Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Sloan awards Wikimedia USD 1m annually for three years

Hi folks, I’m delighted to tell you that yesterday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation board of directors voted to award the Wikimedia Foundation USD 1 million annually for the coming three years. A total of USD 3 million, spread over three years. This is what Sloan characterizes as "institutional funding" - meaning, a form of grant designed to help us work towards our general goals – in our case, financial and operational sustainability, increasing quality, increasing and broadening participation, and distributing our material beyond the wiki environment. As you know, we’ve recently expanded the staff from 10 to 15, and we still have a few more positions to fill: this funding will offset those increased costs. This is _fabulous_ news. Sloan is high-profile and widely-respected: this donation is financially significant for us, and it also signals that Sloan sees our work as important and our organization as trustworthy. I’d like to take a moment to thank Erik Moeller, who developed our first contact with Sloan through his work representing Wikimedia on the Encyclopedia of Life's institutional council. (Sloan is an EOL funder.) Based on that initial relationship, in January Sloan invited Erik to present to them about Wikimedia, after which they asked us for a formal request for funding. Without Erik, this would not have happened. Yay, Erik :-) We will be sending out a press release in a few hours, and I will also send this note to foundation-l soon. Meanwhile, please join the staff and board of the Wikimedia Foundation in celebrating this terrific news! Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l