Powering Python together in 2025, thanks to our community!

We are so very grateful for each of you who donated or became new members during our end-of-year fundraiser and membership drive. We raised $30,000 through the PyCharm promotion offered by JetBrains– WOW! Including individual donations, Supporting Memberships, donations to our Fiscal Sponsorees, and JetBrains’ generous partnership we raised around $99,000 for the PSF’s mission supporting Python and its community.

Your generous support means we can dive into 2025 ready to invest in our key goals for the year. Some of our goals include:

• Embrace the opportunities and tackle the challenges that come with scale
• Foster long term sustainable growth- for Python, the PSF, and the community
• Improve workflows through iterative improvement in collaboration with the community

Each bit of investment from the Python community—money, time, energy, ideas, and enthusiasm—helps us to reach these goals!

We want to specifically call out to our new members: welcome aboard, thank you for joining us, and we are so appreciative of you! We’re looking forward to having your voice take part in the PSF’s future. If you aren’t a member of the PSF yet, check out our Membership page, which includes details about our sliding scale memberships. We are happy to welcome new members any time of year!

As always, we want to thank those in the community who took the time to share our posts on social media and their local or project based networks. We’re excited about what 2025 has in store for Python and the PSF, and as always, we’d love to hear your ideas and feedback. Looking for how to keep in touch with us? You can find all the ways in our "Where to find the PSF?" blog post.

We wish you a perfectly Pythonic year ahead!
- The PSF Team

P.s. Want to continue to help us make an impact? Check out our “Do you know the PSF's next sponsor?” blog post and share with your employer!

PSF Grants: Program & Charter Updates (TLDR)

The PSF Board and Staff have recently undertaken a review and update of our Grants Program to ensure its sustainability and alignment with the evolving needs of the global Python community. To share the outcome of our review, we are publishing a three-part series that outlines:

• Context and our process (Part 1)
• The program’s newly established Guiding Principles (Part 2)
• Upcoming changes to the Grants Work Group Charter & Program (Part 3)

Context and our process (Part 1)

At their recent retreat, the PSF Board outlined updated priorities for the Grants Program, which PSF Staff translated into guiding principles. Staff conducted extensive scenario analysis using grant data, and after careful consideration, the PSF Board unanimously approved changes to the Grants Work Group Charter on December 11, 2024.

To help the community understand the changes and ensure we keep our two-way communication strong, we are going to hold two supplementary PSF Grants Program Office Hours on the PSF Discord. The office hours will be at varying times through January and February on top of our regularly scheduled office hours:

• January 7th, 4PM Eastern, 9PM UTC (supplementary)
  
• January 21st, 9AM Eastern, 1PM UTC (regular)
  
• February 4th, 4PM Eastern, 9PM UTC (supplementary)
  
• February 18th, 9AM Eastern, 1PM UTC (regular)

Learn more about the context and our process in Part 1 of the blog series.

The program's newly established Guiding Principles (Part 2)

The PSF Board, with support from PSF Staff, developed a set of Guiding Principles to provide clear direction for our Grants Program. The principles for the program are:

• Impactful
• Reliable
• Equitable
• Transparent
• Sustainable

The process involved discussions at the Board retreat, refinement by Staff, and final approval by the Board. These principles informed the recent updates to the Grants Work Group Charter.
 

Learn more about the Guiding Principles for the Grants Program in Part 2 of the blog series.

Upcoming changes to the Grants Work Group Charter & Program (Part 3)

The PSF Board has approved updates to the Grants Work Group Charter, effective March 1, 2025, to ensure the program's sustainability. To implement the changes across our documentation, application form, and grant report form, we will be pausing incoming Grants requests for the entire month of February 2025. While there are a handful of changes, we want to highlight two updates that will be most impactful.

To align with the guiding principles, the PSF is pausing funding for certain grant types. Paused categories include:

• Development work
• Kids Coding Camps
• Sprints
• Training Programs
• Workshops requiring equipment
• Other

To maintain financial sustainability, caps will apply to grant types:

• Conferences: $8,000 USD
• Workshops without equipment: $1,500 USD
• PyLadies/DjangoGirls Workshops: $1,500 USD
• Consolidated requests will be capped accordingly, with a maximum of $15,000 USD per year for any organization or event organizer.

Learn more about all of the updates to the Grants Program & Workgroup Charter in Part 3 of this series.

Supporting the community

We recognize the challenges these changes may pose and we’re committed to supporting the community through:

• Aggregating a library of event organizing materials and resources
• Additional Grants Program Office Hours will be held in January and February 2025, alongside regular sessions, to discuss changes and community feedback.
• Monitoring the impact of these updates through quarterly reviews and community feedback.

We have kicked off a thread on Discuss.python.org for those who prefer asynchronous discussion. Additionally, we welcome you to join the PSF Board Office Hours on the PSF Discord in the upcoming months to discuss these changes. You are also welcome to email psf@python.org to contact the PSF Board, or grants@pyfound.org to reach the Staff who administer the PSF Grants program.