On Wed, 9 Jun 2021 at 18:15, Lisa Gruwell <lgruwell@wikimedia.org> wrote:

We are currently working to identify the first grant recipients for the Equity Fund.  The Meta page for the Equity Fund [4] includes more information (the members of the Equity Fund Committee, the five specific focus areas we will be investing in) and next steps.


For those who want to jump straight to what the foundation plans to spend the money on:

  1. Supporting scholarship & advocacy focused on free knowledge and racial equity
  2. Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities
  3. Addressing unequal internet access
  4. Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge
  5. Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories)


1 is vauge and a lot depends on the balance between the two. As far as 2 goes funding journalism is bit of a departure from our standard pratices and contains significant risks. 3 isn't really viable at our kind of funding levels and has significant enviromental concerns. 4 Again not really viable at our funding levels (also english language lessions would have more impact). 5 runs into the issue that the community has not historicaly proven accepting of attempts to lower RS and notability standards for non western areas.




--
geni