Grants Awarded
Friends of Rouge Park – $25,000
Community Driven Stewardship in Rouge Park to Protect the Great Lakes
This grant will strengthen Rouge Park's natural ability to mitigate impacts of flooding and stormwater overflow impacting the community and the Great Lakes by investing in community-driven stewardship model. Working closely with the City of Detroit, Friends of Rouge Park will expand its Lead Steward program and will formalize its long-term coordination with the city to leverage investment needed to manage natural areas and maximize the park's ecological services. The ultimate goal of the project is to grow the impact of FORP's stewardship program.
Detroit Hives – $10,500
Urban Hives Project
Detroit Hives will use this grant to install and maintain 8 to 10 honeybee hives adjacent to urban farms in the Brightmoor Community of Detroit. Urban growers in Detroit have reported reduced yields due to gaps in pollination caused by shrinking pollinator habitat, land fragmentation, and lack of investment. Detroit Hives will install the hives and provide ongoing professional hive management to ensure colony vitality and consistent pollination throughout the growing season. They will collect data to assess pre- and post-project yields at grower sites and changes in honey harvest totals.
Brick Store Museum – $10,000
From Many, One: Results of Revolution
This grant supports the Brick Store Museum, which was founded in 1936 and is housed in a landmark 1825 general store and four adjacent early 19th-century buildings in Kennebunk, Maine, as it embarks on a transformative project to expand upon the one-man narrative of the town's history that grew in the mid-20th century and seeks to more fully reflect the diversity and complexity of southern Maine. The museum will reinterpret its primary gallery to explore early American life during the period 1780-1830 from the perspectives of former enslaved persons that settled in the area in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a local woman who founded a business to support her family in the aftermath of the War of 1812, and three Indigenous communities that inhabited and stewarded the land for centuries before the town was founded. These exhibits will invite visitors to reconsider what early American history looked like-and who it included.
American Folk Art Museum – $25,000
Potential Threads: Un-Raveling and Un-Settling the American Sampler
With this grant, the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) will convene a public event in February 2027 entitled Potential Threads: Un-Raveling and Un-Settling the American Sampler to discuss and interpret artworks presented in the upcoming AFAM exhibition entitled Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American "Schoolgirl" Art. The convening will bring together a diverse group of curators, scholars, and artists to reassess American needlework within an expanded art historical narrative that foregrounds BIPOC, Indigenous, and women's perspectives and reveals a more inclusive and accurate account of early American experience.
Taste the Local Difference – $25,000
Fresh Food Connections: Wholesale Readiness
This grant supports a pilot project designed to expand Michigan's local food infrastructure by helping mid-sized, often BIPOC-owned farms in the greater Flint region transition from direct-to-consumer markets into wholesale channels. By pairing individualized readiness assessments with marketing tools, producer stipends, and facilitated connections to institutional buyers, the project builds the supply-side capacity necessary for emerging regional food hubs and wholesale distributors to reliably source Michigan-grown products. This initiative directly supports Americana's Ag/FS priority to strengthen local food economies through improved market access and distribution. By targeting farms historically excluded from wholesale markets and partnering with Flint Fresh's aggregation and logistics backbone, the project helps fill a critical gap in Michigan's regional food value chain, with potential for replication statewide.
Keep Growing Detroit – $25,000
Rooted in Sovereignty
Keep Growing Detroit (KGD) will use this grant to strengthen the social infrastructure that underpins Detroit's large and diverse urban agriculture network. Through a year of interconnected programming-including seasonal grower gatherings, intergenerational storytelling and cultural workshops, hands-on education, and citywide events-KGD aims to deepen the relationships, shared knowledge, and cultural continuity that sustain community-led food production. The program anticipates engaging hundreds of gardens and farms, positioning Detroiters not only as food producers but as stewards of food traditions and mutual support networks. The project aligns with Americana's Ag/FS priority by nurturing the social systems required for a resilient, community-driven local food ecosystem by strengthening cultural connections and grower-to-grower collaboration.Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance – $25,000
Educating and Advocating to Enforce Kalamazoo River Mouth Protections
This grant supports scientific modeling and visual evidence needed to uphold prior state and federal decisions denying permits to a proposed private marina development that threatens critical dune systems, groundwater-fed wetlands, and Tribal cultural landscapes at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River. MI-EGLE and the US Army Corps of Engineers denied the marina permits in 2024 on the basis of ecological harm, navigational safety, and impacts to a Traditional Cultural Property of the Potawatomi. The developer appealed the denials. The grant aligns with Americana's Natural Resources priority because it safeguards a highly sensitive Lake Michigan watershed, protects rare habitats central to regional water quality, and continues Americana's long support of SDCA's successful efforts to oppose the marina development from 2009 to 2019.
