Hi everyone,
Thank you to everyone who has read and provided feedback on my message - we appreciate the community’s support and engagement in the Foundation’s financial well-being. Based on the feedback received over the past few days, I wanted to provide some additional detail:
- We’ve spent our surplus reserves knowingly and intentionally, because that’s what they’re for - if people have given us money in previous years, it’s because they wanted us to spend it on GNOME! We’ve been able to sponsor things like travel, internships, Flathub and Gtk4 development by spending down these funds, as well as smoothing a drop-off in donations and sponsorships during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 which impacted our usual events calendar.
- Our fiscal year runs October - September. This year we’re expecting to break-even, meaning our income is expected to match our expenditure, and we should start and end the year with the same reserves. The budget for the year covers all of our usual core activities: events, infrastructure, travel, marketing, fiscal hosting of GNOME related projects, operating Flathub and administration of the STF 1M EUR project.
- From an abundance of caution, the reserves policy says we should keep 12 additional months of staff salary and expenses to keep doing those core activities without any further income, which is an extremely unlikely emergency scenario. We are not expecting income to drop-off and so there is no anticipated need to tap into on these reserves, as we are sustainably matching expenses to income.
- The reason we’re hoping to raise more funds is our ambition to do more for the community - the strategy has a number of exciting initiatives we’ll be launching over the coming months and explaining how people can support. Stay tuned!
Thanks,
Rob