Grants:Start/Approach

Wikimedia Foundation Community Resources team, Wikimedia contributors, and affiliate organizations work together to find and fund innovative and important projects, and to evaluate and share the impact of the work being done across the movement. In addition to financial support, we provide grantees with tools, mentorship, and opportunities to tell their own stories and share their knowledge.

Participatory grantmaking

Our grantmaking process is founded on wiki principles. The Community Resources team's goals and targets are developed in collaboration with the volunteer communities we serve. Decisions about which proposals to fund are made on public wikis and in cooperation with volunteers and affiliates.

WMF staff also participate in the execution and analysis of grant-funded projects by providing mentorship and guidance to grantees, connecting them with like-minded individuals and organizations, and by helping them spread awareness of their work through blog posts, learning patterns, and case studies.

Impact-driven projects

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation is supported primarily by individual donors — readers and content contributors who believe in our mission and rely on our high quality free content. The role of the Community Resources team is to re-invest a substantial portion of that budget back into our movement by soliciting and supporting projects and initiatives that further our mission and our strategic vision.

We develop strong evaluation frameworks and effective strategies for grants and grantee partners, in order to build on past successes and learn from our failures. Our research uses both quantitative and qualitative elements of measuring the outcomes and impact of grant-funded projects. Our learning and evaluation team helps our movement as a whole better understand how to realize our ambitious goals one project at a time, and how to build a wider culture of self-assessment, critical thinking, and knowledge sharing within the Wikimedia movement.