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Grants:Simple/Applications/Art+Feminism/2020-2021

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Application or grant stage: in progress
Applicant or grantee: Art+Feminism
Amount requested: US$401,982.00
Amount granted: US$401,982.00
Funding period: 1 September 2020 - 31 December 2021
Midpoint report due: 15 May 2021
Final report due: 30 January 2022

Application edit

Background edit

Annual Plan edit

Budget Plan edit

Staffing Plan edit

Introduction edit

This is the Art+Feminism application for our Simple APG grant for 16-months starting September 1, 2020 - December 31, 2021. This one-time 16 months request will align our grant cycle with one of the existing WMF Simple APG cycles to hopefully facilitate easier communications, funding, and reporting between WMF and Art+Feminism.

The total amount requested is $401,982. 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.

This application also includes many other exciting and important opportunities for the organization, including, but not limited to:

  • It expands and evolves the role of part-time Project Administrator to full-time Program Manager, increasing our overall staff by 33%.
  • It includes funds to add a new Regional Organizer (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.
  • Covering the increase in accounting fees as the organization’s overall budget now exceeds the $250,000 annual threshold which requires a much more formal review of finances.
  • With the increase in the accounting line, we'll be able to account for the auditing costs associated with a larger budget, which actually opens up numerous smaller funding opportunities, including exploring peer-to-peer fundraising and overall diversifying funding. Accounts for operational line items that weren’t previously accounted for such as payroll taxes.
  • This budget 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 global community.

Programs edit

Annual Campaign

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.

Annual Campaign

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.

Event Organizer Testimony

We invited organizers on our post-event survey to include external comments specifically for funders and here are a few highlights from that survey.

I am involved in organizing Art+Feminism workshops in Ghana because of the positive impact it has on Wikipedia and it's sister projects. This year's campaign was well promoted. Communication with organizers was superb. Micro grant got disbursed quickly to support my events in Ghana. I had all the support I needed to organize successful events this year. Looking forward to next year already. - Sadik Shahadu, Navrongo, Ghana

I love that we can host the Art + Feminism Wikipedia-Edit-a-Thon each year. For us, it's a relatively small scale program with a huge impact, both in terms of adding underrepresented artists to Wikipedia, and also in empowering our visitors to take the reins to contribute to public knowledge. We also see folks that we don't necessarily reach through more "established" public program formats like talks and tours. -Greg Stuart, Philadelphia, PA

Our first Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon was a big success. We were inspired to host an event to improve and create articles for the artists in our current exhibition "The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain." During the event we made 160 edits on 31 articles, added a total of 133 references, and added 9,630 words! We also worked on translating articles and created 4 new ones in English for these important artists: Angela Hampel, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Zorka Ságlová, and Doris Ziegler. We're excited to host an edit-a-thon next year and expand the scope of what we edit. - Anna Rose Canzano, Culver City, CA

Hosting an Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was a great way to bring our community together and bring attention to a very important yet often overlooked issue - the gender gap on Wikipedia. This event also offered volunteers an opportunity to more deeply interact with and encounter some of the phenomenal women artists in our own collection here at the Ulrich. I hope that this Edit-a-thon helps spread awareness about the gender gap on Wikipedia and all of the work that has yet to be done, while providing volunteers with the tools necessary to create real change. -Nellie Elliott, Wichita, Kansas, United States

More than 50 researchers, art workers, professors, and students participated in our marathon, accessing the Zoom app and working really hard in the articles and in understanding how to use the Wiki tools. They were people living in different states and even countries, who understood the consequences this project is capable of articulating on people's educational lives and how it could reverberate in other campaigns within the art world. Helping women to achieve the central role we deserve in books, research processes, exhibition making, the historiography of arts, through the internet became our duty. - NaPupila Team, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The support that I was able to access to organise an edit-a-thon was invaluable; it meant that I had the confidence (as a relatively inexperienced editor) to lead a session, approach a host, and ensure that the event was accessible.- Clare Qualmann, London, UK

