On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Tim Starling<[email protected]> wrote:
> Do you mean building an endowment? Because the Foundation management > believes that donors expect their money to be spent on charitable > activities, and that reserves should only be sufficient to cover > income fluctuations over the next few years. I'm told that this is the > prevailing wisdom in the non-profit world. > > However, the reserve is enough that if one income source were to stop, > others could be developed before money to pay the fundraising staff > dried up. So it's self-sufficient in that way. My impression is that Wikimedia currently lives year to year on donations, and that reserves are sufficient to pay a skeleton crew of fundraisers. I'm sure its been discussed before though, but yes, it would seem to make sense for Wikimedia - established as its flagship project is - to build an endowment or trust - donation-seeded and transparently managed of course - to cover most yearly costs. Wikipedia alone has been several times estimated to be in the 4-5 billion dollars market worth range, so - at least now while I'm sitting here in a free internet cafe and still wearing last night's rose-colored beer goggles - a quarter-billion dollar long-term endowment figure doesn't seem too infeasible to me. There are quality assurance issues with en.wiki articles though, that might put limits on those seed funds. -Stevertigo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
