CHCI Initiative at Willson Center announces Mellon funding of Penn Center partnership

Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District – a partnership between St. Helena Island, South Carolina’s Penn Center and the University of Georgia Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, which CHCI has included in its Global Justice and Humanities Practices Initiative – has received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund the second phase of its public humanities partnership.

In 2021, the Willson Center received a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to partner with Penn Center, one of the nation’s most important institutions of African American culture. The partnership is designed to support education and sharing among communities in the Sea Islands region of the Southeastern United States and students from UGA and its partner institutions. Located on St. Helena Island, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands, Penn Center is a nonprofit organization committed to African American education, community development and social justice. It also serves as a gathering place for meetings, educational institutions, and planning activities within the Sea Island Gullah Geechee communities.

This next phase will continue to deepen and evolve its programs, with a view toward building greater collective capacity and bolstering its future sustainability. Angela Dore, who has coordinated the project’s activities at Penn Center since the partnership’s inception, will continue and expand upon her role. The co-PIs of the grant program – Nicholas Allen, Baldwin Chair in Humanities and Willson Center director, and Barbara McCaskill, Distinguished Research Professor of English and associate academic director of the Willson Center – will lead the project in collaboration with Valerie Babb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University. Dr. Robert L. Adams, the Penn Center’s executive director, serves on the project’s steering committee and personally supervises the Penn Center’s contributions to the partnership.

Program activities for the Culture and Community partnership began in 2022 with annual artists-in-residence and community fellows (including Grammy-nominated tenor Victor Ryan Robertson and interdisciplinary artist Amiri Geuka Farris), twice-yearly community conversations, and summer student research residencies that have brought scholars and faculty from academic institutions including UGA, Georgia Tech, Emory University, Howard University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The Culture and Community partnership was originally selected to participate in CHCI’s inaugural cohort of its Global Justice and Humanities Practices Initiative. The Global Justice Initiative was created to bring humanistic research into urgent dialogue with contemporary struggles for justice, equity, and collective memory. CHCI sought projects that not only examine justice from an academic perspective but also engage with the lived experiences of communities facing historical and ongoing injustices.

The project stood out to CHCI’s Board for its commitment to cultural preservation and its emphasis on community engagement in historic justice. By focusing on the Penn Center, a vital site in African American history and the Civil Rights Movement, the Culture and Community project highlighted the role of historical memory in contemporary social justice efforts.

As Chris King, UGA’s interim vice president for research noted, “Research into the humanities provides context, ethical grounding, and public meaning to discovery across all disciplines, ensuring that innovation is responsible, impactful, and trusted. This ongoing partnership with the Penn Center is a wonderful resource to explore that context.”

All of us at CHCI congratulate the Culture and Community partnership and look forward to seeing the results of this exciting second phase.