“Yes” - we have to do all three: Set up and deliver initiatives, talk about them, fundraise off the back of that.
One thing I want to make clear - there is a bunch of stuff that the Foundation does, and has done since day one, and I think should always should do - which is hugely valuable and necessary work to keep the GNOME project and community healthy. Running infrastructure, organising events, sponsoring travel and hackfests, etc. Through our existing sponsors, advisory board and regular donations we don’t cover the annual cost of this, but it’s not so far off that there’s a huge cause for alarm - we could make some savings, go through our reserves slowly while we figure something out, and/or lean on the board to try and bring some new advisory board members in.
However, that’s a very modest goal for what the Foundation can achieve. We probably couldn’t afford/justify an Executive Director in that scenario. I personally have more ambition that the Foundation should be a contributor to and an advocate for GNOME, rather than simply being an assistant/facilitator to the community. Right now we have cash in the bank (just less than $1M) so the choice is about how confident are we that we can set up some of these initiatives and use them to raise new funds - ie do we go big or go home.
I’m obviously hugely biased but the current sketch of initiatives at Evolving a strategy for 2022 and beyond (tl;dr - investment in newcomers & diversity, economic support via paid apps via flathub, decentralised apps for local-first computing) is what I think is a “pretty good start” for where the Foundation can set up or focus more on initiatives which meet a handful of requirements:
- they are directly connected to contributing to and supporting the GNOME project, community and the wider and Linux desktop ecosystem
- they all address a particular audience of people in the outside world who they can benefit
- they each have an audience of potential funders to approach and we can articulate why GNOME working on this initiative is beneficial for their objectives
- we’ve got existing track record in or around each area which we can use to demonstrate to potential funders that we’re likely to be able to deliver on scaling up / accelerating the initiatives
- they speak to at least what I understand to be our shared values and objectives as a community
I would say this was a contrast to our Coding Education Challenge which met some but not all of these criteria - I think the Foundation executed it very well (and I’m very glad it brought @mwu to the Foundation team), but it kind of came and went and left some members wondering what lasting impact it had on GNOME itself.
Obviously the new board and/or the new ED might disagree and adjust some or all of these initiatives, reprioritise them, add or remove some, but the bottom line remains - if we don’t use our reserves to “bootstrap” to a stronger position for fundraising, the inevitable outcome is that we will go through our reserves and need to reduce costs further, and end up in a situation where all of the Foundation’s capacity will be used to deliver on the fiscal sponsorship / assistance / facilitation kind of activities. (I kind of think of this as “Initiative 0” which we fund “first”.)
An essential part of finding new backers is doing a better job of talking about the work we already do in the space - when it comes to funding, the perceived impact of our initiatives is seen through the lens of how good we are at talking about it. @Reginadata can maybe talk more about it as she has done some amazing work in this area speaking to potential corporate sponsors around D&I work, but some of the people she spoke to simply weren’t aware about how strongly the GNOME community and Foundation values and invests in diversity and inclusivity in our community, and there wasn’t a clear place to go, or material that we could give them, that brought together a coherent story about what we’re doing.
The happy cycle we’re hoping to bootstrap for is to get better at executing these programs, get better at talking about them, and get better at raising funds off the back of that . These skills and experience in the nonprofit space are what we’ll be looking for in the new Executive Director as we need to pick up the pace on all three, and I hope that some of our new board members might be able to contribute to as well.