Funding the Movement: Key Takeaways, Trends, and Lessons from FY 2024-2025 Community Fund Grants

In the last fiscal year, the Wikimedia Community Resources team continued to support communities and individuals to bring knowledge equity, increase awareness and explore impactful opportunities to create and contribute to Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia Community Fund includes rapid grants, conference grants and general support grants. As we closed out the year and paused to reflect and think ahead, we are taking this opportunity to share with our partners, grantees and the broader Wikimedia community the main takeaways, trends and areas for improvement that will support, inform and shape how we evolve and improve resourcing a global movement. 

Main Takeaways – Trends

In this last fiscal year, with support from our Regional Funds Committees, the Community Resources team has funded 417 Community Fund grants to affiliates, other mission-aligned organizations, and people around the world, totaling $18,232,260 USD, prioritizing the Movement Strategy goal of Knowledge Equity. As shown in our funding distribution report for FY 2024-2025, 59% of the Community Fund was distributed outside North America and Northern & Western Europe, up from 40% in FY 2020-2021. 

We highlight below a number of areas for improvement that inform our focus with applicants in the coming year: 

• As demonstrated by our funding distribution, Wikimedia Community Fund applicants continued to focus on addressing knowledge equity guided by the Movement 2030 strategy; however, with some applicants, there was a lack of clarity on how the communities and identified target groups would be impacted by the activities carried out. 
• Across several regions, grantees are being encouraged to improve their internal governance, strategic planning, and accountability structures. 
• There is a shared recognition that many affiliates need stronger technical skills, organisational tools, and fundraising capabilities, and this varies based on the maturity of the organisation and to which their contexts allow them to access enabling resourcing.
• Emerging communities and newer affiliates continue to seek access to resources, particularly through the Rapid Fund program.
• Several regions are encouraging or beginning to invest in partnerships that build relevance and sustainability in an attempt to diversify funding and increase their impact across the free knowledge ecosystem.

Trends in Conference & Event Fund

In 2024-2025, the Conference & Event Fund supported 15 conferences across seven regions. We share below some trends emerging from convenings: 

• Stronger organizational support inspires new conference organizers
  Since July 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Travel Team has been offering hands-on support to conference organizers, managing travel and accommodation for scholarship recipients. This service not only lifts a significant organizational burden from local teams, allowing them to focus on delivering great events, but also leverages the Travel Team’s expertise and established partnerships to manage travel budgets more efficiently.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, ten conferences benefited from this support. Looking back and ahead, we’ve seen a wave of new organizing teams – from Türkiye, Uzbekistan, Czechia, the Philippines, Colombia, Benin, Portugal and Tanzania – step up to host international events. Many organizers have shared that this additional backbone of support gave them the confidence to take on the challenge of convening their communities on a global stage.

• Growth and Impact of regional conferences
  The Wikimedia Foundation continues to support key regional gatherings across the movement, including Wikiconference North America, WikiIndaba, the CEE Meeting, the ESEAP Summit, and WikiArabia. These events are not only growing in scale but are also becoming more impactful each year. In regions where hub structures have been established (i.e. CEE, ESEAP), they are increasingly stepping in to support these conferences, helping shape them into stronger, more diverse community events with inspiring, well-crafted programs. We’ve also seen more structured and transparent selection processes emerging for future conference hosts – a sign of maturing event ecosystems across the movement.

• New thematic conferences shaping the future
  Alongside established regional and thematic events, new topics are emerging, inspiring organizers to bring Wikimedians together for focused conversations. Two landmark gatherings stood out this past year:

• The Youth Conference, hosted by Wikimedia Czech Republic – the first Wikimedia event dedicated entirely to youth engagement, building on the growing momentum of younger contributors in the movement.
  
• WikiCredCon, a first-of-its-kind standalone event in San Francisco, convening Wikimedians, researchers, and allies to tackle the pressing issues of credibility, (dis)information, and knowledge integrity.

These events show how Wikimedia organizations, groups, and individuals are connecting relevant global trends and challenges with the Wikimedia mission – creating spaces that are not just informative, but inspiring and shaping the future.

