Mellon Foundation funding will help support the initiatives of AAAS’ Comunity Extension Center, like its annual Juneteenth celebration. Courtesy of Monica Stigler
Ohio State’s Department of African American and African Studies received an almost $2 million boost to continue its 50-year history of education and community engagement focused on the Black experience in Columbus.
The department received a nearly $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, according to a university press release. The release stated this funding will allow the department to bring on 10 new faculty members, relaunch its graduate program, competitively recruit Ph.D. students, create new curriculum and certificates and further support community outreach initiatives like its Community Extension Center, located in Columbus’ historically Black Bronzeville neighborhood.
Dana Renga, divisional dean of arts and humanities, said this grant comes at an important time in the department’s history.
“The department turned 50 last year, as did the Community Extension Center,” Renga said. “It has an amazingly proud history, really strong faculty, has produced fabulous graduate students and, for a series of reasons, just had a lot of faculty departures, and so the college said, ‘We are committed to this.’”
Renga said leaders within the College of Arts and Sciences collaborated with the Mellon Foundation, a nonprofit company dedicated to supporting higher education in the arts and humanities, on how to best serve AAAS.
Renga said AAAS was identified as a department in which Ohio State takes great pride. The grant was secured with help from Executive Vice President and Provost Melissa Gilliam, who previously worked to secure grant funding from the Mellon Foundation in her time as vice provost at the University of Chicago.
The award will be spread out over four years, which speaks to the value of the work AAAS does, Renga said.
Renga said in addition to the grant for AAAS, the Mellon Foundation funded two other research grant proposals from humanities faculty, totaling nearly $1 million. The university’s ability to secure this funding “off-cycle” — outside of Mellon’s scheduled giving — is an important achievement because it puts the university on the radar of other charitable institutions, Renga said.
In 2021, instructors in AAAS expressed concern over the program’s decrease in size. In the 2016-17 academic year, the department housed 27.6 instructors made up of tenure-track faculty, associated faculty and graduate teaching assistants. In 2021, there were 10.8 instructors. The tenure-track faculty decreased from 15.7 to 6 instructors in five years.
Renga said new faculty hires will bring the department up to from five to 16 people over the next three years, allowing for the creation of new certificate programs including applied Black studies and Somali studies. These programs will work directly with Columbus communities.
“In Columbus, we have the second largest Somali population in the country,” Renga said. “At Ohio State, we are a large land grant, the flagship of the state, but we are also an urban land-grant institution with these neighborhoods that afford a lot of interesting collaborations off campus.”
Renga said Mellon Foundation funding will help make faculty and postdoctoral research positions more attractive and help to fund additional research and programs with the Community Extension Center.
The CEC has previously worked with a variety of Ohio State to directly address issues facing the Black community in Columbus — such as access to health care, equitable transportation and education, Renga said.
“Bronzeville is one of those neighborhoods where a freeway was built and cut off a Black community from the center of the city,” Renga said. “The programming really ties the campus community to the community in Bronzeville.”
Though many off-campus Ohio State community extensions operate separately from the university, the center is fiscally tied to the department, Renga said.
Monica Stigler, CEC program director, said the College of Arts and Sciences has contributed funds totaling nearly $500,000 toward the renovation of the center as the Bronzeville community looks to highlight its own impactful history.
Renga said Bronzeville has more historical significance than people recognize.
“A lot of people have no idea that Columbus has this really rich, historical, Black cultural neighborhood on the near east side in Bronzeville,” Renga said. “It has this amazing arts district that has been given a lot of care lately, like the renovation of the Lincoln Theatre where Sammy Davis Jr. made his debut in Columbus when he was two years old.”
Stigler said the university-funded renovations to the CEC will include new classroom spaces which can better serve after-school and community programs, as well as updates to the building that will place the center on level footing with other university spaces — CEC has not been updated since the 1980s.
Additional funding for the renovation came from state funds, Stigler said.
In conjunction with the physical renovation, Stigler said the Mellon grant will expand the reach of past initiatives and jumpstart many of the innovative programs the center has planned for the future — including after-school math programs, individualized nutrition and health assessments and a podcast.
Stigler said the podcast, titled “Black to Basics,” will explore dimensions of wellness outlined by the university through the lens of the Black experience in central Ohio. Stigler said the podcast will likely premiere in its final biweekly form in fall 2023, coinciding with the completion of CEC renovations.
Stigler and Renga said the department has laid the groundwork for how to best use the funding through intentional discussion and collaboration between faculty and staff in the past year.
“Everyone is ready to get to work,” Stigler said. “We’re very excited to be serving the community in new and exciting ways and offering more opportunities for students and faculty to be really engaged with the community in their research and scholarship.”