This virtual edit-a-thon was a great way to get folks together and working on something empowering during the quarantine! Folks learned the basics of wiki editing and brought their own skills and interests to the group. We are so excited to be connected to more people interested in changing the narrative and representation in the fields of Craft! - Teresa Audet, Minneapolis, USA

The Women's Art Register is proud to be part of the Art+Feminism movement, helping us to amplify the voices of Australian women artists around the globe. - Caroline Phillips, Melbourne, Australia

Testimonies/comments from some of our participants, in Portuguese - Wiki Editoras Lx, Lisboa, Portugal

“Gostei da sensação de ter dado visibilidade a uma mulher que não constava na Wikipedia e de ter conhecido mulheres muito interessantes e com histórias e objetivos que me inspiraram muito.”
“Gostei muito da maneira como o encontro foi orquestrado, da organização, do conteúdo trazido pelas mentoras e da comida (delícia, obrigada!).”
“Obrigada por tudo, adorei a experiência, adorei aprender a editar a Wikipédia e adorei poder contribuir.”
“Foi uma experiência intensa e poderosa!”
“Obrigada (...), pela generosidade em como este evento foi organizado e pelo tempo que passamos em conjunto!”

Community Hours

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. In 2019-2020 we offered 15 different Community Hours, with most of the recordings of the sessions uploaded to WikiCommons for continued learning opportunities. These sessions are led by a mix of Regional Organizers, the leadership team, staff, and special guests from the Wikiverse from around the world. We wish to continue these efforts in 2020-2021. In the spirit of community care, we hope to have a few sessions dedicated to topics under that umbrella.

Indigenous Community Work

In collaboration with Wikimedia Norge, the Inuit Art Foundation and Inuit Futures Initiative, we are developing a project to add more circumpolar content from both Sami and Inuit populations. Art+Feminism will provide technical support for the events and training materials. We will work with a young Inuit scholar chosen by Inuit Futures to add and contribute to pages on Inuit people or history.

Following on this limited-term and grant-specific opportunity, we are committed to hiring a Regional Organizer for Indigenous Communities. In the past work with Indigenous communities has been facilitated by the Regional Organizer for Canada, and we believe that the creation of this new position is vital in order to increase our work within Indigenous communities globally, both with care and intention. This position will only be offered to someone who self-identifies as Indigenous. We envision the creation of this new role as a start, and are working on ways to continue partnerships with Indigenous knowledge keepers and producers, while respecting traditional knowledge protocols and equity processes.

Administrative Growth

Strategic Planning

The summer of 2020 we are in Phase 1/Discovery Phase of formal strategic planning facilitated by Wayfinding Partners. Wayfinding Partners work with non-profits with a racial justice lens, a value we share as Art+Feminism continues on the path to be an anti-racist organization. A silver lining to COVID-19 is this opportunity to stop racing forward under the premise of “business as usual” and to take this time for reflection and to ask big questions about our organization. And not just for our organization, but to hopefully model for others to join our work in a meaningful way as we continue to nurture our community with intention. We hope that with funding requested in this application we will be able to continue this journey.

Board Development

We continue to experience steady progress with our board development. With the help of our founding board, guided by our ad-hoc Advisory Committee, we’ve determined the following for continued development of our board: This will be a working board, with an expectation of financial and non-financial support. Art+Feminism is at an exciting point where there are many possibilities and a lot to be imagined and quite honestly, figured out. This requires a particular type of engagement. We seek out board members with a wide range of expertise and experience, with the expectation that they will use their skill and knowledge to advocate and support the organization's mission. We also expect a financial contribution from everyone, which will be scaled to a diverse group of awesome people at the table (more below).

This will be a 100% giving board, at a level in which each board member is comfortable. The level in which a board member gives at is for internal purposes only; all board members have the same ability as all other board members regardless of tier level. These tiers will be revisited each year by the current board to reassess and adjust accordingly. Monthly giving is an option to achieve the overall annual commitment.

We expect that board members can agree to give at a certain tier, but are always encouraged to give as much as possible. We expect all board members to participate in small donor fundraising efforts by the organization (currently, we anticipate one campaign annually).

