Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Whose Knowledge/2021

APG approved in the amount of 150,885 USD

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 150,885 USD, with a grant term starting 1 January 2021 and ending 31 December 2021.

Whose Knowledge has accomplished a great deal in its first nine months in the Simple APG program: Over 17,000 new images of women on Wikimedia projects through campaign events in a year where the pandemic forced many routine events to stop, sharing the importance and success of decolonization efforts through a variety of mediums, and growing your organization’s capacity through the addition of an Operations Coordinator.

We are glad you are continuing to run and reach new communities with the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. The intention to prioritize numerous marginalized groups (Black, brown, indigenous and queer women) in this campaign reinforces the organization’s mission to address the consequences of colonization and systemic discrimination experienced by these groups. These dynamics cause unambiguous harm to these communities, and are present in many dimensions of life, including the ability to use, participate, and be adequately represented in Wikimedia projects. We appreciate Whose Knowledge’s efforts to challenge these norms through its other programs planned for next year focused upon research on practices in page deletion, partnering with major institutions to address the need for more wholly multilingual access to internet services, and more.

Whose Knowledge has requested an increase of about 113% from its previous budget. We acknowledge your rationale for growing your staffing capacity to support fundraising needs and dedicated support for its programmatic initiatives, as well as its goal to maintain an adequate operational reserve. While we can support some of these needs, the available budget for Simple APG is limited and we are unable to support organizational growth to this degree both in this round and in future rounds in the grant program. We leave final decisions over staffing changes and additions up to your discretion, but based on this budget and your organizational goals, we recommend prioritizing:

• the Fundraising Lead role so that capacity for this work can be established in a formal role and support longer term growth for your organization,
• the additional coordinator for Africa supporting the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, and
• reducing the operating reserves budget

We appreciate Whose’s Knowledge’s work to broadly decolonize knowledge both on and off Wikimedia projects and we look forward to supporting you in the coming year.

Best regards from the SAPG Committee and Staff, Siarus1074 (talk) 17:32, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Dear Siarus1074 and the SAPG Committee and Staff, thank you for supporting us, our communities and our work. As you noted, decolonizing knowledge and advocating for knowledge justice within and beyond our movement continues to be critical, especially as we experience these challenging times. We appreciate your recommendations for budget prioritization and will adjust the budget accordingly. We are looking forward to collaborating with all of you during this new cycle.

Best wishes from all of the WK? team, Aadele (talk)

Budget reallocation request for underspent funds

In the process of preparing our final report for our WMF SAPG 2021 Grant, we realized that we have $41,882 in underspend funds.

This is because there were some line items that were deeply impacted by the pandemic such as the anticipated programmatic events under the Decolonizing the Internet's Archives, that did not take place and our programmatic Coordinators, that we were not able to hire and are now planning to hire this year.

At the same time, we had an overspend in some other line items such as the State of the Internet's Languages Report.

One of our Comms Co-Leads stepped down and this led to an increased workload for the two other Comms Co-Leads. This led to an overspend in the Comms Co-Leads line item.

Since WK? is growing and fiscal sponsorship did not seem like a relevant fit for us anymore, we decided to incorporate. The process of incorporating into a 501(c)3 and transitioning the existing organization led to an increased workload for our Operations Lead. This caused an overspend in the Operations Lead line item as well as high incorporation and related legal fees as we have shown below.

We would like to reallocate the underspend funds towards covering our STIL overspend, 30% of the increased Comms Co-Leads and Operations Lead expenses made in July -Dec time period and towards covering (approx) 40% of the legal fees that we spent. --Señoritaleona (talk) 20:01, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Here is the link to see the details in the Reallocation Breakdown tab of this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Pia1Udrl0Ho9HN61_nwmT2-EFiZSI670f70MlkFJwyE/edit?usp=sharing (talk) 21:02, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, this reallocation request is approved! I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 06:30, 7 April 2022 (UTC)