Talk:Global Resource Distribution Committee

Introducing the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee

The interim Global Resource Distribution Committee has been officially created with all its members, after the designation of the three seats for affiliate background. This new community-wide committee has been tasked with setting the strategy, structures, and processes for resource allocation across the Wikimedia Movement.

This is the initial composition of the committee:

• Barakat Adegboye (Sub-Saharan Africa)
• Delphine Ménard (Northern & Western Europe)
• Matthew Vetter (North America)
• Mervat (Middle East & North Africa)
• Lucas Piantá (Latin American & Caribbean)
• Mykola Kozlenko (Central & Eastern Europe & Central Asia)
• Taweetham (East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific)
• J. Balaji (South Asia)
• Lucy Moore (Thematic)
• Lucy Crompton-Reid (Affiliate)
• Mónica Bonilla (Affiliate)
• Herschal Jackson (Affiliate)
• Jorge Vargas (Wikimedia Foundation)

The 13 seats of the committee have been selected through different processes aiming to form a competent and diverse team set for success in a 2-year pilot. The first official meeting was hosted at Wikimania in August 2025, together with a session to present the interim GRDC. JVargas (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Request for feedback: What are the most significant challenges your community faces as it relates to resource distribution within the movement?

To inform the interim GRDC work, we seek feedback from all affiliates, other recipients of grants, and everyone else interested in an effective distribution of funds across the Wikimedia movement. For more information, see Request for feedback. Please add below your answers to the question What are the most significant challenges your community faces as it relates to resource distribution within the movement? Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:32, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

Hello there. In our region (LAC), we have at least four "fully consolidated groups" requesting around 65 % of the region's assigned funds (ps.: eye estimated, not real numbers). These kinds of challenges we have in the region stem from the fact that we want to fund everyone, but the "too big to fail" effect is present here. So, how can we support the small groups present in the region?, How can we ensure the process is fair for everyone?. It's easy for an established affiliate to ask for funds because they have staff or knowledge about the process, but a newcomer or first-timer needs more resources or guidance about the process. This kind of challenge is present in every region and seems a good starting point to discuss scarcity, how to be fair and how to support -with limits- an affiliate. Kindly, Superzerocool (talk) 02:02, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

• We at Wiki Project Med are happy with the current resources we receive from the WMF. Though most of our work is still done by volunteers, funding has helped pay programmers for work we are unable to find volunteers willing/able to do and pay for inventory in multiple countries as we adjust to new international realities. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:24, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

• The most profound challenge is the persistent and unfair erasure of Southern Europe as a distinct region within the Movements’ resource and strategic frameworks. We are chronically subsumed into a broader, inaccurate category, grouped with the wealthy and institutionally robust North-Western Europe. There is also a separate category for the CEE. However, Southern Europe does not exist at all.

This is not a mere oversight, it is an inequity. It is fundamentally unfair to impose strategies and processes designed for Berlin or Warsaw upon communities in Lisbon or Madrid. Our socio-economic realities, marked by high youth unemployment, a predominance of small-to-medium enterprises rather than large philanthropic foundations, the specific contractor (“autónomo”) model, and unique cultural dynamics around open knowledge, are rendered invisible. We cannot properly operate in a “one-size-fits-all” model.

The single most critical structural reform we need is our own dedicated, regional funding pool. A ring-fenced allocation for Southern Europe is not a request for special treatment, it is a demand for equitable access. Only by having a pool designed with and for our specific challenges, such as funding core stability for small associations, supporting volunteer retention in economies with high precarious employment, and addressing our unique content gaps, can we break the cycle of underfunding. This pool would allow us to compete based on our local impact and strategic value to the movement, rather than losing out in competitions against regions with vastly different economies and institutional histories. It would also allow us to access resources within a framework of regional and contextual expertise, in which we do not need to explain again and again how things work in our region.

Until the Movement recognizes Southern Europe's unique profile and needs, not as a sub-region of another, but as a strategic priority in its own right with its own dedicated resources, resource distribution will remain inefficient and unjust, perpetuating a cycle of missed potential.

On behalf of Wikiesfera, PatriHorrillo (talk) 12:34, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

Request for feedback: Where would you start improving the current resources distribution process?

