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Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/Meta2020

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2019 Report

The Art+Feminism User Group was recognized as a Wikimedia user group in September 2017. This report outlines the accomplishments and activities organized by the group between September 2019 and September 2020.

This report is essentially a summary of three other more detailed reports:

Summary

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In 2020, we had events in 6 continents, in 27 countries and 20 languages. In light of the global pandemic of COVID-19, some of our scheduled events were able to pivot to virtual space, exhibiting a remarkable adaptability by various Art+Feminism edit-a-thons organizers. Thanks to this, successful virtual events were held in Armenia, Brazil, Poland, across the US and more. Unfortunately not all organizers were able to shift to in-person to virtual events and their planned activities were ultimately canceled. As we prepare for our 2020-2021 campaign, “business as usual” is not effective or appropriate as we continue to be in a global pandemic simultaneously with a civil rights movement. It’s been reported that in a recent study, the majority of people will not feel comfortable returning to museums until a vaccine for COVID-19 is widely available. The pandemic is allowing us to focus internally and be less number driven. We want to work on intentional care and deepen our relationships within our community.

Finances

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Our final budget summary and budget can be viewed in Final SAPG report for 2019-2020 .

This was our first year working without a fiscal sponsor.

Activities

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Annual Campaign

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Over the past seven years, Art+Feminism has experienced steady growth with our annual campaign. Excluding the impacts of COVID-19 and organizational changes on our most recent campaign, A+F has had increased participation and expanded our global reach on an annual basis. In 2020-2021, we are utilizing some of the qualitative data we’ve collected over the years to better support the A+F community and build stronger, mutually serving relationships. Our goal for this upcoming year is to strengthen internal and external relationships and deepen our impact where we already have a presence. Initiatives like strategic planning, Indigenous community work, small donor cultivation and board development are all key elements in this overall effort of community care.

We will be expanding our training offerings for our Regional Organizers and event organizers during our 2020-2021 campaign, as part of that work of community building. For Regional Organizers, these sessions will offer technical training (e.g., how to use technological tools like Streak to efficiently participate in the A+F workflow, etc.) and community-building (via skill-sharing). For our event organizers, these training sessions will include A+F staples like Intro to Editing Wikipedia along with skill-building opportunities relevant to event organizing and adapted to the virtual landscape.

Additionally, we are further preparing our community for COVID-19’s impact on our ability to gather and edit in person. At the end of our 2019-2020 campaign, we produced the Art+Feminism Collaborative Resources for Virtual Events document. Given the ongoing pandemic, our 2020-2021 campaign will include virtual edit-a-thons directly organized by the A+F leadership team and support to experienced and new edit-a-thon organizers in hosting virtual events.

Non Profit Organization Building

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In May 2019, our application to become a not-for-profit entity was approved by the IRS. This year, our focus has been on establishing efficient, sustainable, forward looking operations appropriate to our new status. Below you will find documentation of the steps we've taken so far.

De-centering co-founders role

  • Part of expanding the leadership collective and elevating members is part of a strategic process of the co-founders stepping back. Michael Mandiberg stepped down as a Lead Co-Organizer to become President of the Board. Siân Evans and Jacqueline Mabey will serve one more year as Lead Co-Organizers. The leadership collective has been working to document all institutional knowledge held by the founders.

Board

  • One of the mandates of our non-profit status was to build out a Board of Directors. The leadership collective decided to start with a small board of three required members, so as to give the community and new Executive Director space to help grow the organization further. As of writing, our current Board of Directors includes:
    • Michael Mandiberg, Acting Board President, Artist; Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center
    • Sheetal Prajapati, Acting Secretary, Advisory Committee Chair, Faculty, School of Visual Arts; Principal, Lohar Projects
    • Roderick Schrock, Acting Treasurer, Executive Director, Eyebeam
  • Changes from Grant Proposal: In our Staffing Plan, we initially proposed that Michael Mandiberg join the Board of Directors as the Treasurer, but at the advice of the other board members, we appointed Michael Acting Board President, as he came in with the most institutional knowledge.

Advisory Board

At the request of our Board of Directors, we also established an Advisory Board to help shepherd us through this crucial transitional year of institution-building. This committee of field experts, works with A+F’s board of directors and executive director over a 6-month period to provide guidance and insight through their expertise to support the organization’s initial development and growth over the next 12-18 months. The first meeting was held on February 4, 2020. Currently, our Advisory Board consists of:

Building the leadership collective

  • Melissa Tamani, Siân Evans and Jacqueline Mabey all continue to serve on the Leadership Collective as Lead Co-organizers.
  • We added Mohammed Sadat Abdulai and Amber Berson as halftime Lead Co-organizers. This is a change from our Staffing Plan, in which we proposed bringing on one additional Lead Co-organizer, but Mohmamed and Amber both brought different and specific skillsets to the team and have become invaluable members.

