By Jennifer Alzate González, PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature

Nonprofit grantmaking, impact assessment, the philanthropy sector — before my 8-week fellowship at the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, I had only the haziest idea what these terms meant. And I often joked, to appreciative laughter, that my dissertation had nothing to do with these concepts. But with the help of mentor Jillian Rosen and AAACF’s small, tight-knit staff, I found myself and my whole outlook on academia changed through this eight week immersion into the world of community foundations.
You can think of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation as a middle-person between philanthropists and the nonprofits who rely on their generosity. Why not just donate to a nonprofit directly, you ask? Because the AAACF is committed to helping nonprofits fulfill their missions in perpetuity. They do that through financial advisers who invest the initial gift in order to grow it, so that an initial donation of $5,000 might be worth much more in a few years. The AAACF then disperses that gift right back to the community in alignment with the donor’s original wishes.

Although that makes sense to me now, that wasn’t always the case. In my first two weeks on the job, I felt a little bit like a graduate student who has never read any critical theory in their first 800-level class. But instead of a slew of incomprehensible references to Derrida, Althusser, Muñoz, and Cohen, it was to donor advised funds, field of interest funds, administrative endowment funds, and much much more. But as a “professional learner,” as I’ve come to call PhD students, it was thrilling to read and read and read about something I’d known so little about before. And moreover, it was easy to connect the dots to things I did know and care about — like the incredible work of queer and trans of color nonprofits like the Audre Lorde Project and the TransLatin@ Coalition, which rely on grants and gifts to run their daily operations.
Putting aside my reservations about the nonprofit-industrial complex (as brilliantly illuminated by The Revolution Will Not Be Funded[1]), I dove into the challenge of learning how to realistically assess a community foundation’s impact: that is, how much of a positive change their grants made on the strength of local nonprofits and of the Ann Arbor area nonprofit ecosystem overall. To do that, I researched philanthropy best-practices for measuring impact and then used that research to problem-solve for specific metrics that the AAACF could use to measure the impact of their grantmaking.
Over the course of my time at AAACF, I leaned on many of the skills I’d been honing as a PhD student: the ability to research and mine vast quantities of information for what is immediately useful; the ability to see a problem from multiple angles; the ability to ask the right questions of both the problem and the potential solutions; and the persistence to see the project through. Additionally, I picked up some experience with data collection and visualization, including Excel sheets, Google analytics, and infographic tools like Visual.ly.

