Mellon Foundation Grant

The Mellon Foundation grant’s intended long-term outcomes include strengthening Ohio State’s partnerships with community arts and cultural organizations in Columbus, bolstering a cross-sector career support system for arts students and visual and performing artists in central Ohio, and increasing opportunities for engagement with the arts at all five of Ohio State’s campuses. 

This award marks a relatively unusual instance in which two separate programs at the Foundation — Arts and Culture and Higher Learning — have collaborated to jointly fund a proposal. By enhancing education with arts-related experiential learning throughout central Ohio, the university aims to address both programs’ goals. 

To forge lasting, impactful connections between students, the university and local nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, undergraduate and graduate students will participate in experiential learning within those organizations, helping build each nonprofit’s critical capacity while launching students on a values-driven professional trajectory. By partnering with arts organizations to offer paid internship opportunities, Ohio State will equip students with essential skills and potentially transformative experiences while supporting and sustaining the arts infrastructure in Columbus. 

In partnership with Ohio State’s Imagined Future’s Initiative, graduate students will be matched with organizations according to their interests and abilities as well as those organizations’ present needs. Their appointments will cover the summer months, when many doctoral and MFA students typically have no departmental funding. 

Undergraduate students supported by the grant will receive training during their first semester of participation at the Urban Arts Space, where they will be able to specialize in areas such as video production, marketing and communications, accessibility and engagement. During their second semester, they will be placed with community arts organizations able to both mentor those students and expand their own capacity with the additional help. 

A second initiative supported by the Mellon funding will broaden the scope of art across Ohio State by focusing on the university’s four regional campuses and their existing artistic resources. New “Spark” grants will provide seed money, enabling arts-driven innovation to flourish across the state, including in the rural areas served by the regional campuses. An annual “Spark” competition will be open to all staff and faculty; three or four community-engaged projects will be funded yearly. 

Finally, grant funding will support careful evaluation of the success of these programs and make those assessments available to other universities wishing to undertake similar initiatives.