Guidelines for preparation and submission

Call for Proposals to Community-Based Archives

Public Knowledge

Call for Proposals 2025

Registration Request Applicant Resources Grants Database

Grantmaking areaPublic Knowledge

DateJanuary 6, 2025

Photos and artifacts from the Shorefront archive. Photo: Dino Robinson

The Mellon Foundation invites community-based archives in the United States and its territories to submit applications for general operating support.

These grants may provide support in one or more of the following areas of need:

Operational costs, including staff, space, and utilities.
Collections care, including the acquisition of new materials, physical and digital storage fees, and access and preservation efforts.
Programming activities, including events, exhibitions, and increased community usage.

This funding opportunity is overseen by the Foundation’s Public Knowledge program.

About this Grant Program

For the purposes of this call, community-based archives are defined as organizations that gather and share materials as members of under-documented communities to preserve and celebrate their collective histories. These archives serve to affirm and uplift their community’s existence and identity, to help combat patterns of misinformation, and to provide a trusted environment for the perpetuation of community traditions, art forms, and languages, among other forms of empowerment. Formed as counter responses to a long legacy of oversight and extraction by mainstream cultural heritage institutions and by the academy, these archives are essential to the creation of a more inclusive and multivocal American story.

Over the course of three open calls for proposals from 2019-2021, the Foundation awarded nearly $5 million to 46 community-based archives. As Mellon reopens this funding opportunity, it commits to funding another $5 million over three calls.

About the 2025 Call for Proposals

The 2025 Call for Proposals to Community-Based Archives is now open. Through this program, direct support will be provided to community-based archives that represent and serve communities marginalized due to oppression.

Applications will be due by Friday, March 28, 2025 at 5:00pm ET. All applicants will be notified of the status of their submission by Wednesday, May 7, 2025. If selected, additional information and materials will be requested in a final proposal to be reviewed by the Foundation’s Officers.

Awards will range from $25,000 to $100,000 for grants of two years in length. Grant periods would begin August 1, 2025 and end on July 31, 2027. The Foundation plans to convene representatives from the awarded archives in person over the course of the grant term to build a cohort of organizations that would help and learn from each other.

All interested applicants must first complete a registration request by March 12, 2025 at 5:00pm Eastern. After Foundation staff have processed the registration request, eligible applicants will gain access to the application form in the Foundation’s Fluxx grantee portal. On the form, applicants will be asked to provide information about their organization and its archival collections, as well as the following documents in support of the project:

A proposal narrative of 2-3 pages
A CV or resume for the project lead
A recent Form 990
Annual operating budgets for 2023 and 2024
A document of the archive’s governance structure including a list of board members, staff, and/or volunteer leads

Visit our applicant resources for further details on how to apply. If you would like to sign up for email alerts, or if you have any questions about this funding opportunity, please contact program staff at communityarchives@mellon.org.

Eligibility

Organizations that respond to this Call for Proposals must:

Be located within the United States or one of its territories.
Have 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status or be a federally recognized Indian tribe.
Have an archive or an archiving initiative with an annual operating budget of at least $12,500 and no more than $1 million. In-kind donations towards occupancy costs may be used to calculate the total operating budget. This call is open to both standalone archives and community-based organizations with an archiving initiative.
Have an established and actively collecting archive that has been in operation for two or more years. This funding cannot be used to create a new archive.

Applications from universities will not be considered.

In order to ensure that your organization is eligible to apply for this funding opportunity, all interested applicants must first complete a registration request form. Please note: The Foundation does not make grants to individuals or support K-12 initiatives.