20-05-2025
Elizabeth Alexander
Few people have had careers that have championed diversity on as many fronts as Elizabeth Alexander. She has focused on the cause as a scholar, a writer, a teacher, an artist, and now as president of the $7.9 billion Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the arts and humanities in the U.S. So how does she feel about the rollback of diversity initiatives that she has spent most of her working life championing?
'Absolutely laser- focused, undauntedly focused, on the values that our work contains,' she says. 'And on the assertion that America is a richly and powerfully multi-vocal, multi-experiential democracy.'
In April, after President Donald Trump's cost-cutting team deemed that much of the funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library studies was wasteful, Mellon stepped in. 'We had grantees calling us, panicked, some of them unable to continue their projects and run their organizations,' says Alexander. 'We made a $15 million grant to the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and they will redistribute that money in all of the states and the six territories, so that these projects for now can carry forward.'
That won't keep the lights on at all the reading groups, literary festivals, and free college classes that American taxpayers previously funded. But it has already spurred at least one philanthropist to make a matching grant of $250,000 to the Alabama State Humanities Council—and that, Alexander says, is the goal.
'Always in philanthropy, we are hoping that because of our extraordinary teams, and the power of the grantees, that others will be more able to see what those folks are doing and get excited about it and think about supporting it,' she says.
Since arriving at the Mellon Foundation in 2018, after stints in academia and a concurrent career as a writer—she read one of her poems at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration—Alexander has used a social justice lens to examine the institution's grantmaking. 'We are trying to tell and lift up as broad a swath of American stories as possible,' she says.
One of her signature initiatives has been the $500 million multi-year Monuments Project, which memorializes lesser-known figures and events from American history in public spaces. These can take the form of museum installations, statues, murals, or even a book of calligraphy, as in the case of The Ireichō, which lists the names of the 125,000 Japanese Americans forcibly relocated to internment camps during World War II. In February, Mellon announced a $35 million grant to help preserve the legacy of jazz, a uniquely American art form. Also new in 2025: a fellowship program that provides older jazz musicians with a $100,000 grant, plus extra cash for housing and other needs, so they can make and preserve their music.
Alexander is energized by her fellow philanthropists' responses to the federal funding cuts and elimination of DEI programs. 'As much as this is a challenging time, it's actually a very powerful time in philanthropy, because people are coming together,' she says.
Her hope is that by bringing these stories to light, people will begin to appreciate that American life is made richer by the differences of its varied communities. 'How do we emphasize and support… the critical thinking that allows people to learn and understand that you can tell more than one story at a time?' she asks. 'That allows people to ask the questions of how power works and what has been included and what has not been included, and how we can tell and uphold all of our history.'
Though her day-to-day focus can vary, Alexander sees her books, her scholarship, and her administrative and grant-making work as all of a piece. What has surprised her about philanthropy is how sweeping its effects can be: teachers' work lives on in their students, writers' work lives on in the minds and lives of their readers, but philanthropists' work has visible ripple effects for generations.
'The reach of the work that people are doing is infinite,' she says.