To inform the interim GRDC work, we seek feedback from all affiliates, other recipients of grants, and everyone else interested in an effective distribution of funds across the Wikimedia movement. For more information, see Request for feedback. Please add below your answers to the question Where would you start improving the current resources distribution process? Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:33, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

We need to start where we can make the most impact. The biggest budget item by far is the WMF expenditure on salaries, so that's always going to be the first item to consider. How do we measure its impact and compare it to the alternatives? Nemo 15:26, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Hello, I'm Dennis, a current member of RFC LAC until next year. About the current process, I read the note-taking from Hispanic affiliates in Buenos Aires, and I feel impressed by the unknown about how the process works and how the process is made by committee members, even from some people who were working in other WMF committees in the past. I see the first step is gathering or reaching the affiliates and showing (again or first time) how the grant-making is doing in WMF and how the endowment is doing in the movement, I read a lot of negative feedback about our working as "bad decision makers" and this is midly frustrating for me, because I every time wants to support my region, formerly as WMCL board member and currently serving in this committee in the past years.

Other think "to improve" is asking the affiliates if they want to continue supporting this way to ask for funds, or if they are thinking of the previous models. I read the notes from LATAM+Spain notes, and they want a new model based on thematic instead of region: it's pretty tricky to do some kind of this separation, because the language itself seems a good starting point, but we couldn't figure out how much diversity topics could arise in the next years.

In my experience reviewing all the proposals for my region, I suggest being more strict with non-good-standing affiliates (ie, don't meet criteria about internal governance, or they don't prove the impact). Unfortunately, the number of affiliates (recognised or not by WMF) has been growing pretty fast in the last years, and the funds available are not growing so fast that small affiliates can't be funded because some large affiliates need more money to "maintain the lights on" of the organisation.

I know, this is tricky feedback, because you ask about how to start, but the first step is reconozing about the needing is growing so fast, the newcomers needs money and the big one need more money, so the question is "how can make process more fairly for everyone?", Will the WMF movement so open the receive new groups without any limits? (yeah, I know the RfC from the AffCom).

Kindly, Superzerocool (talk) 01:54, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

• Establish specific, significant funds for priority strategic areas like gender equity. This recognizes that closing knowledge gaps in these areas requires specialized, sustained investment. It allows groups focused on gender to apply for resources without competing against large, general-purpose affiliates, ensuring funding aligns directly with Movement Strategy.

We also think that it would be good to shift a substantial portion of funding from purely project-based grants to core operational and capacity-building grants. This means directly supporting the professionalization of groups, paying for staff, secure workspaces, legal fees, and basic tools. The goal is to move groups from a precarious existence to stability, enabling them to plan beyond a short term project cycle and focus on high-impact work. There is a reason most gender groups are user groups, with many operating in conditions akin to hand-to-mouth, and quite frankly that reflects very poorly on the Movement and its reliance on volunteer exploitation as a model. We need to sustainably grow and professionalise these groups.

On behalf of Wikiesfera, PatriHorrillo (talk) 12:34, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

Request for feedback: What are the top priority areas that we must support? And given limited funds, in which areas should we reduce our support?

To inform the interim GRDC work, we seek feedback from all affiliates, other recipients of grants, and everyone else interested in an effective distribution of funds across the Wikimedia movement. For more information, see Request for feedback. Please add below your answers to the question What are the top priority areas that we must support? And given limited funds, in which areas should we reduce our support? Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:34, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

I think we must ask ourselves about how the money is retrieved and how it is spent in the movement. I reviewed some grant proposals, around 65 % ~ 90 % are staff or organization spending, and the other amount is for travel for activities or participating in Wikimedia events. So, the main question to ask is "how much money are we spending to 'maintain the lights on' and keep running everything in every affiliate and WMF?". This kind of answer will set up our "minimal amount to be a movement" (without volunteers). This kind of question only creates a concept about "hey, everyone, we need X USD to keep the Y organization running without organizing anything". After this introspective answer, we could ask ourselves if the impact of activities helps to change the world, or if we are creating only a way to support a personal passion instead of a collective benefit.

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't answer your question because if there is no analysis about spending, it's not easy to guess what area to reduce anything...