Since July 2025, the Conference & Event Fund has transitioned from the Community Resources team to the Movement Communications team to provide a more holistic support to conference organizers, as well as streamlining event experiences for Wikimedians across the different events supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Regional Highlights

Central Eastern Europe/Central Asia

• The CEE/Central Asia Regional Fund Committee agreed to make investments in grantees that will support their capacity building around fundraising. One example includes the Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group, who will be applying for a specific nonprofit status in Romania, which will allow them access to funding opportunities locally as well as more broadly in Europe. This will also mean the organization no longer requires a fiscal sponsor, allowing more funding to be directed towards programmatic efforts that benefit the communities it serves.
• The Committee also supported growing two new affiliates through General Support Funding in the CEE Region: Wikimedia Greece User Group and the Wikimedia Cyprus User Group. While Cyprus is a very new affiliate to the movement that brings good cultural institutions and nonprofit expertise to its work, Greece has been a longstanding affiliate in the movement that retains good Wikimedia expertise and experience working with editors and movement events. Interestingly, these two organizations have been working closely together in their programming to complement their respective areas of expertise.
• Overall inflation fell regionally this past year, meaning that grantees were either able to sustain their work this year using a comparable budget from the previous year, and that budgetary growth was premised on supporting the growth of successful programs and events or experimenting with new programmatic opportunities that affiliates identified. Inflation remains somewhat high in a few countries, and was less burdensome compared to FY 2023-2024.

East, Southeast Asia & Pacific (ESEAP)

• This year, the ESEAP Regional Funds Committee took a more hands-on approach to how funding was allocated across communities, including offering percentage-based funding suggestions to partners, which was supportive in helping to prioritise growth across various geographies and sub-regions.
• The Committee agreed to set aside resourcing for growth., Many groups in ESEAP are transitioning across organisational lifecycle stages from start-up to growth stages. Apart from setting aside funds for new applicants, the Regional Funds Committee members may, in the next fiscal year, consider earmarking a pool of funding for growth projects. 
• Exploring Field Building:  The ESEAP Programme Officer and the Regional Funds Committee are exploring the concept of field building and what it could look like for the region through a pilot.  They have begun this process by socialising the idea at the last ESEAP Summit. The ESEAP Programme officer has also shared recommendations with grant applicants to begin thinking about internal capacity needs and is in the process of understanding grantees’/ partners’ priorities and motivations.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

• This year, the region continued to support multi-year grantee partners, including  Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedistas de Uruguay, Wikimedistas de Bolivia, and Wiki Movimento Brasil. A new multi-year grant was funded to Wikimedia Colombia, and for new annual applications, funding was allocated to the Equipo de Wikimedistas de la Universidad de la Plata, Mais Teoria de Historia na Wiki, amongst other partners.
• The LAC committee discussed the importance of equitable distribution, emphasizing the need to consider applicants’ growth needs, their stage of development, and the overall constraints of the regional budget. This approach aims to ensure that each grantee receives a portion of the budget that aligns with their specific growth requirements while balancing the overall funding limitations and considering the various phases of organizational development.
• We continue to see increased efforts to diversify funding sources, especially from more seasoned grantee partners and from a programmatic end of things. Established chapters and user groups constantly strive to expand their programmatic offering related to education, culture, heritage, gender, diversity, and community. Depending on each affiliate’s strengths and the relevance of local contexts, they may also focus on public policy advocacy, human rights, technology, indigenous communities, and climate change. 
• We see new ways of organizing and governance models: Volunteer groups are beginning to explore other forms of organizing beyond the traditional pathway towards an affiliate Chapter or User Group. At the local level, grantee partners opt to keep working with fiscal sponsor institutions instead of becoming autonomous registered institutions in their country. We see other models where mission-aligned initiatives collaborate under a locally registered association, working as an umbrella organization and as the fiscal sponsor. 

Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

• This year marked the formal separation of the Middle East and North Africa region from Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of funding strategy and committee governance. The MENA Regional Funds Committee was officially recognized in February 2025. This shift acknowledges that distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts require tailored strategies, and it empowers MENA stakeholders to make more regionally informed and context-sensitive funding decisions.
• There has been a surge in emerging communities seeking funding to grow their opportunities in the Wikimedia movement, specifically from the Gulf and conflict-affected areas, e.g. Wikimedians of Kuwait and Wikimedia Sudan, respectively. This has led to a significant rise – 70% – from the previous in funding allocated to Rapid Grants for the region.
• Since its inception, the MENA Regional Funds Committee has focused many of its funding decisions on effective governance and financial management. For instance, grants were withheld from a few returning affiliates due to weak governance structures. This marks a shift toward an emphasis of organizational maturity and accountability over automatic or expected renewed funding, a demonstration of substantive intention to improve funding approaches. 
• Communities are increasingly leveraging Wikimedia grants to catalyze external partnerships, particularly with educational institutions and local civil society actors. For example, some communities are using funds to support university partnerships. There is also growing participation in thematic campaigns such as Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki for Climate Change, and Wiki Loves Ramadan.
• Throughout the year, a number of shared capacity gaps were identified across grantees, particularly in strategic planning, organizational development, and technical upskilling: (1) a need for better strategic planning, (3) clearer organizational development pathways and support for volunteer groups, (4) support for communities that are operating under crisis conditions (e.g. Palestine and Sudan), (5) more investment in building the technical capacities of volunteers in MENA and finally (6) greater focus on content partnerships that bring expertise to Wikimedia projects.
• Building on these trends, the Regional Funds Committee will prioritize the following focus areas in the next fiscal year: improved strategic direction, more transparent and accountable governance structures, greater investment in building the technical and organizational capacities of Wikimedians in MENA and promoting a culture of transparency and learning. 

