Penn State has been awarded a $3.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The grant is directed to Penn State’s “Just Transformations: A College of the Liberal Arts Initiative Toward Building and Sustaining Diverse Communities in Higher Education” project.
According to a Penn State news release, the Mellon grant is intended to support and expand Penn State programs such as the Colored Conventions Project and the Center for Black Digital Research.
The project will be headed by four faculty co-principal investigators – each will lead it for a year. The four are Dr. Amy Allen, head of the Philosophy Department; Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman, founding director of the Colored Conventions Project and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research (CBDR); Dr. Cynthia Young, head of the African American Studies Department; and Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, CBDR co-director.
“The University has made substantial investments in African American studies over the last few years, and this grant allows us to build on that investment,” Young said. “When foundations partner with units like ours, we can boost that investment by fostering faculty and student research on the intellectual and political contributions of Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities to all fields and disciplines, while also increasing the number of BIPOC faculty and students in the professoriate.”