Forwarding to the Treasurers and Affiliate mailing lists for their consideration.

Pine ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Pine W" wiki.pine@gmail.com Date: Nov 30, 2015 10:11 AM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Endowment Discussion To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc:

That's a good question.

Alternatives to private sector equity investments include public-sector bonds, as well as commodities and currencies. While I wouldn't recommend that WMF do either of the latter two, there might be some reasonable choices for WMF in the public sector bond market.

In the private sector, I hope that WMF would be very careful about the ethics of the companies and industries in which it chooses to invest.

Pine On Nov 30, 2015 10:01 AM, "Brion Vibber" bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:

Thanks!

I added a section to the talk page asking about how we would actually go about investing... the purpose of an endowment is to let it grow and just spend some of the interest, but that growth doesn't happen in a vacuum. Investment happens by putting money into other peoples' businesses and letting them pay you back with interest.

So we'd be asking donors for tens of millions of dollars to invest in third-party businesses -- a fundamental change in our fundraising proposition. Thinking about our social responsibility as an investor is probably worthwhile.

-- brion

On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Lisa Gruwell lgruwell@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Hi all-

For several years, the Wikimedia movement has been having discussions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment about whether and when to begin building an endowment. I put an essay up on meta recently in an attempt

to

...

rekindle this conversation with the community. We included launching an endowment in the FY 2015-16 annual plan. We also plan to have this conversation as a part of the larger strategic planning process because building an endowment means prioritizing some future needs over some current needs.

Before we can begin to support an endowment, there is strategic

groundwork

...

that should be completed to ensure that the effort is both thoughtful and successful. To help get the conversation moving, I seeded the discussion page with a few questions that we are hoping you will help us answer. Please add the questions I didn't think to ask, too. We'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this and your help in thinking through some of

the

...

strategic questions.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment_Essay Best regards,

Lisa Gruwell _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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