Northern and Western Europe

• The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee awarded 60% of applications as multi-annual grants this year. The Committee welcomed three organisations into the multiannual grant portfolio (Wikimedia Community Ireland, Wikimedia Israel, and Wikimedia Malta), showing that multi-year stability is important in diverse contexts and at different organisational maturity levels. Gender-focused groups were prioritized for growth, while personnel growth was awarded to selected established and developing affiliates equally. Through additional funding, Wikimedia Belgium will embark on professionalising efforts, enabling them to hire their first paid personnel.
• Increased emphasis on supporting organisational maturity: As the region’s grantee community has been the recipient of Wikimedia Community grants over a longer period of time, and due to the recent changes in Affiliate Health Criteria, the Regional Funds Committee has paid particular attention to organisational self-sufficiency, strategic focus, governance capacity, resource efficiency and external fundraising, as signals of readiness to receive general support. As a result, almost 50% of the grantees received conditional funding, asking the organisations to improve one or more areas mentioned above.
• The Committee also focused on understanding how the grantee community responds to external trends influencing the overall Wikimedia movement (e.g. in advocacy work, working with AI, geopolitical changes, multi-generational strategy, overall contribution trends, etc).
• There is a noticeable change in the thematic orientation of the grantee community, venturing into misinformation and disinformation, citizenship, media and information literacy subjects. Grantees are also going deeper into topics related to climate change, AI, and public policy advocacy. In terms of community management, we see a decreasing focus on volunteer recruitment, but increased efforts towards volunteer support and capacity building for existing volunteers in the region.

South Asia

• The Wikimedia community in India continues to be a key player in the region in terms of fundraising opportunities, maturity of the movement and resourcing needs. In the past twelve months, this has translated to:
  • Continuous efforts to tap into alternative payment processing systems for fundraising
  • Active monitoring and support to uphold and maintain the legitimacy of Wikimedia projects in India
  • Ensuring that resourcing pathways to communities remain open, transferring funding pathways from CIS to IIIT-H and continuously adapting to the applicable regulatory and operational requirements in India.
• As the South Asia Community Resources team continues to support a thriving community within India, there is a further commitment to support emerging opportunities in other South Asia regions and explore an intentional approach to providing more space, representation and resourcing to other communities with funding restrictions in mind. For example, Wikimedia Bangladesh accessed its first General Support and Conference grant this year.
• In the coming year (FY 2025-2026), the South Asia Community Resources team anticipates a strong interest in: (1) unlocking the potential to access resourcing, (2) increasing the share of resourcing for the South Asia region, (3) building on depth and diversity within the South Asia region. For example, given that the widely anticipated Wiki Conference India 2025 will not take place and the SAARC conference 2026 proposal was declined, we anticipate that there will be a desire for more community-driven collaborations within and across sub-regions, and emerging communities are keen to play a more active role in the region. We look forward to supporting these initiatives. 
• Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) continues to be instrumental in supporting this community growth in India, and we also see more communities coming forward. For example, Wiki Loves Folklore and Feminism Activities in India (a consolidated campaign/peer-led effort), West Bengal User Group support of the Bhutan wikimedian community. Through intentional holding of spaces, we hope to support more learning and mentoring across geographies. 

Sub-Saharan Africa

• This year, the Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Funds Committee awarded General Support grants to 25 grantees representing 13 countries, including 2 grantees with a regional focus (Africa Wiki Women and Wiki In Africa). In all, four grantees are newcomers (Jenga Wikipedia Ya Kiswahili Tanzania, Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania, Wikilinguila DRC and Wikimedians Madagascar User Group)
• Increased emphasis on joint resourcing to strengthen collaboration and cooperation among user groups: Following the recommendation from the Committee, four Tanzanian user groups submitted two joint funding applications focusing on consolidating their collaboration through joint activities instead of working in isolation. This was aligned with committee engagement on the proposals recommending joint applications in countries where several user groups are active. The implementation of these joint activities will require commitment from all parties involved, including information sharing, regular monitoring and clear roles and responsibilities. It is our hope that the case of Tanzania joint activities will produce tangible results, and can be a model that can be replicated in other countries.
• This year, General Support Funds have been allocated to support various Wikimedia projects, mostly related to community support and engagement, education and gender and diversity. All of our grantees had a particular interest in activities related to participation in campaigns and contests. 