Small Donor Cultivation

This grant application includes support for the increase in accounting fees as the organization’s overall budget now exceeds $250,000 annually which requires a more formal review of finances and thus opens up numerous smaller funding opportunities, including exploring peer-to-peer fundraising and overall diversifying funding. We’re currently researching various donor platforms to find the right fit for us to do small (and large!) individual donor cultivation. We are in a unique position with a lot of potential by inviting our existing global community to be able to make financial contributions, of any size to help sustain the work of Art+Feminism. Art+Feminism’s current Executive Director has a track record of success with grassroots, peer-to-peer fundraising, most recently spearheading a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $40,000 in 2019 before coming to Art+Feminism.

Outside Expertise/Working with Consultants

Distinct areas where we wish to engage with outside expertise by way of consultants are with translation, restorative justice practices and facilitation, grant writing, and web maintenance.

Anti-Harassment Working Group (AHWG)

We take safety very seriously in the events we promote, which is why we have a Safe Space/Brave Space Policy that we require to be honored by all those who organize an editathon under the flag of Art+Feminism. The Anti-Harassment Working Group is a subcommittee dedicated to developing strategies and tools that help our community prevent, manage, and report online harassment that may occur as a result of their involvement with Art+Feminism projects. This initiative is a response to the experiences of harassment lived by members of our leadership collective, as well as to the reports that we have received from members of our community over the course of our organization’s history. We know from experience that Wikimedia’s online community is far from being a safe space for everyone, which is why we decided to create a group specifically charged with developing tools to prevent and document incidents of harassment or misbehavior, to guide users through the tools already in place via the Wikimedia Foundation. We have informed the Trust and Safety team, as well as the Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation about the creation of this Working Group. In the first year, we have accomplished a remarkable body of work. In February 2020, we released the first version of the Toolkit for Security on Wikipedia. AHWG is currently leading a conversation among our community members around the Universal Code of Conduct proposed by WMF, and has been in touch with the Foundation’s Trust and Safety team along the way. AHWG members are also the key players in our WikiCred project.

Art+Feminism Impact Research Project (WikiData)

One of Art+Feminism’s co-founders and acting board President, Michael Mandiberg, is currently leading internal research that looks at the impact of Art+Feminism on addressing Wikipedia’s ongoing gender gap problem. In 2014 approximately 10-15% of the editor community were women, trans and non-binary people and only 15% of all biographies were about women, trans and non-binary people. Six years of many community initiatives to bridge this gap increased the overall percentage of biographies to 18%. The project seeks to better understand the contours of this change, by focusing on the articles in Wikiproject Visual Arts, the area of focus of two of the key initiatives: Art+Feminism and Black Lunch Table, and an area of interest to Women in Red. The result of this research will help provide a clearer picture of the work of Art+Feminism with some of the overall goals of the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole.

WikiCred Grant Initiative

We are delighted to share that we’ve received funding for a new initiative titled “Reading together: Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities”. This initiative, completely funded by WikiCred is a research project that will work to expand the definition and scope of what is considered a reliable source (WP:RS) on Wikipedia for marginalized communities. The project has three parts, with the possibility of a publication at the end:

Part 1
A research project to expand the definition, scope and interpretation of reliable sources for marginalized communities in multiple language versions of Wikipedia, including Spanish, English, and French.
Part 2
Art+Feminism to organize town halls for the community in multiple languages including Spanish, English, and French (Amber Berson is fluent in French and resides in Montréal, Canada, and Melissa Tamani is fluent in Spanish and resides in Lima, Peru).
Part 3
Art+Feminism to collect feedback and adjust expansion as a result of the town halls. The main deliverable of the project consists of a report with the results of the three phases, as well as a series of recommendations for different stakeholders in the Wikipedia community.

