Hi all,

Thanks for the questions. We intend to announce the Knowledge Equity Fund in early 2021, once we have a bit more details and specifics worked out. However, we can share the overall intention today.

Some background: Our fiscal year runs from July through June, which means that the second half of last year was heavily affected by the unforeseen effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Community events were canceled, hiring slowed, and we put work on pause while we responded to the changing circumstances. As a result, we ended the year with funds that were underspent, relative to what we had planned for the budget. 

In May of last year, we were also planning for this current fiscal year and had very little insight about how fundraising would perform in this pandemic. People around the world were losing their sources of income, as unemployment soared. We worked with the board to plan for different scenarios, including if fundraising went really poorly.

As a general matter, when the budget is underspent, any remainder goes into the reserve. For accounting purposes, it cannot be carried over into the budget of a new fiscal year. Because we were concerned about the uncertainty of fundraising this year, we decided to set aside underspent funds from the past fiscal year, so that we could keep our commitment to our grantees even if fundraising fell short and also make progress on knowledge equity. (Good news: Fundraising ended up going a lot better than we expected when we were planning in the early months of this pandemic.  More to come on that.)

With the WMF board’s approval, we set up a US$8.7 million grantmaking fund at Tides Advocacy, which has two purposes: 1) Funding Annual Plan Grants (APG) to the affiliates this year and 2) Funding Knowledge Equity. We have been working with Tides since 2016 when we launched the Endowment. The relationship has gone well and they have a lot of expertise at administering grants internationally. 

Our first priority was to ensure that we had enough funding to support community grants. We transferred the full amount for Annual Plan Grants (APG) for FY20-21 over to Tides to ensure that all funding for affiliates for this year was secured, regardless of how fundraising performed. It also gives staff at affiliates and the Foundation more time to work together to make thoughtful grants, instead of an end-of-year rush. All affiliates who will be receiving funding through Tides were informed of the arrangement last summer. All other grantmaking (Community Grants, Rapid Grants, Project Grants) are still being funded through WMF directly, as usual. There is a round of APG grants set to go out via Tides this week.

As the Audit Report FAQ states,[1] the remaining funds will be used to launch the Wikimedia Knowledge Equity Fund. This new fund is in addition to the existing grants that are already available for the communities (Community Grants, Rapid Grants, Project Grants, and APGs) and does not impact the amount of funds in those grant portfolios.

Our goal is to use this fund to invest in new opportunities that increase the availability of free knowledge for marginalized people and counteract structural inequalities. Knowledge equity is a key pillar of the 2030 movement strategy, and this investment will help us to address some of the barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge. 

As of now, this is a one-time commitment of approximately $4.5 million. We are still working on the specific initial objectives of the fund and how it will operate. As a pilot initiative, we’ll be learning and adapting as we go. 

We’ll share more details in early 2021 about the Knowledge Equity Fund. We are excited to see what progress we can make for knowledge equity with this investment. 

Thank you,

Lisa Gruwell

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2019-2020_-_frequently_asked_questions/id#This_year%E2%80%99s_report_says_that_the_Wikimedia_Foundation_provided_an_unconditional_grant_of_$8.723_million_to_Tides_Advocacy_for_the_Wikimedia_Knowledge_Equity_Fund._What_is_the_Wikimedia_Knowledge_Equity_Fund?