Description

In our response last year to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Luce Foundation’s Theology Program (now the Religion & Theology Program) renewed and expanded efforts to listen to our grantees and partners, seeking to be especially attentive to those communities least heard. Through a series of emergency grants, we sought to amplify the voices of these communities and to provide rapid support for community-based responses to the pandemic, with a particular focus on supporting initiatives in and with especially vulnerable communities.
Collaborating with a select number of recent and current Theology Program grantees whose work has engaged and supported at-risk communities, we funded emergency efforts in several U.S. cities and regions. Responsive to the ideas and creativity of our grantee partners, these emergency grants have taken multiple forms, while all involving: (1) the provision of direct support to community-based partners and organizations responding to the pandemic (usually through rapid-response small grants); and (2) aligned efforts to document, and create contexts for the expression of, the experiences of vulnerable communities under the pandemic (through oral histories, the collection of testimonies, virtual research, community forums, media projects, and support for artists and local arts communities). Many of the rapid response projects we supported are now reaching their one-year mark and poised to complete and report on work funded through our 2020 emergency grants.
We still have much to learn about – and from – this newly-networked set of grantees. We do know now that our grants provided emergency support to over 130 local organizations serving especially vulnerable populations – as one part of the larger Luce Foundation effort to support our partners and the communities they serve. And we have already sought to build on this networked, community-based approach, and to take important next steps in advancing the Religion & Theology Program’s commitment to positioning attention to racial equity more fully at the heart of its work.
This recommended urgent needs grant, in support of a collaborative project to be based at Morgan State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and the City, extends the spirit of our earlier rapid response to the COVID-19-pandemic and its effects, aims to deepen and expand the web of relationships established through that response, and provides support for additional learning from and consolidation of the diverse forms of knowledge produced through our networked initiative. In conjunction with work to be supported through our recent grant to the Public Religion Research Institute, the grant represents one further opportunity to align our aspiration to advance public knowledge with locally situated forms of community engagement.
At the center of the Religion & Theology Program’s efforts to advance more inclusive and nuanced public knowledge of American religion lies the Luce Foundation’s commitment to supporting diverse public knowledge makers. Our work especially seeks to empower and amplify underrepresented voices. As the narrative of Morgan State’s proposal makes evident, this grant would serve that purpose. Through a program of small “public knowledge and community engagement” grants, the Center for the Study of Religion and the City will support a network of knowledge makers in up to 8-10 different U.S. cities. At least half of these grants will be made to HBCUs, HSIs, TCUs and/or historically underrepresented scholars, and all grants will support teams that have demonstrated a commitment to racial justice and publicly engaged work.