Grant Metrics Reporting edit

By midpoint of 2020, some organizers have moved their events online upon the Wikimedia Foundation directive to cancel all offline events following the COVID-19 outbreak. We do not expect all planned offline events to actually move online as this may be uncharted territory for some organizers, in which case we know that those events will not happen. Additionally, we anticipate that attendance at online events will overall be lower than attendance at public events. For example, when the MoMA event moved online, a week before the event there were already approximately 50 editors signed up and then only approximately 15 more editors signed up the day of the virtual event. We go into detail about how we anticipate numbers being affected this year due to the global pandemic in the Risk/Challenges section, but over, we anticipate our numbers to be lower this year. Final metrics will be tracked in the shared google doc.

Midterm report edit

Program story edit

 
Art+Feminism homepage (2021)

We’re excited to share our program's progress so far and continue to do this work!

Part of our 2019-2020 APG grant included a website redesign that was fully launched in December 2020. We worked with Partner and Partners, a US-based, worker-owned design firm to redesign our website. It serves as the main hub for our resources, tools, guides and information. It is currently available in 4 languages (English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) and we’re working on having it available in Arabic by the end of the year. We work with a team of translators who are also knowledgeable about Wikipedia instead of relying on machine translation, which is often literal in its interpretation of Wiki-specific concepts and defaults to masculine versions of words in languages that rely on grammatical gender because machine translations at this point are very literal and also default to the masculine translation. In line with our feminist mission and values, our translation team are able to provide gender neutral interpretation of our materials.

Many of our regional ambassadors noted that the updated version of the website facilitated their outreach to potential event organizers. With information about the campaign and resources on how to join us organized and accessible in multiple languages, the updated website proved to be a useful tool.

Art+Feminism continues to grow and evolve in many positive ways. As we continue to work on internal processes and approaches, we’ve noticed the influence of our work in the larger movement and in the emergence of new gender gap reduction projects with specific approaches. This is the case of the global campaign to generate visibility for women journalists “Women do News” whose training guide on Wikipedia editing is directly inspired by our Quick Guide for Editors, and the project Art+Sports+Feminism, inspired in the Art+Feminism campaign and created outside of our leadership team. Finally, we’ve been in conversation with other Wikimedia chapters about our approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and restorative practices.

Program Progress edit

Annual Campaign edit

 
Cartel para art and feminism 2021

We initiated our 20-21 Campaign with a Community Care Statement. We knew that our international community had been living under a range of governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and we wanted to encourage our organizers to prioritize the health and safety of their communities. Not only that, but we also knew that because of the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, some of our organizers would opt out of participating in our campaign altogether. But for those who were eager to return and for organizers to the campaign, we provided resources (training materials and additional event funding) to make virtual events possible. For organizers hosting in-person events, we followed Wikimedia Foundation guidelines and requested that event organizers who were applying for our microfunding, complete the foundation’s risk assessment tool. Our plan to provide new and relevant resources to support our organizers throughout the pandemic began to take shape last year. From March 2020 onward, we began planning and creating virtual meeting resources. These resources include our Virtual Meeting Guide and screen captures of various online platforms (i.e., Zoom, Google Meet, and StreamYard) that can be used in hosting Art+Feminism events.

 
Art+Feminism Virtual Meeting Guide (2020) available in English, French, and Spanish

Furthermore, we were able to support event organizers hosting virtual events, not only through our resource guides, but providing additional funding to be used for technology like Zoom and to help offset the cost of data for events occurring in places with structural internet connectivity issues (i.e., event organizers could redistribute funds to their attendees in this case). To achieve this, we increased the cap of our event funding award from $125 to $250.

At the time of this report, these resources have supported more than 2200 editors at 133 edit-a-thons around the world.

This year, in addition to editing events, we invited new and returning organizers to consider hosting non-editing events, including Meetups and Panels/Lectures/Conversations. To date, our organizers hosted several panels and conversations, some of which were integrated in a schedule of events that included editing. Some notable panels include a conversation with cartoonist MariNaomi at The Ohio State University (in the USA), Closing the Gender Gap in Africa and Decolonising the Internet hosted by Wikimedia Botswana Community Usergroup, and Arte + Feminismo: Artistas hondureñas en la Wikipedia hosted by YWCA Honduras.

