New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures (Nous) Awarded $100k

Plus, Nous Efforts to Preserve Louisiana French, Creole and Indigenous Languages

NEW ORLEANS (press release) – The New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures (Nous), a cultural institution committed to preserving and promoting Louisiana’s heritage cultures (with a focus on Cajun, Creole and Indigenous communities), received a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation.

This $100,000 grant award is the largest Nous has received to date and follows other recent milestones in the past six months, including the receipt of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants and the opening of a cultural center in the French Quarter.

Organizers share that Nous’s growing national recognition as a leading nonprofit in cultural advocacy and preservation represents a marked investment in Louisiana’s rich heritage and communities.

How Nous Will Utilize the Mellon Foundation Grant

The fund from the Mellon Foundation’s Community-Based Archives Grant will go toward the Archives Funèbres (Funeral Archives, in French) program.

Archives Funèbres is an initiative to collect, digitize and preserve thousands of funerary materials, second-line programs, obituaries and photographs in a public archive eventually hosted on the Nous website.

Fieldwork will be led by Dr. Kim Vaz-Deville, a renowned scholar of Black carnival traditions in New Orleans, current Board member at Nous and a past recipient of Nous’s Le Lab cultural accelerator program.

Commenting on the importance of the work, Dr. Vaz-Deville said, “The records we are conserving are extremely fragile, both physically and metaphorically. It is crucial that we collect and digitize these documents for current and future generations before they are lost to time.”

How Community Members Can Contribute

The initiative is a multi-year project that is community-driven, with local families, funeral directors, genealogists and historians all invited to contribute materials to the archive.

Community members who would like to contribute materials to be included in the initiative are invited to reach out to bonjour@nous-foundation.org.

Organizers share how the initiative will provide value for the community:

• For communities historically marginalized from mainstream media and narratives, funeral programs are an incredibly valuable documentation of the community affiliations, cultural traditions, genealogies and authentic stories of south Louisiana’s ancestors.
• These materials also serve as primary sources for the study and preservation of endangered languages, such as Louisiana French and Creole, and Indigenous languages, for which the number of speakers has plummeted from an estimated over 1,000,000 people in 1970 to 150,000 today.

Speaking on the grant, Nous Executive Director Scott Tilton commented, “We are very excited to work with Dr. Vaz-Deville on this initiative/program and enrich our community-based digital archives with such important materials. Working with communities to preserve cultural records like these that would be otherwise inaccessible is a huge step forward for the visibility of Louisiana’s heritage cultures.”