Forwarding to the Treasurers and Affiliate mailing lists for their
consideration.
Pine
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Pine W" <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
Date: Nov 30, 2015 10:11 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Endowment Discussion
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc:
That's a good question.
Alternatives to private sector equity investments include public-sector
bonds, as well as commodities and currencies. While I wouldn't recommend
that WMF do either of the latter two, there might be some reasonable
choices for WMF in the public sector bond market.
In the private sector, I hope that WMF would be very careful about the
ethics of the companies and industries in which it chooses to invest.
Pine
On Nov 30, 2015 10:01 AM, "Brion Vibber" <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks!
I added a section to the talk page asking about how we would actually go
about investing... the purpose of an endowment is to let it grow and just
spend some of the interest, but that growth doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Investment happens by putting money into other peoples' businesses and
letting them pay you back with interest.
So we'd be asking donors for tens of millions of dollars to invest in
third-party businesses -- a fundamental change in our fundraising
proposition. Thinking about our social responsibility as an investor is
probably worthwhile.
-- brion
On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Lisa Gruwell <lgruwell(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi all-
For several years, the Wikimedia movement has been having discussions
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment> about whether and when to
begin
building an endowment. I put an essay up on meta recently in an attempt
to
rekindle this conversation with the community.
We included launching an
endowment in the FY 2015-16 annual plan. We also plan to have this
conversation as a part of the larger strategic planning process because
building an endowment means prioritizing some future needs over some
current needs.
Before we can begin to support an endowment, there is strategic
groundwork
that should be completed to ensure that the
effort is both thoughtful and
successful. To help get the conversation moving, I seeded the discussion
page with a few questions that we are hoping you will help us answer.
Please add the questions I didn't think to ask, too. We'd appreciate
hearing your thoughts on this and your help in thinking through some of
the
strategic questions.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment_Essay
Best regards,
Lisa Gruwell
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