The Wikimedia Endowment held its bi-annual Board meeting in San Francisco, California (United States) on 18 July 2024 where they passed the FY2024-25 annual plan and budget.
The Board, which is made up of Endowment donors and Wikimedia community members, meets twice per year to discuss crucial issues around the management and governance of the fund. Here are some key outcomes of the meeting:
Approval of the 2024-25 Annual Plan and Budget
Every year, the Endowment Board determines how much of the Endowment can be spent within the guardrails of its spending policy. For fiscal year 2024-2025, the Board opted to spend 3.6% of the Endowment: $2.2 million for operational expenses and $3.4 million for grants. Importantly, the Board is not spending the corpus (i.e. the donations to the Endowment), but rather spending a portion of the investment growth that the Endowment has gained in accordance with its investment policy. Also, the Endowment does not have any employees, but reimburses the Wikimedia Foundation every year for the staff time and other expenses that the Foundation incurs on behalf of the Endowment.
This year, the goal is to once more raise $10 million for the Endowment while making some improvements to the website, securing more planned giving commitments, and making $3.4 million in grants. You can read more about the Wikimedia Endowment’s Annual Plan.
Selection of officers and establishment of the Audit Committee
At the meeting, the Endowment Board also elected officers who will serve for two-year terms. These include Annette Campbell-White as Chair of the Board, Mayree Clark as Chair of the Finance Committee, Phoebe Ayers as Chair of the Community and Grantmaking Committee, and Doron Weber as Chair of the Governance Committee.
The board also appointed members to the Audit Committee, which consists of one member of the Endowment Board and four members who are independent of the board. The members are Annette Campbell-White; Wikimedia Endowment donors Kevin Bonebrake and Ike Kier; English Wikipedia Admin James Alexander; and Tanya Capuano, former Audit Committee Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board. The board tapped Kevin Bonebrake to chair the committee, which will be working with the auditing firm KPMG to complete the audit in the coming months.
The Board also reappointed staff officer positions, including Lisa Seitz Gruwell as the Endowment President, Dhaval Patel as the Treasurer, and Chuck Roslof as the Secretary, replacing Stephen LaPorte).
The Endowment Board will meet again in January 2025, where they will discuss the grants they will make for the year.
Grants to support Technical Innovation of the Wikimedia Projects
In June 2024, the Wikimedia Endowment made the following grants to support technical innovation of the Wikimedia projects:
- Kiwix (In allowing more people to share in more knowledge in more languages)
- Abstract Wikipedia (In making knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access or people evading censorship)
- Future Audiences (In exploring strategies for expanding beyond Wikimedia’s existing audiences of consumers and contributors)
- MediaWiki Improvements (In improving the platform in such a way that it increases the maintainability and sustainability of the platform, simplifies feature development and empowers technical contributors, and ensures the platform can better meet current and future needs of open knowledge production and encyclopedic content)
About the Wikimedia Endowment
Launched in 2016, the Wikimedia Endowment is a nonprofit charitable organization providing a permanent safekeeping fund to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. It aims to create a solid financial foundation for the future of the Wikimedia projects. As of June 30, 2024, the Wikimedia Endowment was valued at $144 million USD. The Wikimedia Endowment is a U.S.-based 501(c)3 charity (Tax ID: 87-3024488). To learn more, please visit www.wikimediaendowment.org
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