Latest news with #MellonFoundation
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
American Council of Learned Societies Names 2025 ACLS Leading Edge Fellows
Early-Career PhDs to Join Nonprofit Organizations in Communities Across the Country NEW YORK, May 30, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to name 16 new ACLS Leading Edge Fellows. The ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship Program supports outstanding recent PhDs in the humanities and social sciences as they work with organizations advancing justice and equity in communities across the United States. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. In 2025, fellows will take up two-year positions designed to take advantage of the diverse skills of PhD humanists while contributing to the impactful work of host organizations, including The Afiya Center (Dallas, TX), Open Communities (Evanston, IL), and Sojourner House (Providence, RI). The 2025 Leading Edge Fellows earned PhDs from 14 universities and represent a wide array of humanistic disciplines, including American studies, art history, Black studies, communications, English, geography, philosophy, psychology, religion, and women's studies. "ACLS is excited to announce the 16 Leading Edge Fellows who will join our 2025 host organization partners to build capacity through work in narrative strategy, policy research, advocacy, and community outreach," said Desiree Barron-Callaci, ACLS Senior Program Officer for US Programs. "Our fellows will also have the opportunity to learn from colleagues with diverse forms of professional training, and work with communities in Florida, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and more. We are grateful to our partner organizations who collaborated with ACLS to design positions that creatively harness the power of humanistic training and participated in the program's multi-stage review process." Meet the 2025 Leading Edge Fellows and learn about their positions. Leading Edge Fellows receive a $72,000 stipend in the first year and $74,000 in the second for in-person positions, with fully remote fellows receiving a $70,000 stipend in the first year and $72,000 in the second. The award also comes with access to health insurance and an annual budget of up to $3,000 for professional development activities, as well as networking, mentorship, and career development resources provided by ACLS. The Mellon Foundation recently awarded ACLS a $3 million grant to continue the Leading Edge Fellowship Program. The grant will allow ACLS to place an eighth cohort of recent humanities and social sciences PhDs in two-year positions with nonprofit organizations across the country in 2026. Information about the upcoming competition, including eligibility guidelines, partner organizations, and applications will be available in January 2026. Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS expands the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting our commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation's largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Mellon believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there. Through its grants, Mellon seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Media Contact Anna Polovick Waggy, American Council of Learned Societies, 6468307661, awaggy@ View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE American Council of Learned Societies Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Independent
3 days ago
- General
- The Independent
Foundations donate $1.5M to help restore historic Black church in Memphis gutted by arson
Several foundations have donated $1.5 million to help rebuild after arson gutted a historic Black church in Memphis, Tennessee, that played an important role in the civil rights movement. Clayborn Temple had been undergoing a yearslong renovation when someone intentionally set a fire inside the church in the early hours of April 28, destroying almost everything but parts of the facade. Before the fire, the Romanesque revival church was in the midst of a $25 million restoration project that included restoring a 3,000-pipe grand organ. The project also sought to help revitalize the neighborhood with a museum, cultural programing and community outreach. Despite the extensive damage, Anasa Troutman, executive director of Historic Clayborn Temple, has said they plan to continue moving forward with the restoration. Troutman announced the new donations for that effort Wednesday. The money comes from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund along with the Mellon and Ford foundations. Located just south of the iconic Beale Street, Clayborn Temple was built in 1892 as the Second Presbyterian Church and originally served an all-white congregation. In 1949, the building was sold to an African Methodist Episcopal congregation and given its current name. In 1968, the church served as the headquarters for a sanitation workers' strike, which brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he was assassinated.