Superzerocool (talk) 02:17, 27 November 2025 (UTC) (ps: don't read this as an accusation; maybe a language barrier is present here!)

• IMO software and tool development should be prioritized. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:21, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

• Underrepresented groups and topics. If gender equity (and similarly, topics related to the Global South, LGBT, indigenous knowledge) is a true priority in terms of participation, content, and leadership, then it must be funded accordingly. Provide real multi-year core funding to affiliates and groups that demonstrate measurable impact in these strategic areas, enabling them to grow sustainably.

While we think it is problematic to operate under a scarcity mentality that is very likely articifial, the logical choice would be to reduce support to activities that do not reduce knowledge gaps and do not demonstrably contribute to Movement Strategy. That includes projects with no clear equity lens, which do not explicitly address how they will improve knowledge equity or diversity, as well as inertia funding for old affiliates. It is more than possible to examine continued, disproportionate funding to large, established affiliates in well-represented regions if they are not pivoting significantly on closing critical gaps, for instance. Support should be recalibrated towards their strategic initiatives, not their institutional permanence.

On behalf of Wikiesfera, PatriHorrillo (talk) 12:34, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

As a newer user group organizer, I wish that there was more support for expanding the pie. User groups could be supported to apply to varied sources of funding, and not be over-dependent on the Foundation. This would also make these programs more sustainable and accessible to new entrants. E mln e (talk) 22:51, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

GRDC update - November 2025

The interim GRDC officially started its work at Wikimania last August, we have made a lot of progress since then, and it is time to start reporting updates regularly.

Conferences

Publicly, we have introduced the GRDC pilot at several events, sharing sessions with the Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations pilot. We have been to the CEE Meeting, Encuentro de la Comunidad Hispanohablante, WikiConference North America, and GLAM Wiki.

Online calls

We are also participating in online community events, and organizing our own workshops upon request. We have joined the last ESEAP Community Call, we are confirmed to join the next MENA community call, and we are starting to plan workshops for South Asia and other communities. If you want us to run a GRDC session for your community, let us know!

Setting up the committee

Internally, we have set up the basic procedures the committee needs: communication channels, collaboration tools, a decision-making process, a conflict of interest policy, and our page here on Meta. We are also developing a comprehensive stakeholder engagement plan to ensure alignment across the Movement.

Refreshed principles for a refreshed strategy

Last but not least, we have started working on what we plan to be our most important work in the first year of this pilot: a first draft of a new resource distribution strategy. The current strategy was designed in 2020-21, a lot has changed since then, and it is time to revisit it and address new questions and challenges. As a first step, we are reviewing and updating the current principles, on top of which we will build the strategy – more about this soon. We are also requesting feedback at community events and here on Meta about the priorities our refreshed strategy should focus on. Your feedback is very important to put us on the right track!

Ongoing work

This is what we are working on and expect to report upon in our next update:

• Run GRDC workshops at several online community events.
• Start gathering feedback from affiliates, other grantees, and everyone interested in resource allocation across the Wikimedia movement.
• Complete a first draft of the refreshed grantmaking principles, ready for community review.
• Research current resource distribution challenges in the Wikimedia movement, previous strategic discussions and solutions implemented, and models from other non-profit organizations.
• Define a plan to engage with all the stakeholders related to resource distribution (BoT, Regional Fund Committees, Affiliations Committee, WMF staff, a good representation of affiliates and other types of grantees…)

What do you think? We welcome your questions, comments and suggestions. And watch this page to learn about more updates.

On behalf of the GRDC, Mervat (talk) 12:53, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

It's sensible to start from an evaluation of the 2020 principles and strategy, however they were very vague: I for one would have a very hard time saying whether the goals of the "relaunch" were achieved. Is the committee going to be provided with some analysis on the changes and their impact so far, compared against the stated goals? I've sometimes seen some figures in the WMF annual reports but they were extremely high level and not suitable to assess the improvement against the goals.