Regional Ambassadors

In this grant cycle, we expanded and codified our Regional Ambassador team to operate more smoothly and efficiently. Our team currently consists of:

  • United States
    • Stacey Allan, California
    • Amanda Meeks, Southwest & Midwest
    • Megan O’Hearn, New York
    • Jaison Oliver, South
    • Gabrielle Reed, New England
    • Sophie Reverdy, Mid-Atlantic
    • Taryn Tomasello, Northwest & Midwest
  • International
    • Daniela Brugger, Europe/UK
    • Medhavi Gandhi, South Asia
    • Gisselle Giron, Latin America
    • Walaa Abdel Manaem, Middle East
    • Jessie Mi, Asia
    • Juliana Monteiro, Portuguese Speaking Countries
    • Athina Petsou, Europe/UK
    • Sofia Stancioff, Canada
    • Dominique Elaine Yao, Francophone Africa + France
    • Zita Ursula Zage, Anglophone Africa
  • Wiki Regional Ambassador
    • Richard Knipel

New Roles: Executive Director and Project Administrator

  • We conducted an extensive search for an Executive Director and hired Kira Wisniewski. So far, Kira has used her extensive nonprofit experience to help build out infrastructure to make Art+Feminism sustainable into the future.
  • We also hired our 2018-2019 grant cycle's Community Fellow, Nina Yeboah, as a part-time Program Administrator. This position has been invaluable in terms of building out our Regional Organizer roles and supporting local events on the ground, including grant funding and communications.

Contractors: Grant Writer and Webmxter/Data Integration

  • Grant writer: We decided to hold off in hiring a grant writer to prioritize other financial needs.
  • Webmxter/Data Integration: A CFP to built a new website with data integration features will be sent out in April 2020. As a stopgap measure, a simple, interim version of the website was built in an ADA-accessible format and Airtable was employed to collect data from our participants.

Protocols and Processes

We've set up important structural systems like payroll, worker's comp, and board insurance. We continue to establish and document protocols and procedures as we shift from a collective to an official non-profit.

As noted in our 2020-2021 Annual Plan, we’re on the long journey of decoloinzing and centering anti-racists practices with an intersectional feminist lens. We started doing restorative practices training this summer facilitated by harp+sword and purposefully sought out a strategic plan facilitator, Wayfinding Partners, that operates with a social justice lens. We are thankful for the ability to reallocate funds to training this year and plan on keeping that as a permanent budget line moving forward. This work along with the work of truly being anti-racist in practice is ongoing.

Anti Harassment Working Group

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  • In November 2019, the Art+Feminism leadership collective established an Anti Harassment Working Group to develop policies, procedures and tools to handle and prevent the on- and off-wiki harassment that have been experienced by editors and organizers involved in our campaigns over the years.
  • In February 2020, this group released the Art+Feminism Toolkit for Security on Wikipedia and hosted a community hour session to introduce the new material to our community.
  • The working group has drafted an internal protocol to handle harassment reports and has established a dedicated email, safety@artandfeminism.org, to receive reports.
  • The Trust and Safety team has been informed about the establishment of the working group as well as of its first product.
  • This working group has organized conversations and surveys in multiple languages around the WMF Universal Code of Conduct and put forth a statement containing our support and our hesitations in August 2020 as well as a formal response to the Draft in October 2020.

Community and Office House

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To support our growing global community, this year we introduced online "Community Hours" on a variety of topics that might be useful for our community of organizers like promoting your event or offering case studies from our global community. We continued and expanded "Office Hours" which focus on wiki skills like "Introduction to Editing Wikipedia" (which we are offering in a variety of languages.) Since our mid-point report, we held an additional ten Community Hours. Here is a full list.

Next Steps

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We recognize this will be an atypical year for many reasons. A silver lining of being in the midst of a global pandemic and a civil rights movement, is the ability and opportunity to take the time for reflection. We’re able to ask some big questions, such as what can Art+Feminism core activities be outside of the typical edit-a-thon? How can we continue to advocate for the inclusion of marginalized communities in the Wikimedia community and beyond? How do we advocate for indigenous voices to be at the table? What can we do internally to center intersectional feminism and anti-racist practices?

We’re grateful that we’re currently entering the first phase of facilitated strategic planning in this existing grant cycle to help us navigate Art+Feminism’s potential in a strategic way. We are requesting support in this application to continue to fund this work.

In this next year, we're excited to be moving forward with many other exciting and important opportunities for the organization, including, but not limited to:

  • Expanding and evolving the role of part-time Project Administrator to full-time Program Manager, increasing our overall staff by 33%.
  • Bringing on new Regional Organizers (what we refer to internally as Regional Ambassadors) specifically to work with Indigenous Communities. This is vital to increase our work with those communities with care and intention.
  • Exploring individual giving, as we continue to work towards diversifying our funding.
  • This year also includes a small, but important move for Art+Feminism to rent our own mailbox, so it's no longer going to one of the founder's personal PO boxes.

We will continue the work of building a strong organizational foundation for the organization while nurturing our established international community.

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