Hi folks-
The PSF Grants Program has been temporarily paused after hitting our 2025 funding cap early.
It was an extremely difficult but necessary decision to ensure the program and foundation’s near and long term sustainability. Learn more + how you can support the PSF’s future on our blog:
If you have submitted an application and have yet to receive a decision, you will receive an email from us soon. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we navigate this challenging situation.
Many organizers shared their worries about keeping their events alive. As both a board member and part of the community, it’s been tough for us too.
I’ve put together a practical playbook from what I’ve learnt over the years as event organizer. And I hope it helps one event at a time 
.
Hang in there, organizers. Feel free to reach out to any of the board members or grants@python.org if you need assistance or advice. And thank you for keeping the lights on.
27 posts were merged into an existing topic: PSF grant shutdown - PUBLISH FINANCIAL STATEMENTS SINCE 2022 NOW
Hi @riecatnor, could you please explain how grant expenditures in a single quarter can use up more than twice the amount scheduled for that quarter without the grants WG noticing ?
From the blog post: “PSF Staff have been checking in quarterly on our award expenditure … at the end of Q1, we were on track. … at the end of Q2, however, we had granted close to 80% of the 2025 grant budget”.
This sounds like there’s a need for better budget management in the grants WG and also a need for the reference figures used in giving out grants to be adjusted to fit expected grant applications for a year and updated during a given year.
There should be enough past data available to make reasonable and sound estimates. You can also use the events calendars to see when conferences are typically scheduled and when to expect grants requests.
–
To @fkiraly : You can have a look at the annual report to see at least a summary of the financials: 2023 PSF Annual Impact Report | Python.org
Thanks for your interest in the long term health of the PSF’s grants program. In our blog post on this topic we did cover how the budget was exceeded, “Since announcing Grants program changes in December 2024, grant requests have grown about 40% over last year.” The reason for the pause is that the number of requests and the amounts being asked for exceeded our budget. We have no control over the number of requests we receive, it is a function of community enthusiasm (which we appreciate but is sadly not tied to donor enthusiasm.)
Next year we are moving to quarterly review, “PSF Staff will research, plan, and implement a quarterly review and awarding approach for the PSF Grants Program to provide an equitable and financially sustainable process.” so that we can award to groups across the year without disproportionately leaving the events that fall later in the year without support.
I’m happy to hear suggestions on how to raise more money for our grants program. And for those of you who would rather support individual events, I think nearly every event in our eco-system would welcome financial support or leads on sponsors for their events.
That is certainly true, but the grants WG is not obliged to approve all incoming requests. Indeed, the purpose of the grants WG is to manage requests in such a way that the available budget can be used to adequately distribute grants to the wider Python community.
I do wonder why no one saw this coming. The June minutes record a large number of significant grants to a large number of conferences: June 20, 2025 | PSF Meeting Minutes | Python.org
The grants WG should at least receive a quarterly cap on what they can approve without additional board and controller feedback to make sure that we don’t run into a situation where the grants budget runs out and no additional funding is available for conferences which happen later in the year.
The problem here is not a financial one - it’s great that the PSF can have such a significant grants program. It’s an organizational one, which causes an unfair distribution of funds and one which needs to be addressed at the org level sooner rather than later. Simply saying “We need more sponsors” will not resolve this organizational issue.
I’m pretty sure that potential grant recipients will start sending in their requests very early next year, in order not to risk running into a similar situation.
A staggered budget approach where the grants WG only receives a fixed amount per quarter to spend and then only for events happening within the next 6 months would make this more manageable.
I’d also recommend giving them better tooling to stay on top of things financially (perhaps CiviCRM has some tooling for this or you could use a simply Google Spreadsheet).
This wouldn’t solve the inherent problem, just, potentially, spread it more evenly across the year. It would require the WG to either decline requests received in the last part of the quarter or defer them to the next quarter. My guess is the choice would be to prefer to defer which would still cause later events to be rejected due to lack of budget.
A systemic change is needed but it needs to address the issue holistically. The issue here isn’t that the funds were all used too early, it was perhaps that the grants were too generous and, most definitely, that the income that is used for grants - both donations and PyCon US tickets - were below what was anticipated. I do not know what the solution is, I do know that a quarterly cap on grants is not it.
Great minds think alike! Our published statement proposes exactly this going forward, “PSF Staff will research, plan, and implement a quarterly review and awarding approach for the PSF Grants Program to provide an equitable and financially sustainable process.”
I wholly endorse @malemburg’s observations and suggestions.
When I first heard about the pause, I was astonished. In my years on the first 13 Boards (some of which overlapped with @malemburg’s), there was no grants working group. The Board accepted or rejected each grant proposal individually. When a Board meeting started, we knew the precise grant budget remaining, and when it ended it was a simple matter of subtraction to reduce it by the total of grants accepted during that meeting. “Over budget surprises” were simply impossible. Note the “surprise” part of that. Going over budget was certainly possible, but spending more than we had on hand was a deliberate choice, made with eyes wide open. We always knew exactly how much of the budget remained, second by second.
Things are more complex now in several ways, and the grants working group apparently has some level of independent (of the Board) spending authority now, but the basics of budgeting haven’t changed: X dollars in and Y dollars out is trouble when Y exceeds X, and in grants there is total control over Y. There’s isn’t, e.g., an act of God that can force grants to be made. “Acts of God” can affect X. For example, in my days we were always just one PyCon away from potential bankruptcy, and the PSF has no direct control over income sources, weather, terrorist acts, recessions, pandemics, changes in government policies, …
The most fiscally defensive approach is to budget for no more than a fixed amount of cash on hand in the bank at the start of a fiscal year. If income is higher than anticipated, great, you can increase the grants budget if that seems best. But if it’s lower than anticipated, that doesn’t affect the cash that was already set aside for the budget.
“More contributions” isn’t the answer. Spending always needs to be rigorously tracked and controlled, as requests for grants will always grow to exceed contributions.
I appreciate that this is especially difficult for the PSF to “stomach”, as it gets many requests for relatively small grants, almost none of which is a “budget buster” on its own, and almost all which it would like to grant. Effective budgeting is not a job for “nice people” 
. It needs hard-headed accountants and “business types” in charge of it.
Long-term, the most realistic outcome is that some worthy grants must be rejected. This is how every grant-giving organization has to operate.
If an organization approves every grant it will keep getting more requests until it runs out of money, or they totally exhaust the appetite for even-plausibly-relevant grant applications. Given the size of the Python ecosystem I doubt the latter is on the horizon.
Every system is grant review is terrible, but some are worse than others. I don’t envy anyone the task of figuring that out, but I hope the criteria for selection are made clear to the public.