Associated Press
3 days ago
- General
- Associated Press
Foundations donate $1.5M to help restore historic Black church in Memphis gutted by arson
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — Several foundations have donated $1.5 million to help rebuild after arson gutted a historic Black church in Memphis, Tennessee, that played an important role in the civil rights movement. Clayborn Temple had been undergoing a yearslong renovation when someone intentionally set a fire inside the church in the early hours of April 28, destroying almost everything but parts of the facade. Before the fire, the Romanesque revival church was in the midst of a $25 million restoration project that included restoring a 3,000-pipe grand organ. The project also sought to help revitalize the neighborhood with a museum, cultural programing and community outreach. Despite the extensive damage, Anasa Troutman, executive director of Historic Clayborn Temple, has said they plan to continue moving forward with the restoration. Troutman announced the new donations for that effort Wednesday. The money comes from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund along with the Mellon and Ford foundations. Located just south of the iconic Beale Street, Clayborn Temple was built in 1892 as the Second Presbyterian Church and originally served an all-white congregation. In 1949, the building was sold to an African Methodist Episcopal congregation and given its current name. In 1968, the church served as the headquarters for a sanitation workers' strike, which brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he was assassinated.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘None of this should have worked': David Adjmi on how Led Zeppelin sparked Broadway smash Stereophonic
In 2013, I was desperately looking for a way to quit writing plays. I'd had a terrible, scarring artistic collaboration a couple of years prior, and it broke me. And on top of that, I was actually broke, financially. So I decided to give up playwriting, move to Los Angeles and make some money writing for film and television. But just as I'd made that decision, I received a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation. It came with a significant chunk of money, so I was thrilled. Only it also came with conditions: one of which was that I needed to write a new play. 'Fine,' I thought. 'I'll write a very short one-act to fulfil the requirements of the grant and then be done with theatre for ever.' Months later, I was on an aeroplane listening to in-flight radio when Led Zeppelin's cover of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You came on. I knew the haunting opening chords because when I was little my brother used to play them over and over to teach himself guitar. Until that moment, though, I don't think I'd heard the actual song. What struck me most was the absolutely searing, raw vocals of Robert Plant. He was threatening a breakup, but the threat was delivered partly as a seduction, partly as a nervous breakdown. Underneath the 'I'm gonna leave you' was the opposite: 'I can never ever leave you and don't you dare leave me!' Listening to his hypnotising vocals, I began to imagine what it must have felt like in that studio, the strange intimacy amid the technical weirdness of an analogue recording studio. I instantly knew it was the setting for a play. The song was a little like a Freudian rebus: it glittered cryptically with my fraught emotions about the theatre, and my brother, and past relationships. But on that flight the only things I consciously knew were: 1. I would write a play about a band making a record; 2. It would be set in a music studio in the 1970s; and 3. The set would function almost like an art installation, with soundproofing, mics and speakers part of the theatrical apparatus to tell the story. I wanted this play to be different from anything I'd ever written, and I wanted to find a new way of working, so I decided to write it in concentrated bursts that would culminate in brief workshops I would organise a few times every year. And I wanted to build my creative team in advance, before writing a word, just based on a premise. I first approached Daniel Aukin to direct. He roped in musical director Justin Craig and Ryan Rumery, our sound designer. I had been trying to work with David Zinn for years, and he agreed to do the set. And then a friend introduced me to Arcade Fire's Will Butler; he had no idea who I was, but for whatever reason agreed to write the music for these snippets of songs we would hear over the course of the play. My problem at the outset was that I knew nothing about the recording process. I mean nothing. I watched lots of documentaries and took notes and wrote down technical-sounding phrases such as 'I like the tremolo effect' and 'put more EQ on the amp' (which I later learned didn't really mean anything). I constructed a few loose scenes and in 2014 did a very rough workshop, which Daniel directed. The 'band' was a bunch of actor friends who played toy instruments. What I knew at this point was there were five members of this fictional Anglo-American band: Simon, the drummer; Peter, the exacting lead guitarist; Diana, the self-deprecating lead singer, who is also Peter's girlfriend; Holly, who plays keys; and Reg, Holly's substance-addled husband, who plays bass. The band has just started recording their sophomore LP when their first album unexpectedly climbs back up the charts, and the pressures of this new, imminent fame cause fractures in their personal and professional relationships. Halfway through the first day I said to Daniel, 'Shouldn't there be more people in the studio?' Daniel then said that I had forgotten to put in an engineer. So in 2015, I added Grover, the engineer character, and took my increasingly bigger jumble of pages to John Kilgore, who had engineered for people such as Philip Glass in the analogue 1970s. John agreed to advise us. Daniel and I sat in his studio one afternoon as he pored through the rough draft page by page and painstakingly noted everything I'd gotten wrong. John also felt my engineer would need an assistant – a note which really opened up the play for me. Grover and Charlie, the two engineers, become a sort of comically beleaguered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – a way in for the audience. John walked me through all the phases of recording: laying down tracks, overdubbing vocals, adding in harmonies, mixing and so on. I started to realise that if I wanted to show how an album gets made in a painstaking, granular way that subverts how rock bands are traditionally depicted in dramatic works, then this was not going to be a slim one-act. The play grew to two acts, then three and then four. I knew the length and technical demands would probably make it un-producible, but I put on my