Time has flown by since we received the community call last December for greater transparency and better processes around our Grants Program. PSF staff have produced a Grants Program Transparency Report and begun holding monthly Grants Program Office Hours. The PSF Board also invested in a third-party retrospective and launched a major refresh of all areas of our Grants program.
To provide the Grants Program more support, we assigned Marie Nordin, PSF Community Communications Manager, to support the Grants Program alongside Laura Graves, Senior Accountant. Marie has stepped into the Grants Workgroup Chair role to relieve Laura after 3+ years– thank you, Laura! Marie has been leading the initiatives and work related to the Grants Program in collaboration with Laura.
Behind the scenes, PSF staff has been working with the PSF Board and the Grants Workgroup (workgroup) to translate the feedback we’ve received and the analysis we’ve performed into action, starting with the Grants Workgroup Charter. A full breakdown of updates to the charter can be found in Part 2 of this update.
The PSF Board spent time on their recent retreat to explore priorities for the program going forward. We also ran a more thorough workgroup membership renewal process based on the updated charter to support quicker grant reviews and votes through active workgroup engagement. We’re excited to share refresh progress, updates, and plans for the future of the program later on in this post!
Something wonderful, bringing more changes
Meanwhile, the attention our Grants Program has received in the past year has resulted in something wonderful: we’re getting more requests than ever. Our call to historically underrepresented regions to request funds has been answered in some areas- and we are thrilled! For example, in the African region, we granted around 65K in 2023 and over 140K already this year! And, year to date in 2024 we have awarded more grant funding than we did in all of 2023. The other side of this coin presents us with a new issue– the budget for the program.
Up until this year, we’ve been able to grant at least partial funding to the majority of requests we’ve received while staying within our guidelines and maintaining a feasible annual budget. With more eligible requests incoming, every “yes” brings us closer to the ceiling of our grant budget. In addition to the increased quantity of requests, we are receiving requests for higher amounts. Inflation and the tech crunch have been hitting event organizers everywhere (this includes the PSF-produced PyCon US), and we are seeing that reflected in the number and size of the grant requests we are receiving.
Moving forward, with the increased quantity and amount of eligible grant requests, we will need to take steps to ensure we are balancing grant awards with sustainability for our Grants Program, and the Foundation overall. We know that the most important part of any changes to the Grants Program is awareness and two-way communications with the community. We aim to do that as early and transparently as we possibly can. That means we aren’t changing anything about how we award grants today or even next week– but within the next couple of months. Please keep an eye on our blog and social accounts (Mastodon, X, LinkedIn) for news about upcoming changes, and make sure to share this post with your fellow Python event and initiative organizers.
Grants Workgroup Charter update process
The purpose of the PSF Grants Workgroup (workgroup) is to review, approve, and deny grant funding proposals for Python conferences, training workshops, Meetups, development projects, and other related Python initiatives. The workgroup charter outlines processes, guidelines, and membership requirements for the workgroup. Small changes have been made to the charter over the years, but it’s been some time since any significant changes were implemented.
During the summer of 2024, Marie, workgroup chair (hi 👋 it’s me writing this!), and Laura worked on updates for the charter. The updates focused on how to make the Grants Program processes and guidelines work better for the workgroup, the PSF Board, and most especially, the community we serve.
After many hours of discussing pain points, running scenarios, exploring possible guidelines, and drafting the actual wording, Marie and Laura introduced proposed updates for the charter to the Board in July. After a month of review and 1:1 meetings with the PSF Board and workgroup members, the updated charter went to a vote with the PSF Board on August 14th and was approved unanimously.
The workgroup has been operating under its new charter for a couple of months. Before we shared broadly with the community, we wanted to make sure the updates didn’t cause unintended consequences, and we were ready to walk back anything that didn’t make sense. Turns out, our hard work paid off, and the updates have been mostly working as we hoped. We will continue to monitor the impact of the changes and make any adjustments in the next Charter update. Read up on the Grants Workgroup Charter updates in Part 2 of this blog post!