 
Art+Feminism 2021 event attendees in Nepal.

Community Hours edit

To support our growing global community, in late 2019 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. Topics have ranged from technical (like how to edit) to case studies or talks related to the arts and feminism (like working collectives).

We defined criteria and a process for anyone within the Art+Feminism community to facilitate/pitch a Community Hours. Because of  our Year-End fundraiser we are able to offer a modest honorarium of $125 for facilitators work for these sessions. In April, we started offering a Data/Internet Connectivity Stipend for Community Hours attendees who reside in regions where expenses for private internet/data costs are prohibitively expensive, Art+Feminism is able to offer a $5 USD stipend to offset costs.

In reverse chronological order for 2021:

  • 04/24/2021: Media Wiki translate-a-thon for smaller language Wikipedia Communities (Wikimedia Commons)
  • 04/22/2021: Intro to WikiCommons (Wikimedia Commons)
  • 03/24/2021: Wikidata, Lexemes and Minority Languages (Recording)
  • 02/26/2021: Promoting your (virtual) edit-a-thon (Wikimedia Commons)
  • 02/06/2021: Art+Feminism Funding Opportunities (Wikimedia Commons)
  • 01/21/2021 and 01/23/2021: Creating a Theme for your 2021 A+F Event

We have plans for future Community Hours on topics such as translation, accessibility, Wikidata, and more.

Indigenous Community Work edit

In 2020-2021, Art+Feminism started a pilot initiative with Wikimedians Thérèse Ottawa and Sadik Shahadu to support their ongoing work in the Atikamekw and Dagbani languages, respectively, on Wikipedia as inaugural Art+Feminism Indigenous Communities Ambassadors.  We were excited to bring on both (originally only anticipating one Indigeneous Ambassador in this pilot), but what we quickly realized is that we do not currently have the infrastructure to support a contractor who is unable to communicate in English and ended the contract with Thérèse Ottawa before the end of this year. Thérèse continues to do great work in the Atikamekw community and we hope that we will be able to work together in a future project.

Additionally, we left the description for this pilot program intentionally open to input and development from the ambassadors, which can be really fruitful, but also has an equal chance of lacking structure. Moving forward we will work with the Wikimedian to indicate their focus (i.e., research, training, translation, etc.) and develop a work plan in which the person indicates their focus more clearly (i.e. research, training, translation etc.)

In addition, we continued to support Wikimedia Norge to add more circumpolar content from Indigenous perspectives. Art+Feminism will provide technical support for their events and training materials and members will participate in the Arctic Knot conference on Indigenous languages on Wikipedia in June 2021.

Administrative Growth edit

Strategic Planning edit

Following the work completed in summer 2020, we entered phase two of Strategic Planning facilitated by Wayfinding Partners. What originally was intended to be two full-day sessions, we divided the sessions into four parts to accommodate being virtual and working across timezones. The first two sessions were focussed on alignment and revision around our mission, vision and values. We also analyzed and explored questions like “What do we mean when we say intersectional feminism? Decolonization?” We discussed the scope of our work - does it end with Wikipedia? Or begin?

In the final two sessions we came to our “big question” and also defined a strategy screen to use for all strategies moving forward. Our big question is “How might Art+Feminism become a truly global organization in an equitable and accessible way?” Wayfinding Partners delivered a Road Map in April, and we are currently using the tools to work towards our short-term and midterm goals.

Small Donor Cultivation edit

Starting on #GivingTuesday (December 1, 2020) we kicked off our first-ever Year End Fundraiser raised nearly $9000 with 95 individual donors. We’re directly investing these funds back into our community with the aforementioned honorariums for Community Hours facilitators and have created a Regional Ambassador Fund, a pilot initiative that provides funds (up to $500 USD) for Regional Ambassadors to use for Art+Feminism inspired work, projects or for training or other professional development.

