Calyx’s grantmaking philosophy: planting seeds for a blooming future of tech freedom
GRANTING UPDATE:
The application deadline for the Sepal Fund has extended to Monday, March 3, 2025. Find out how to apply on the grant page.
The Calyx Institute started providing small grants in 2020; seeds of hope to nourish individuals, small organizations, and collectives contributing to free and open-source software (FOSS) technologies and internet freedom. With the launch of our new initiative, the Sepal Fund, Calyx aims to reach even more people in our ecosystem, connecting them not only with financial resources, but with others doing complementary work.
Technologies are not built and distributed evenly. Platforms and their metaphorical enclosed gardens, built by tech giants, constantly reshape how we access communications, information, and knowledge. Government mass surveillance programs and invasive commercial data tracking profit from valuable personal data, leaving individual people subject to regular threats of data breach and abuse.
At the Calyx Institute, we envision a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected. That means supporting a privacy-respecting digital ecosystem fueled by FOSS, and communities working to protect and advance internet freedom and human rights. More importantly, we are committed to making sure the global majority and under-resourced people can equally afford and enjoy digital technologies without impediment, fear or hesitation.
Women and identity-diverse groups should be able to opt out from data tracking and profiling, by their phone makers and service providers, that could put them in danger. Residents in rural areas of America should be able to stay connected and engage meaningfully in the digital world. Survivors of natural disasters and crises should be able to contact their loved ones, despite infrastructural damage. Journalists and activists should be able to make safe, secure, and private communications to do their work. None of these are possible if we live in a one-dimensional, for-profit tech world. Sustaining and advancing an alternative tech future with an ecosystem of FOSS tools is more critical than ever. People's lives depend on it.
As we’ve reflected on the past four years of grantmaking experiences, along with the lived experiences of many on staff, Calyx’s philosophy on grantmaking has taken shape, encompassing the following principles:
- Community building. Too often, individuals, projects and organizations receiving funding from a shared funder are kept in silos from one another. By the nature of FOSS development, we understand how generative and necessary cross-pollination and collaboration is for sustainability. Undertaking the deep work of networking and community building among past, present and future Calyx grant recipients is core to our funding philosophy.
- Multi-Year commitment. Sustaining a tool is much more challenging than creating a tool, especially for less resourced projects and groups. More often than not, the funds needed to sustain a project, tool or program developed through seed funding is hard or impossible to come by. As a result, many innovative and game-changing ideas are left without care, leaving initial funding wasted and leading to reinventing the wheel. The newly launched Sepal Fund aims to change that pattern, by providing continuous funding for three consecutive years, thereby allowing for maintenance and planning.
- Unrestricted funding. Small organizations and collectives do not have the capacity to equip themselves with expertise in administration and operational work. Restricted grants without holistic support could disproportionately cost them energy and resources, leaving the core programmatic work hindered or even discarded, diminishing the effect of the funding. Calyx provides unrestricted funding to allow for projects and organizations to self-determine how resources would best serve their work.
- Eliminating barriers. Grant applications can often be burdensome and overly complex to small teams and projects. Calyx has streamlined and standardized our grant application to eliminate barriers in applying for much needed funding for small-but-mighty projects.
- Reciprocity. Too often, grant recipients are made to feel like supplicants, benefiting from the generosity of the grant makers. At Calyx, we believe that grant makers receive as much as grant recipients from the funding relationship.
- Sharing results. Calyx aims to compile and publish our learnings from the Sepal Fund pilot (2025-2027), so as to share knowledge and power across our digital privacy ecosystem.
We hope the Sepal Fund effort will sprout more growth in the whole ecosystem of FOSS technologies, and help to pollinate enlightenment across privacy and security advocates, internet freedom supporters, digital educators, and everyone for a privately, freely, and securely connected future.
