WordPress wouldn’t be WordPress if it wasn’t for the people. A strong community that’s open to anyone that wants to do something with this open-source platform. But also a community that’s made up of a lot of volunteers, people investing a lot of their time and other resources to make WordPress even better. To make that community accessible for even more people, our Diversity fund aims to take away financial hurdles for underrepresented groups. How? And can you apply? Let’s find out!

Watch the video: Diversity fund

At Yoast, we care deeply about diversity. That’s why we created the Diversity fund a few years ago. A fund that makes it possible for more people to attend community events. However, as these events now often take place online, we’ve had to think of another focus for our Diversity fund.

We believe that encouraging diversity among any community or gathering is essential. The same goes for our WordPress community and events that go with it. These events are places we go to learn, get inspired, meet new friends, and make significant career or life decisions. The people we see and meet at these events shape that experience and have the ability to change or broaden our worldview.

The Yoast Diversity fund

Our Diversity fund has been around for a while and was originally focused on increasing the diversity of speaker line-ups at tech conferences. Because conferences still had some way to go when it comes to representing underrepresented or disadvantaged groups. We wanted to help in changing that. By removing one of the barriers that can prevent someone from being able to share their experiences: the finances that come with attending a conference. From hiring a babysitter to transport costs like a plane ticket or specialized wheelchair transport.

During 2018, 2019, and 2020:

• We were able to sponsor 70 people,
• To join a total of 56 events,
• That were all around Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, and Australia.

However, the pandemic that has changed so much for many of us also changed the way we attend conferences. Which are now mainly held online and are often free of charge for those attending. Which is awesome! Because it makes these events accessible for so many people from all around the world. Even canceling the need for our Diversity fund in some ways. So we wanted to come up with another way to spend this money wisely.

Sponsoring WordPress projects

We want to keep our Diversity fund alive and we want to keep helping people in the WordPress community. That’s why our Diversity fund will now be used to sponsor people that work on a project that benefits WordPress. This can range from teaching a group of people anywhere in the world how to use WordPress to writing patches for Core. As long as your project contributes to making WordPress a better or more diverse environment!

So what kind of projects are we looking for? It can be a short-term project, like fixing a simple bug, or a longer-term project like creating a new WordPress theme. That being said, we are looking for projects that aim to be no longer than one WordPress release cycle of three months. But don’t worry that we will rush you in any way, this fund is simply to help you work on your project with ease. We will ask you to write a biweekly status update for our development blog, to keep others informed about what’s happening in the WordPress community.

How to apply for the Diversity fund

Are you already working on a project that seems like a good fit, or do you have a great project idea in the making? Then we would love to hear about it! Everyone can submit a proposal, just make sure to apply for the Diversity fund before the 31st of May, 2021.

If you know someone else who can benefit from our Diversity fund, let them know about this right away. We love WordPress, we love the community and we want to pitch in to make it even better and more diverse than it already is!

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