Board Development edit

Working with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) we were able to rework our bylaws to create staggered terms for our new board members. In collaboration with board members Roderick Schrock, Michael Mandiberg and Sheetal Prajapati, we have invited and elected a board of directors that is over 60% BIPOC and women/non-binary. We are committed to these voices not just having a seat at the table, but taking part in building an open table at the leadership level that embodies the values of Art+Feminism. We’re humbled and delighted that this group of changemakers are joining us in our work and believe their expertise and experience will be invaluable to this critical moment of the organization.

Board Member Pronouns Board Position Professional title(s)
Sheetal Prajapati (she/her) Board Chair Interim Managing Director, Common Field; Principal, Lohar Projects; Faculty, School of Visual Arts
Roderick Schrock (he/him) Treasurer Executive Director, Eyebeam
Michael Mandiberg (they/them) Secretary Artist; Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center
Adela C. Licona (she/her/ella) Board member Founder, The Art of Change Agency; Associate Professor Emeritus, English, University of Arizona
Kerrie Cotten Williams (they/them/she/her) Board member Manager, The People’s Archive, DC Public Library
Wendy Woon (she/her) Board member Consultant; Former Deputy Director for Education, The Museum of Modern Art

WikiCred Grant Initiative edit

Unreliable Guidelines: Reliable Sources and marginalized communities in French, English and Spanish Wikipedia, the report for our inaugural research project Reading Together: Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities is complete. The project used an intersectional feminist methodology to address how Wikipedia trainers involved in the Art+Feminism movement approach the reliable source guidelines in French, English and Spanish Wikipedias. Rigorous analysis ends with recommendations for more inclusive and diverse Wikipedias. The report is currently being designed by graphic designer Inés Viana and will be available to the public in June 2021

Spending update Midterm edit

As anticipated, we are underspending in areas such as travel and event expenses. When creating this budget we knew that we would likely have to reallocate funds from these evergreen budget lines.

We’re working with Veronica Thamaini, Senior Program Officer, Community Resources to properly move around a few budget lines to be able to use funding more efficiently. Two requests were already made for budget reallocation including the Call to Action Art Commission and increasing staff compensation.

The entire budget is visible here.

Please include the total amount of Simple APG funds you spent as of May 13, 2021:

  • 216,029.36 USD/Local currency

Grant Metrics Reporting Midterm edit

Preliminary Outcomes edit

Similar to the previous year, organizers could not arrange physical events in 2021 due to the WMF Event Ban policy and their respective government restrictions on gatherings, further we circulated the aforementioned Community Care statement, encouraging organizers to do what was best and safest for their communities beyond government restrictions. As projected in our annual plan, we set modest criteria for this year’s campaign based off of the sharp decline witnessed in 2020 in the number of edit-a-thons and consequently in the number of editors and content pages created. However, as of the midpoint of this grant cycle we managed to exceed the number of registered participants by over 20% and exceeded the target of the number programs that we set out to have created in the dashboard 2021.

As collected on our Dashboard campaign as of 10 May 2021, we have:

  • 134 Events on the Dashboard
  • 2218 Editors
  • 12.3k Articles Edited
  • 2.78k Articles Created
  • 3.19k Commons uploads

Online vs in-person events edit

Having overseen two successive “mostly” online campaigns in 2020 and 2021, we’re in a better position to reimagine how we want to further engage our communities moving forward. As an organization that started out with a strong emphasis on in-person meetups, we’re evolving and learning to become more flexible in adapting to new situations. Yes, we’ve seen a rapid decline in our overall metrics in the last two years, but we’re also curious to know about other areas that organizing online could have had a positive impact. Some of the questions we’re thinking about are whether there is a preference by any of our communities or event participants of online over onsite events or vice versa, whether registered participants feel more supported or actually contribute more or less at virtual events.

Global Distribution edit

We are currently working on a detailed breakdown of our presence throughout the various regions around the world where Art+Feminism has taken place. Although we will have our yearly closing celebrations in May 2021, events may still take place after that. Hence, we hope to be able to paint a complete picture of the outcome of the campaign in time for our final report.

