Senior Program Assistant

The Mellon Foundation

Senior Program Assistant, Humanities in Place

The Mellon Foundation ("Foundation") is a not-for-profit, grant making organization that believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and we believe that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.

The Foundation makes grants in four core program areas - Higher Learning, Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge, and Humanities in Place - and through its signature Presidential Initiatives. The Foundation seeks a Senior Program Assistant for our Humanities in Place team.

About the Program

Humanities in Place supports a fuller exploration of communities and sites located in and connected historically to the US. Working with heritage and public spaces, history museums and other institutions, and conveners of shared experiences-including built, digital, or ephemeral-we strive to expand the public expression of the histories that have made us and the values we hold. Our program works across and within diverse communities, encouraging bold, innovative rethinking of past practice, as well as visionary new approaches for how to collectively understand, uplift, and celebrate more complete stories about who we are.

A selection of organizations, people, places, and ideas that inspire our work are featured on the Mellon website Public Places, Public Stories page.

Three interconnected strategies guide Mellon's Humanities in Place grantmaking:

Strategy 1:
Keep and Shape our Places

Resource projects, initiatives, and infrastructure to better identify, document, create, and care for our places; and support innovative ideas and actions that help people engage with cultural heritage

Strategy 2:
Support and Sustain Our Institutions

Catalyze initiatives and programs supporting the development and sustainability of institutions (e.g., civic, cultural, educational, or community) through place-based and heritage-centered approaches

Strategy 3:
Promote Greater Engagement and Understanding

Support projects and programs with a place-based focus that promote greater access, interaction, and exchange of stories and experiences

About the Position

Reporting to the Program Director for Humanities in Place, the Senior Program Assistant will provide programmatic, logistical, and research support to programmatic work in Humanities in Place. The successful candidate will be thoughtful, highly motivated, energetic, collaborative, and congenial, with well-developed communication and organizational skills. This position includes independent work on on-going grantmaking activities (such as serving as a liaison to grantees, corresponding with grantees about proposals;

managing program-related information in the Foundation's grant portal (Fluxx) and other information systems like  and Power

BI; tracking grant files, data, and budgets, reviewing and preparing proposals and reports; and assisting with preparing dockets and other materials for trustee meetings); episodic or long-term research projects; collaborative work with colleagues across program areas, the President's Office, and the Foundation (for example on compliance, legal, program planning, and program-related event coordination); and administrative work in support of the Program Director and grantmaking out of the Humanities in Place program.

This role will include travel several times per year for site visits, meetings, and programs nationwide, and have responsibility for the development of internal and external grantee engagement, learning, and relationships as well as for related presentations, content, coordination, and convenings. The work of the Senior Program Assistant is highly detail-oriented and requires accuracy, the ability to anticipate outcomes, multi-tasking, effective time-management, flexibility, creativity, rigor, cool-headedness, precision, patience, efficiency, and the ability to work with both nuance and discretion.

The role includes ongoing coordination and management of tasks with…