[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[Philippe Beaudette]

See also: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment



___________________
Philippe Beaudette
Director, Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

415-839-6885, x 6643

philippe at wikimedia.org


On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 4:12 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>wrote:

> On 14 March 2013 08:09, Manuel Schneider <manuel.schneider at wikimedia.ch>
> wrote:
>
> > thanks for collecting these links, they are interesting. Anyway, I
> > didn't fully understand the idea behind the page, especially as a
> > non-native speaker I have problems to come up with a proper translation
> > / understanding of "Endowment". I understand it as "what WM(F) owns" and
> > it may refer to the "right" WM(F) expects to have on getting / using
> > their donated money or may refer to the reserves WMF is currently
> building.
> >
> > Can you explain this a bit better for people like me, please? Maybe
> > right on that Meta page would be good, so others can read it as well.
>
> Hi Manuel,
>
> The basic idea of an endowment is that it's a large sum of money
> collected to "set up" a charity - it then uses the income from
> investing this money to cover some or all of its operating costs,
> rather than just spending it over a long period of time. The Wellcome
> Trust is a pretty good high-profile example; it has a capital
> endowment of around fifteen billion pounds, and spends about six
> hundred million (4%) a year.
>
> (In the US context, they're very common for universities, but this is
> less so in Europe; here it's more "traditional charities")
>
> I've given a quick outline on the meta page. Building up an endowment
> sufficient to run WMF would be tricky, of course :-)
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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