A survey (asking people whether they feel there was progress against those goals) could also be useful, although any survey tends to be severely affected by survivorship bias: the responses from people/orgs/groups who have been supported by grants in the past ~5 years should be somehow segregated from the answers from those who were not or who used to be before, so that some data normalisation is possible. Nemo 15:24, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

@Nemo bis:, thank you for your feedback. We aim to define a refreshed grantmaking strategy with principles, vision, recommendations, and metrics that are specific, actionable, and measurable. We are finishing a first version of the principles that we will publish in January for ongoing review. We hope this first building block of the new strategy will be also a statement about the concreteness we are aiming for.

Regarding your idea of creating a survey to gather feedback, we thank you for the suggestion. We will keep it in mind as we plan our next steps. Please don’t hesitate to share any other ideas or comments you may have! --Mervat (talk) 11:17, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

GRDC Update - December 2025

Hi again, these are the highlights of the Global Resource Distribution Committee since our last update.

Refreshed principles for a refreshed strategy

We completed a first internal draft of principles which will underpin a new resource distribution strategy. We are finishing our internal review and we plan to publish the first version of these principles in January. Looking ahead to the year 2026, we will work on a first version of the vision of this new strategy.

Events

We ran workshops at the MENA Connect Community Call, the Executive Directors Annual Meeting in São Paulo, and a community call for North America. We also sent a written update for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees meeting in December, and we have submitted a session proposal for the ESEAP Conference 2026.

Nominating contacts

We are nominating different committee members as main contacts for different stakeholders: the Regional Fund Committees, community volunteers, the Executive Directors Group, other Affiliates not represented in the EDs group, the Affiliations Committee, and the Wikimedia Foundation. Having these specialized contacts will help us respond quicker in spaces like here on Meta-Wiki and will allow us to engage in a regular way with our key stakeholders.

Coordination with the Affiliations Committee

AffCom is one of our main stakeholders. Delphine Ménard, Herschal Jackson and Matt Vetter have been nominated to be the main GRDC points of contact for this committee. We just had our first meeting together, and our goal is to establish a continuous collaboration as we work on our respective mandates, which are intertwined.

Coordination with the Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations pilot

The Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations pilot is proceeding with their work selecting key questions we need to address as a movement, and co-creating their answers. The GRDC is a main stakeholder for any questions and proposals related to funding, and we have been invited to join the focus group that is currently selecting these key questions.

Other ongoing work

• Continue gathering feedback – we may take our time to respond but we are reading everything and we are very grateful to the first people contributing their ideas. Special thanks to Nemo, Superzerocool, Doc James and PatriHorrillo for your feedback posted in this Talk page, as well as all the participants in the past workshops.
• Research current resource distribution challenges in the Wikimedia movement, previous strategic discussions and solutions implemented, and models from other non-profit organizations.
• Meet the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (who recently got new members) and the new CEO, to ensure we are aligned on the GRDC mandate and priorities.

Mervat (talk) 11:02, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

GRDC Update - January 2026

Happy January! These are the highlights of the Global Resource Distribution Committee since our last update.

Refreshed Funding Principles ready for your review

The GRDC is expected to answer important questions and to make important decisions. To do this work well, we need to agree on answers and decisions based on a refreshed strategy grounded in our current situation and objectives as a movement. The Funding Principles guide the strategic priorities of the GRDC and everyone else involved in Wikimedia grantmaking. They also guide us on how decisions are made and why. This is a major update and we welcome your feedback for improvements in the Discussion page.

Strategic purpose and priorities

With the Funding Principles in place, it is time to define the purpose and the priorities of the strategy we are set to define and propose as a first draft by Wikimania, in August. We have divided the GRDC members in two groups and we have started drafting the proposals. We are building this work on top of the Funding Principles, the feedback received, past and current work in the Wikimedia movement (like the Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations pilot), and good examples by other organizations.

Coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation

We are increasing our contacts within the Wikimedia Foundation and our involvement in their planning activities. Since our start, we have been working closely with the Community Resources and Partnerships team, who organizes resource distribution and supports our committee. Recently we have met the Board of Trustees and we have established a direct connection to ensure that we remain strategically aligned. Also, we are getting ready to participate in the conversations related to the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2026-2027.