Final metrics will be tracked in the shared google doc.

Final report edit

Program story edit

Please tell or link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period. This can be another meta page, a blog post or any other source that tells your program story.

Since our midterm report, we are very proud of how we were able to grow as an organization during this ongoing pandemic. One program story that explores that explores our work outside our signature global campaign, was our presentation at Wikimania 2021 in a session titled “Art+Feminism: Beyond the Edit-a-thon”. We had nine members of the Art+Feminism community join us for this presentation, coming from six different countries.

In alphabetical order by first name:

  • Amber Berson (Canada)
  • Kira Wisniewski (US)
  • Medhavi Gandhi (India)
  • Melissa Tamani Becerra (Peru)
  • Mohammed Sadat Abdulai (Germany)
  • Monika Sengul-Jones (US)
  • Richard Knipel (US)
  • Sara Clugage (US)
  • Zita Ursula Zage (Ghana)

The session highlighted:

Recording of session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvxyPeK9ZM8

Learning story edit

Please link to one learning story that shows how your organization documents lessons learned and adapts its programs accordingly.

The shift toward virtual events, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic gave us an opportunity to experiment with some ideas the Art+Feminism leadership team had discussed about diversifying our annual campaign.

Since 2014, we have invited Wikimedians to join us in hosting an editing event to contribute content towards our goal of closing the gender gap. With diversifying the event types through which event organizers could join the campaign, we hoped to welcome new organizers with less editing experience into our mission and to give our more experienced editors an opportunity to plan something different and potentially less rigorous than an editing event.

To start, we created a document with event criteria to assist any event organizers who were interested in hosting an event other than an edit-a-thon. As organizers submitted their events, our program manager reviewed and approved these events and organizers were able to move forward with seeking funding from A+F, hosting their event, and submitting a report about their event (if funded). If there was a question about whether or not an event should be approved, the program manager relied on the A+F leadership team for feedback. If events were determined to not be a good fit, this was communicated to the event organizer with an offer of support to create an event that did fit.

Some 2020-21 events that went beyond the edit-a-thon:

We also had some organizers who hosted a combination of event types:

While the Art+Feminism leadership team was quickly able to implement a screening process to handle event submissions that did not align with our mission, we had not anticipated some of the additional support panel and meetup organizers would need. For instance, some of our panel organizers submitted events with exciting topics but without clear information on panelists and logistical details, such as how participants could join in the conversation. For our 2022 campaign we will be updating our resources to provide more guidance and examples for our event organizers.


Programs Impact edit

Annual Campaign edit

In 2021, edit-a-thons were held in 33 countries, 5 continents, and in 25 languages, with nearly two dozen more events taking place since our midterm report. The DIY spirit of Art+Feminism was exemplified in new and exciting ways. In addition to the examples previously mentioned from this year above and in our mid-term report, two other examples include:


Trinity College organized a three-day virtual event including a keynote talk by Amanda Guzman, Ph.D. Ann Plato Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies, a virtual tour of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art focusing on early modern women artists, and an all day edit-a-thon punctuated with an hour-long showcase of local and student artists.

Primer Editatón Musical (1st Musical Edit-a-thon), was a two-day virtual event centered on the memory of choral conductor Gisela Crespo Brito, aiming to recognize and make visible the achievements and contributions of women and non-binary people in music in Latin America. The collaborative event included several panel discussions, an editing workshop by Wikimedia Mexico, an inclusive language workshop, and space for participants to share personal experiences. (This event was in Spanish.)

We continued our trajectory started last year of focusing on cultivating community with our existing event organizers and really emphasizing community care.

Community Hours edit

We held five more Community Hours since our progress report. Two of the sessions were hosted in Spanish this past year and we have plans for future non-English sessions in the next funding cycle. In all, we held 11 Community Hours in the past funding cycle.

Recording of all community hours can be found at the Resource tab in our website, and in the Category Art+Feminism training videos in Wikimedia Commons.