US & Canada

• The US & Canada Regional Committee set a 500,000 USD funding cap for General Support Funds. Due to modest budgetary growth, interest in supporting growth for developing grantees, and interest in supporting new grantees in the region, the Regional Funds Committee supported implementing a funding cap of 500,000 USD of annual funding for any single applicant. The Committee may consider revising this cap in the future, as well as making minimal exceptions for one-time investments in grantees (such as for supporting fundraising capacity building).
• The General Support Fund continues to support a mix of robust organizations operating with either regional or thematic strategies. Organizations focused on more immediate communities within the region, including Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia New York City, and Wikimedia DC. Organizations operating on a more thematic basis include WikiPortraits, Whose Knowledge and Wiki Project Med, whose work benefits communities both within and outside the region.
• Rapid Funds have increasingly supported the revitalization of smaller regional affiliates, as well as technical work for users with extended rights. Organizers have been successful at using smaller grants to re-engage affiliate members that were less active during the pandemic through gatherings and events at cultural institutions. Furthermore, Rapid Funds have been able to support improvements to administrative tools and processes around user blocks when addressing disruptive behavior on-wiki.

Towards Greater Subsidiarity 

Over the past year, we’ve made meaningful progress in advancing the principle of subsidiarity in resource distribution by working closely with movement partners who are well-placed to make funding decisions in their local or thematic contexts.

Through strong collaboration with organizers of core campaigns such as Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Africa, and SheSaid, we successfully implemented funding initiatives that placed these partners in direct decision-making roles. Wiki in Africa reviewed and made decisions on approximately 30 funding applications totalling $80,000, and is now in the process of reviewing campaign reporting and outcomes. Similarly, the Wiki Loves Earth team led decision-making on 12 applications in Rapid Fund cycles, amounting to $43,133. These efforts signal a growing capacity and trust in community-led funding processes that are both contextually informed and aligned with organizer priorities.

In Nigeria, we are supporting the establishment of a national funding initiative aimed at strengthening coordination among Wikimedia affiliates and reducing fragmentation. Building on the success of their existing micro-funding and support programs, affiliates in Nigeria have engaged in community consultations and are now co-designing the initiative based on input received. This marks a significant step toward community and locally anchored resource distribution. 

Looking ahead to FY 2025–2026, our goal is to support seven movement partners in taking measurable steps toward subsidiarity, including deepening our work with Wiki in Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, and affiliates in Nigeria, and launching new initiatives with Wikimedia Colombia, CEE Hub, WikiFranca, and Wikimedia Indonesia. Each partner will demonstrate tangible outcomes — such as managing funds or assuming key decision-making responsibilities — as part of this broader shift towards shared power and equity in funding.

FY25-26 Budget

As with last year, we used a participatory budgeting process to inform the FY 2025–2026 budget, building on the model we established with the affiliate Executive Directors working group and Regional Funds Committees. This approach reflects our ongoing commitment to shared decision-making, especially in how resources are allocated across regions. Last year’s process also led to the introduction of a three-year grant plan, offering affiliates, grantee partners and regional funding committees greater clarity for multi-year planning.

Similar to last year, we created the regional allocation of the Community Fund using two key inputs:

• Weighted average inflation by region – based on IMF data, this takes into account country-level inflation weighted by the size of last year’s grant to the affiliate(s) in each country.
• Expected growth of existing affiliates and projected newcomers – based on conversations between Program Officers and grantee partners, and discussions with Regional Funds Committees during funding rounds.

While we recognize that we cannot fund all expected growth, we use these insights to inform our decisions and balance needs across the movement. We’re also mindful of the tradeoffs that may arise—particularly if affiliate budget projections exceed available funds or restrict our ability to support new entrants to the movement. We welcome ongoing feedback from grantee partners and funding committees to improve this approach.

The result of this year’s process is summarized in the table below, showing FY 2025–2026 Community Fund allocations by region, including the specific growth percentage assigned to each.

Gratitude

We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all Regional Funds Committee members for their commitment, dedication, and effort in the decision-making process. We recognize that this is not an easy endeavour, and we deeply appreciate the knowledge and experiences you share to guide how we resource movement partners.

We are also grateful to our grantee partners for their steadfast commitment and collaboration in advancing knowledge equity through diverse initiatives around the world. Thank you

For any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at communityresources@wikimedia.org.