Specialized outreach

As implied in the information above, the GRDC is reaching out to our stakeholders and organizing ongoing conversations and work with each of them. For this to work, we have organized ourselves in working groups engaging with each of our main stakeholders: the Community (volunteers and volunteer-based affiliates), the Executive Directors Group, the Affiliations Committee, the Regional Fund Committees, and the Wikimedia Foundation. We are still tweaking some details about who goes to which group, and when we have the groups confirmed we will publish them on our page here on Meta. If you have questions or feedback for us, you don’t have to wait. Just contact us!

--Taweethaも (talk) 13:46, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for these updates. I’m not sure where the best place is to surface this, but I understand that the concept of thematic funding is already on the GRDC committee’s radar. I don’t have all the solutions, but I do think it’s important to raise and acknowledge this, and I appreciate the committee for considering it. I’d be interested to know how the GRDC is currently thinking about thematics, and how I and other thematic affiliates might be helpful in moving that conversation forward. So far, I’ve been instructed that the best way to engage is through the talk page here, but if another method or specific information would be more helpful, please let me know. I’m also happy to talk more about how Art+Feminism’s work relates to this topic if that would be useful.

To give a very general example of Art+Feminism’s work, we are a US-based nonprofit, but our leadership team, board members, network organizers, and event organizers are truly global. Like much of the movement, we currently see the most activity in Africa, and our leadership team, board, and network organizers all include strong representation there. I want to clarify that our work is not limited to Africa. We hold events every year across multiple continents and countries worldwide. I share this simply as one example of how a strictly regional model does not always align with how our work is structured. --Kiraface (talk) 22:00, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Kiraface thank you very much for reaching out. Yes, a comment here is a good start. We also have our ongoing request for feedback about three main questions just above, in case you want to share more in the context of those questions. And of course, you can reach out to grdc@wikimedia.org or to me as the GRDC member selected for the thematic seat. In any case, your point about the need to discuss thematic funding is shared by the GRDC. We want to have more conversations with the organizations working on thematic priorities. While most regions have clear spaces for regional conversations, so far we have struggled finding the right venues to have discussions centered on thematics. If you and other thematic organizations have a space to meet and discuss, or if you want to have an online workshop with us, we just need to find the best time(s) and meet! I'd add that the same concern was shared by others at the GLAMWiki conference - when thematic work is international it can be hard to work out how it sits in the existing funding structures. I recall at least three conversations on this, which I fed back to the rest of the GRDC, but it is really informative to know that's a shared concern of A+F's. Also, I feel I owe you an apology: I meant to reach out last Autumn, but my PhD took over my life, let me know if you'd still like to chat separately. Plus, a second apology that it took me so long to respond to this. Speak soon Lajmmoore (talk) 22:00, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

We'd love to be involved in a conversation! We'll have more flexibility to meet after this month. --Kiraface (talk) 15:20, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

GRDC update - February 2026

We published our last update recently and we have been working mostly on internal tasks since then. Here is a summary of ongoing work:

Funding Principles

We are processing the feedback about the Funding Principles. We have got several insightful comments and we are working on the responses. We would like to thank you for your patience; some items are more straightforward to address than others, and in parallel we are carefully analyzing the most significant points.

Strategic priorities

A key takeaway from the feedback is the need to clearly explain what problems this strategy is trying to solve. In recent months, we have advanced two parallel tracks: refining the Funding Principles and defining the core strategic priorities and challenges ahead. We expect to share this work in the coming weeks. We will also use this first version to inform the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual planning, and to focus our conversations with the communities, affiliates, and other stakeholders.

Strategic purpose

We are also working on the purpose of the Grantmaking Strategy, defining why it matters, who it serves, and what long-term success looks like. A good purpose definition ensures the strategy stays coherent, relevant and community-focused. This work is still ongoing and closely aligned with the broader strategy development.  

Meeting the Regional Fund Committees

In the coming weeks, the GRDC is holding sessions with the Regional Fund Committees. As key implementers of the current strategy, their perspectives help us better understand emerging challenges and opportunities. The GRDC is also responsible for guiding the policy and strategic direction of the Regional Fund Committees; these meetings aim to learn from their feedback and better understand their ideas, needs, and requests.

Do you also want to meet the GRDC? Contact us! Ridzaina (talk) 09:59, 23 February 2026 (UTC)