Indigenous Community Work edit

Indigenous Community ambassador, Sadik Shahadu (User:Shahadusadik) continues to do incredible work. He participated in a session at the Arctic Knot Conference with Dr. Sara Thomas titled “Envision the future of your language community: how can small language Wikipedias move forward?”. That can be viewed on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVoTUaf8HPc&t=4260s

Art+Feminism Indigenous Communities Ambassador role was new in this grant cycle. Art+Feminism collaborated with Sadik to revisit the role description and are reframing this role in the next grant cycle as West African Indigenous Language Coordinator. The West African Indigenous Language Coordinator role is the evolution of the pilot Indigenous Ambassador role created in 2020-2021. This role is focused on identifying and uplifting smaller language Wikipedia communities in West Africa by providing support to these communities through training, workshops and campaigns.

Administrative Growth edit

Commitment to internal institution building edit

As we think about our work regarding different systems of oppression, we spent most of Q3 and Q4, taking a critical look at our internal operations to ensure our values are consistently reflected in how we do our work. Beginning in August 2021, the Art+Feminism leadership team took an organizational pause on all programmatic activities to create anti-oppression policies and mechanisms that include a commitment to an ongoing process of learning, maintaining and creating equitable practices, and encouraging transparent communication within the organization.

Staffing edit

The role of Lead Co-Organizer, a contract position that originally shaped the annual campaign, has evolved to being deeply engaged in the day-to-day of the organization. However it is neither sustainable nor appropriate to rely on this role for that type of labor. We are redefining this role to maintain some of its unique qualities (i.e., that the role is held by non-US team members to appropriately engage the diversity of our community) while also ensuring our expectations of labor are truly fair and equitable. Also in the past year, the Program Administrator grew to Program Manager and is a critical role in our goals of building community and relationships and leaves less capacity for administrative work. Thus, increasing administrative capacity is a key objective in our sustainability. We’re grateful for funding from the Ford Foundation that will enable us to hire a full time Administrative Associate in 2022.

Fundraising edit

We have created a pathway for individual giving (which thus far has generated over $13,000 in donations). Our grant writing efforts led us to the New Media Leadership Cohort at the Ford Foundation with an unrestricted 16-month grant.

Spending update Final edit

As we wrap up year end accounting and change our fiscal year to match the calendar year/new funding cycle with our CPA, by working with our program officer, we have been given permission to rollover that budget line to 2022, so we’re able to remit payment once work is complete rather than pre-paying. We anticipate that this work will conclude in early Q1.

According to progress billing provided by our accounting firm in December 2021, those total costs should come in at about $14,000. A progress billing invoice was paid for $3,624.25 on December 15.

The entire budget is visible here.

The total amount of Simple APG funds spent during the grant period (including approved rollover for year end accounting costs): $401,982.00 USD/Local currency

Grant Metrics Reporting Final edit

Main article: Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/Metrics2021

Events happened in 33 countries, 5 continents, and in 25 languages.

During the 2021 campaign 160 events and 2700 participants were recorded in the Art+Feminism 2021 Programs dashboard. Half of all the planned events were either cancelled or didn't record any editor activity.

Nearly 16000 content pages were created or improved across all Wikimedia projects including more than 10700 Wikidata items and 3600 Wikimedia Commons pages. The largest number of contributions were made on Wikidata (44%), English Wikipedia (20%) and Arabic Wikipedia (7%). Less than 2% of all new articles created were Deleted. For the first time we recorded edits made in the Incubator in Dagbani language.

Since both linear and exponential growth of Art+Feminism events and editor activity peaked in 2019 we recorded a further deline in almost all measurable areas of our campaign's numbers from the 2020 campaign. This coincides with the global pandemic and the organization’s shifted focus to community building in existing communities rather than a focus on continued overall growth. (We however exceeded our 2021 projection of the number of newly registered accounts by 22%.)

Detailed outcomes from 2021 are on this wiki page and on our WMF Google Sheet. Our metrics goals for 2020 are predictions based off of our model which you can view in this google sheet.

Metrics, targets and results:grants metrics worksheet here.

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