playwright blinders (deny reality and pretend everything you write is viable until further notice!) and kept going. We continued like this for the next few years, developing the play one workshop at a time. My creative team became trusted advisers and, in some cases, my dramaturgs. I spent an entire afternoon grilling Ryan on how one might fix a drum sound, and how that fix would make the sound worse, and how one might try to fix that, and how that fix would make it even worse, and so on. From this conversation, I built a sequence that became the opening of the second act. I dictated whole scenes to my assistant, Julia, and had her read back what I'd extemporised in character; we'd then finesse those lines for hours, and with her help I'd score everything out on the page. David made us a little model for the set and cardboard figures we could move around between the sound and control rooms to figure out who was in what room when, as the logistics were starting to make us crazy. In the spring of 2019, four and a half years after he agreed to be part of this crazy experiment, I finally had a draft to show Will. He and I met Justin, Ryan and Daniel, and we all read the play aloud. At this point I knew precisely how many songs I needed, what they were meant to feel like, when they would recur in new arrangements and so on. Will now had something concrete to respond to, so he went away for a bit to do what he called his 'Stanislavski work' (which I thought was so cute). The process of getting the music we needed was not so easy or immediate, but Will was very invested in getting it right. His Stanislavski thing involved getting into the minds and histories of the characters as written, and imagining where their heads were at in the summer of 1976, and who their musical influences might be from the 50s and 60s. He then sent a batch of songs to Daniel and me – two of which, Masquerade and Seven Roads, made the cut. There was a great song for Holly we couldn't use called In Your Arms but Will later ended up recording it for the cast album. Another song in that first batch was meant to be Diana's big number in act one, but I thought the lyrics felt too angry and punishing. I loved the melody, but wanted the lyrics to have more of a feeling of uncanniness – like something is starting to surface to awareness but she's not there yet. Somehow this led to Will speeding up the song and turning it to something akin to a moody Giorgio Moroder synth thing. I really loved it, but I knew it wouldn't fit Diana's arc dramaturgically. So we ended up giving that song to Holly, and Will had to write a new song for Diana, which turned out to be Bright. It wasn't merely character stuff Will had to deal with; there were carefully constructed problems centring on the creation of the songs themselves – though when I wrote the draft the songs didn't exist, so Will had to reverse-engineer everything. For instance, characters in act two argue over a bass riff, one that would be debated repeatedly over the course of the play. Will's task was to make each version of the riff make not only musical sense, but dramatic sense in a way that built the stakes. In act two, Simon can't get a drum to sound the way Peter wants it, and I wrote detailed descriptions of Peter's complaint (around a drum part that didn't yet exist) in the dialogue. So Will took the details around that complaint as written and wrote a song that did all the drum stuff Peter demanded in that moment. Justin worked his magic in a similar way, figuring out orchestrations to Will's songs which, according to the story, are meant to go from pretty good to great in real time, sometimes over the course of a single scene. The process of collaboration was enigmatic, and none of this should have worked: I was asking too much of everyone, and I required a degree of expertise from my collaborators in areas that weren't really anyone's areas of expertise. But everyone loved what we were making and they rose to the challenge. Stereophonic is a play about artistic collaboration that was born from a soul-crushing collaborative process – but our collaborative process was heaven on earth. I just happened to fall in with a group of crazy geniuses who were mavericks and up for anything. I got very, very lucky. Stereophonic is at the Duke of York's theatre, London, 24 May-11 October
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Nationwide donation supports South Dakota Humanities Council after federal funding cut
A child reads a book at the South Dakota Humanities Council Every Reader event in Rapid City in 2017. (Courtesy of South Dakota Humanities Council) The South Dakota Humanities Council is set to receive at least $200,000 from a national charitable foundation to keep it afloat after the federal government terminated nearly $1 million in grant funding awarded to the organization this year. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February urging agencies to streamline the federal bureaucracy. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides funding to humanities organizations across the country, cited the executive order when it terminated $65 million in grants to all 56 humanities councils across the country and its territories earlier this month. New York-based Mellon Foundation pledged Tuesday to provide $15 million to be divided among all 56 humanities councils. Each council will receive a minimum of $200,000, though the foundation will donate an extra $50,000 if the council matches that amount in local fundraising, said South Dakota Humanities Council Executive Director Christina Oey. The nonprofit provides public education in literacy, civics, the arts and culture. 'It'll allow us to continue going longer than we anticipated,' Oey said of the donation. 'It was that light of hope we needed.' The money will help keep the council's programs running, including the annual Festival of Books and the Young Readers program. The Young Readers program distributes 15,000 copies of a book to South Dakota third graders each year. The funding will help pay for shipping of the Young Readers books to schools, and allow this year's Festival of Books to continue. The festival is planned for Sept. 26-28 in Spearfish. But the donation is just a fifth of what was lost. The federal funding made up 73% of the council's overall budget, Oey said. Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander said in a news release Tuesday that although the donation won't cover all the lost funding, she hopes it'll help councils get by. 'At stake are both the operational integrity of organizations like museums, libraries, historical societies in every single state, as well as the mechanisms to participate in the cultural dynamism and exchange that is a fundamental part of American civic life,' Alexander said. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
