopens this funding OPPORTUNITY, it commits to funding one other $5 million over three calls.

grant

• Awards will vary from $25,000 to $100,000 for grants of two years in size. Grant durations would start August 1, 2025 and finish on July 31, 2027.

Eligibility

Organizations that reply to this Call for Proposals should: 

• Be situated throughout the United States or one in every of its territories. 
• Have 501(c)(3) tax-exempt standing or be a federally acknowledged Indian tribe. 
• Have an archive or an archiving initiative with an annual working finances of no less than $12,500 and not more than $1 million. In-kind donations in the direction of occupancy prices could also be used to calculate the overall working finances. This name is open to each standalone archives and group-based mostly organizations with an archiving initiative. 
• Have a longtime and actively accumulating archive that has been in operation for two or extra years. This funding can’t be used to create a brand new archive. 

Application

All candidates should first full a registration request by March 12, 2025 at 5:00pm Eastern. After Foundation employees have processed the registration request, eligible candidates will acquire entry to the application kind within the Foundation’s Fluxx grantee portal. On the shape, candidates can be requested to present details about their group and its archival collections, in addition to the next paperwork in help of the mission:

• A proposal narrative of two-3 pages 
• A CV or resume for the mission lead 
• A latest Form 990 
• Annual working budgets for 2023 and 2024 
• A doc of the archive’s governance construction together with a listing of board members, employees, and/or volunteer leads

For extra data, go to Call for Proposals to Community-Based Archives.