Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Australia 2019-2020

Grant approved (37,125 AUD for 12 months, with some changes to your budget)

This grant is approved in the amount of 37,125 AUD for 12 months. WMAU is continuing their work in community support and outreach, which is essential for growing their volunteer base in a large and dispersed geographic area.

We appreciate WMAU’s improvements in communication and planning. We also appreciate WMAU’s planned focus on strategy in the upcoming year, and their thoughtfulness about onboarding new leadership and training board members. We hope this focus will help them address challenges going forward. We see how WMAU is aiming to become more sustainable in many ways, by investing in training and capacity building for committee members and the community. We urge WMAU to continue to think of how to distribute workload and responsibilities evenly on the board, and develop a robust leadership team that is not overly dependent on one or two people. We realize this is a long term project that requires an ongoing investment in funding and volunteer time.

Some concerns and challenges highlighted by the committee in last year’s assessment remain. These include a large proportion of the budget devoted to travel (an expensive approach in terms of money and volunteer time), and an ongoing focus on indigenous languages without adequate coordination with others in the movement doing similar work, and without adequate involvement from indigenous people or their expertise. The committee noted that this is a focus of the current year’s plan, and requests that WMAU commit to the spirit of the committee’s recommendations from last year by not expanding its work with indigenous communities until it receives more scrutiny.

We require some changes in your budget in order to approve this grant. We are not reducing your overall grant amount, because we feel it is important to support your community and your work at this critical time. You may present alternatives to your program officer for any expenses not approved here.

• We will not approve any contractor or travel expenses (or any other expenses) aimed at engaging with another indigenous community, in the spirit of the committee’s recommendations from last year. Therefore, we ask that you remove these expenses from your budget and suggest something else you would like to do with the funding. For example, we could support a project aimed at building your organization's competence to include more indigenous people in your activities on a general level.
• We will not approve contractor expenses to cover preparation for the conference grant. Therefore, we ask that you remove these expenses from your budget and suggest something else you would like to do with the funding. For example, we could support a project aimed at building your organization's long term fundraising capacity.
• While we are approving the expenses for a freelance programmer to find a solution to the technical challenge around QR codes this time, we do not plan on investing in this in the future. We hope that a one-time investment is sufficient to overcome the challenges.
• Finally, in line with the committee’s comments we would not like to see an increase in focus or funding on work with indigenous languages. Therefore, we ask that you remove these expenses from your budget and suggest something else you would like to do with the funding.

We are not asking you to reduce travel expenses overall, but we would like to understand how you are implementing the committee’s suggestions in this area: “We see this kind of investment as one-time funding that would require putting structures in place in order to make this kind of travel less frequent, and handing over engagement and organization to local volunteers once they are activated and/or developing virtual support materials for local volunteers.” We would like to hear more from you about how you plan to make this happen over the next year with the travel funding that you have. We know it is a major challenge.

We are looking forward to working with you in 2019!

Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 00:39, 4 June 2019 (UTC) Winifred

Approval of Reallocation Request

Hello Pru.mitchell and WMAU committee members, thank you for requesting a reallocation of funds as you shift your activities due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on your proposed programming plans. I am approving your GLAMS on Wikidata engagement proposal. Best regards, WJifar (WMF) (talk) 08:06, 30 April 2020 (UTC)