In the end, I was able to present something I was pretty proud of: an impact assessment report with data from the past 5 years on how AAACF’s grantmaking had matched their priorities, as well as an impact assessment tool for future use. But even more importantly, I gained confidence that with a positive mentor and an openness to learning, I was capable of adapting to and thriving in a new field. For these reasons, I would highly recommend applying for the Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship!
[1] The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, 2009
More From Our Blog
Speaking History: Public Engagement at The UMMA
By Lucy Smith, Doctoral Student in History and Women’s Studies Jean – Antoine Houdon, the Parian sculpture, traveled to …Read More »The Humans of the Archives
By Alex Honold, Second year PhD student in Education Studies with a focus in history education and learning technologies. …Read More »Expanding the Archive: Building a Digital Archive at the Arab American National Museum
By: Meryem Kamil, Doctoral Candidate, American Culture “Take the banana, put it in a vat of rice overnight, and then …Read More »Humanities, Communications, and Philanthropy: What I Learned Sharing the Barbour Scholars Story
By Elizabeth Harlow, Doctoral Candidate, English Language & Literature As the University of Michigan commemorated its bicentennial in 2017, one …Read More »Preparing for Humanities Careers: Suggestions for Doctoral Students and Departments
By Matthew Woodbury, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History As a historian, when asked to explain what I do, one reply …Read More »Exploring Public Humanities at the University of Michigan Museum of Art
By Michael Pascual, Doctoral Student, American Culture I have been in school for as long as I can remember. Except …Read More »From Angst to Advocacy: My Summer with the Michigan Humanities Council
By Emelia Abbe, Doctoral Student, English Language and Literature I’ve never been sold on the idea of a strictly academic …Read More »“More than a sound, it’s a feel”
By Nicole Navarro, Doctoral Student, Department of History When I was accepted as a Mellon Fellow at the Charles H. …Read More »Transferring Skills and Building New Ones at Michigan Publishing
By Catalina Esguerra, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures This past summer, I had the opportunity to work …Read More »(Re)learning to Write
By Cecilia Morales, Doctoral Candidate in English Given that one of my goals in applying for a Mellon Fellowship was to …Read More »Digitizing Digs: My Summer at the MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences
By Allison Kemmerle, Doctoral Candidate in Greek & Roman History This past summer, I completed a Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship at …Read More »What I Did This Summer: My Mellon Fellowship Experience at the Wright Museum
Originally written by Marie Stango for the Public Humanities section of the Discover Rackham blog in November 2015 How can scholars located …Read More »“May the shadow of the moon fall on a world at peace”: Working at the Arab American National Museum
By Mika Kennedy, Doctoral Candidate in English Language and Literature At time of writing [August 2017], I’m in rural Nebraska. I …Read More »RESIST
By Peggy Lee, Doctoral Candidate in American Culture RESIST My last day at the NEH in August 2017 was the …Read More »Speaking – and not only – in Code
By Marisol Fila, PhD Student, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures I became interested in Digital Humanities during my first year …Read More »Learning to Integrate: Exploring Environmental Humanities During My Mellon Fellowship
By Catherine Fairfield, Doctoral Student in English and Women’s Studies For the last eight weeks, I’ve been taking part in the Rackham …Read More »Collecting Records, and Archival Experience Too: Mellon Fellowship at the Bentley Historical Library
By Matt Villeneuve, Doctoral Student in the Department of History The inestimable historian Barbara Tuchman once remarked that “To a historian, …Read More »Learning About Digital Publishing and Collaboration at Michigan Publishing
By Elina Salminen, Ph.D. Candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology This spring and summer, I have …Read More »Reimagining the Possibilities: Mellon Mini-Course on Health and Humanities
By Jallicia Jolly, PhD Candidate in American Culture Purposeful intellectual work meets publicly engaged humanities in “Health and Humanities” taught …Read More »Mellon Mini-Course: Editorial and Translation Work Within and Beyond Academia
By Elizabeth Nabney, PhD Candidate in Classical Studies I decided to attend the 2016 Mellon mini-course, “Editorial and Translation Work Within …Read More »Mellon Mini-Course: Understanding Research Career Pathways through Health Humanities
This is the first in a new series of blog posts by participants in Mellon Public Humanities Mini-Courses. By Amanda …Read More »A Defining Humanities Experience
By Rachel Cawkwell, PhD Student in English Language and Literature Humanties. It was one of the several misspellings of the word …Read More »The Next Generation of the Humanities, or A Good Problem to Have
By Malcolm Tariq, PhD Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature On my first day at the National Endowment for …Read More »Storytelling and Community-Building through Mellon Public Humanities Fellowships
By Christina LaRose, PhD Candidate, English & Women’s Studies I discovered the power of storytelling in the early 1990s when Princeton …Read More »A Historian’s Experience in Software Development
By Ana M. Silva, PhD Candidate, Department of History Can a History PhD provide the skills for a career in …Read More »“More Than You Think You Are”
By Emily Macgillivray, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of American Culture In 2002 pop-rock band Matchbox 20 released their third studio album, More …Read More »Is Public Scholarship About Telling Stuff To More People?
By Cassius Adair, PhD Candidate, Department of English I love to talk at people, which is one of the reasons …Read More »Putting the Humanities into Practice
By Shana Melnysyn, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and History When I first considered applying for a Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship, I …Read More »How I Spent my Summer Vacation: A Historian’s Report
By Jacqueline D. Antonovich, PhD Candidate, Department of History I’ll be honest with you. One of the best perks of …Read More »