Central Lake Superior Watershed Partners – $25,000
Merging TEK and Green Infrastructure with Coastal Tribal Communities
In this project, Superior Watershed Partnership (SWP) and three Tribal communities in the Upper Peninsula-Keweenaw Bay, Bay Mills, and Hannahville-will design and install culturally informed green infrastructure that improves water quality and protects vulnerable coastal habitats. The project combines Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), youth conservation corps labor, and before/after ecological monitoring to restore habitat, reduce stormwater impacts, and build long-term community stewardship. The project aligns closely with Americana's Natural Resources priority by delivering tangible, place-based restoration in high-risk Great Lakes watersheds while centering community leadership, Indigenous knowledge, and intergenerational engagement. SWP may replicate the project across additional Tribal and coastal communities.
Huron River Watershed Council – $25,000
Catalyzing Green Stormwater Infrastructure
This grant supports the expansion of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) in three southeast Michigan communities-Ypsilanti, Belleville, and Van Buren Township-that have been identified as having the watershed's highest flood vulnerability and greatest environmental justice concerns. In this project, HRWC will pair public listening sessions with the development of 2-3 site-specific GSI concept designs and the installation of household rain gardens to build community ownership of nature-based stormwater solutions in places historically underserved by GSI investment. The grant aligns with Americana's Natural Resources program priority by supporting community-led, replicable watershed protection efforts that reduce polluted runoff, improve water quality in the Huron River (and ultimately Lake Erie), and strengthen local capacity for long-term stormwater resilience. The focus on vulnerable communities-where environmental and socioeconomic burdens intersect-aligns closely with the Foundation's commitment to equitable, watershed-scale impact.
Detroit Black Community Food Security Network – $25,000
Building Toward Zero Waste at the Detroit Food Commons
DBCFSN will use this grant to support community-centered food waste composting operations at the Detroit People's Food Co-op (DPFC), a member-owned grocery store cooperative in Detroit's North End neighborhood. DBCFSN believes that food waste composting is a critical component of a closed loop food economy, "where a majority of the economical, political, cultural, social and ecological capital can be recycled back into the community to generate transformative change." DBCFSN will apply the grant to engage a compost manager to coordinate food waste diversion from DPFC to composting systems at D-Town Farm, DBCFSN's 7-acre farm in Rouge Park.
Keweenaw Land Trust – $25,000
Volunteer Capacity Initiative: Laying the Groundwork for Lasting Impact
This grant will support the Volunteer Capacity Initiative at the Keweenaw Land Trust. The project will transform KLT's long tradition of volunteerism into a robust, well-supported program that trains and retains local stewards of the nearly 10 miles of Lake Superior shoreline that KLT protects. By building systems for recruitment, onboarding, and recognition, KLT will expand its volunteer base, enhance shoreline and watershed protection, and strengthen the long-term health of Lake Superior.
Flint Social Club – $25,000
The People's Mart
With this grant, Flint Social Club will install critical infrastructure in "The People's Mart," a community-powered food hub that will create markets, storage capacity, and processing infrastructure for small- and mid-sized Michigan growers, food processors, and emerging food entrepreneurs, especially those from BIPOC, immigrant, and low-income communities. The Food Hub also will help urban consumers in Flint - particularly in historically redlined and food-insecure neighborhoods - access affordable, healthy, and culturally appropriate food.
Telfair Museums – $15,000
Roots in the Rushes: African American Basketry of the Lowcountry
This grant will support a planned exhibition at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, GA that will focus on the bulrush basket craft tradition historically practiced by communities of enslaved individuals from West Africa that blended features of their heritage with European American cultural traits and eventually became known as the Gullah Geechee. The exhibition will explore the intricate history of this type of basketmaking in the region. Related programming will help contemporary audiences connect with this important and often overlooked craft tradition, including highlighting the artists who are preserving this art form today.
GVSU – WGVU Public Media – $25,000
Frontier to Freedom: Wilderness, Revolution, and Michigan Statehood
This grant will support the production of a documentary with the working title "Frontier to Freedom: Wilderness, Revolution, and Michigan Statehood," which is being filmed in recognition of the U.S. semiquincentennial. The documentary will explore the rich and often overlooked history of Michigan, tracing its evolution from a vast, untamed wilderness inhabited by Indigenous peoples to its emergence as the 26th U.S. state in 1837. Expert interviews, archival imagery, animated maps, and visuals of Michigan's beautiful landscapes will be used to describe and illustrate the region's formative years, its strategic significance during the American Revolution, and the complex socio-political forces that shaped Michigan's path to statehood. Americana's grant will support a particular focus on how the treatment of Indigenous communities in Michigan directly misaligned with the goals of freedom and self-determination that early Americans were espousing.
Historic Deerfield, Inc. – $25,000
Luce/Americana Curatorial Fellowship
With this grant, Historic Deerfield will create a one-year fellowship position (the Luce/Americana Curatorial Fellow) to research, share, and publish new scholarship on early 19th-century New England women artists. These artists often defied expectations, overcame serious obstacles with determination, and challenged gender roles to create artworks of significant value and importance. The fellow will focus on Historic Deerfield's collection of nearly 2000 objects of fine art and will generate greater understanding of the role of New England women in the arts of the 19th century.
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