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.
Python community, there is a lot of messaging from PSF and allies along the lines “dear organizers, PSF and you are in the same boat, we are so sad and suffer with you, there was nothing we could have done ”.
Do not accept this narrative but hold PSF accountable for its egregious failures.
For instance, for not publishing ahead projections and financial statements as any normal, professional organisation would do:
Also, Marie (@riecatnor), Georgi(@georgically) , it would be instructive to see an answer to the following question:
can you put a ballpark number to the financial benefits that you have received over the last years from or through PSF?
direct (e.g., salary, grants) or in-kind/indirect (funding to allied projects, events, etc)?
Any maybe compare that to the amounts that, for example, you have recently denied to the median African event that confers benefits and opportunities to not 2 but maybe 100 people?
But, on second thought: publishing your salary would be factual and give useful context, but it would not be such a great communication strategy, Community Communications Manager Marie Nordin?
So, instead, let’s focus how we and PSF can jointly suffer and hope for a time where maybe more scraps will land in the laps of us wretched of the world
And please let me know if being critical and asking for accountability and transparency is considered a Code of Conduct violation on this forum - after all, I did imply at least negligence, and my tone could make you sad
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 the pointer. More than nothing, though this is a mix of glossy self-congratulation and numbers that do are not detailed enough to understand where money keeps going.
Also, this is a “hindsight” view, where are budgets/projections? Do these exist? Forecasts are critical to see whether an organisation is headed for a full-on crash.
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.
@Deb , thanks for your swift response.
While we have your attention, can you explain how you managed to spend 2.500.000 Dollar on pycon US in 2024? (this is the sum according to page 25 of the “2024 impact report”)
According to the convention center page, renting out the full thing is just 30k daily; you also charged 750$ per corporate, 400$ per individual, 100$ per student to attendees.
At 2.551 in-person attendees, it means you spent approx 1.000$ per attendee (!). If this is from catering, that is multiple 5-star menus and centuries old wine per person, even after substracting venue costs.
For comparison, the report lists upkeep of the python packaging/distribution ecosystem at 1.3 million, and grants at 0.6 million.
Also, how much did you spend on pycon US 2025?
So,@Deb, what do you think you have control over? In your budget, I mean? Expenditures maybe?
Like, maybe, staff costs, or how much you spend on pycon US every year? Is that something you have control over, or is this also a function of “community enthusiasm” that is impossible to rein in? Just asking politely here.
Maybe a list of the companies or persons that received funds for pycon 2024 and pycon 2025, and for what, might be helpful to “improve the long-term health of the program”, as you say.
Do you really think that’s what you’re doing?
It’s not a CoC violation to ask for details. However, you’re also acting extremely rude and pushy, and it’s pretty clear you’re aware of that. Slow down how often you’re posting, wait for responses to have an actual dialog, and use polite, professional communication regardless of how urgent or angry you may be.
Moderators have decided to set this to slow mode along with the other topic you started.
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.
Moderators, thanks for unblocking my account again.
Funny how no one seems to be engaging with my question: where did the 2.500.000 (two point five million) Dollar for pycon US 2024 go?
This is four times the annual grant budget. About 50% of the Program Service Expense budget. The venue costs 30.000 per day, so even if you pay all of the 2.511 attendees a hotel room every day on top and 5-star menu, you do not quite get there.
And what did pycon US 2025 cost?
You asked that question 4 hours ago, on a Friday afternoon in Europe, and a Friday before a long weekend in the U.S and Canada:
While I am interested in what information comes out of this topic, I think you need to significantly realign your timeline expectations if you’re actually wanting helpful and constructive outcomes.
That you expect the board of a non-profit to answer your questions (a person who is not financially contributing to or, presumably, involved in grant applications with the PSF) within a few hours on the same day regardless of anyone’s prior commitments is wildly unrealistic.
From my own experience of administrative and financial questions from an organization I would consider simply receiving an acknowledgement of the questions within 1 business day (that would be by the end of Tuesday in the U.S and Canada) to be a fast turn around. And to be clear, I don’t have or mean to imply that expectation.
That you expect the board of a non-profit to answer your questions […] is wildly unrealistic.
@Deb Nicholson, the executive director, has almost immediately replied and engaged with this thread, her answer is “we will do quarterly reviews on the grant budget”.
completely unhelpful misdirection, because the issue concerns the entire budget, incl the massive multimillion expenditures for pycon US, the single largest post - four times the grant budget, and likely cannibalizing the grant budget! With the massive, growing multimillion spend on pycon US, and conferences everywhere getting denied much lower sums, proposing more reviews on the grant budget is not just ineffective, but it is intentional, cynical negligence.
the executive director can be expected to know where the single largest supermassive expenditure went. If a single expenditure is 50-60% of everything, she better know off the top of her head where it went, and be able to explain it in a way the public can understand, or she has utterly failed at her job and should look for another one.
Deb N has almost immediately engaged with this thread, but is deflecting by disregarding the impact of the pycon overspend on the grants budget, while supporters cheer her on (nothing to see at pycon US with the 2.5 millions! let’s ignore this and talk about sth else!) - so the argument “you cannot expect to get an answer” is absurd, simply because in fact we got an answer within a few hours of me posting, from the executive director no less.
Side note: ”you have not donated anything hence you cannot expect an answer” is not just an absurd ad hominem, but also based on a factually wrong premise.
(I am a contributing member and the link you gave shows exactly the opposite)
I hope you do not expect me to comment on that anymore.
The problem are the millions spent on pycon US close to the decision makers, while grants are being shut down worldwide. We want answers, not performative distraction.
This is bad faith and manipulative quoting, my quote without the aside parenthesis says:
That you expect the board of a non-profit to answer your questions (…) within a few hours on the same day regardless of anyone’s prior commitments is wildly unrealistic.
You selectively edited it to make it sound like I am implying expecting your questions to be answered is unrealistic, rather than what I actually said which is that the timeline you are expecting is unrealistic.
I hope you appreciate why you might receive abrasive answers if you are going to engage in such bad faith communication by mischaracterizing what others have said.
You have also missed the other main point of my post, which is your new specific question to an organization about a large budget matter involving multiple parties, rather than just clarifying already existing statements and agreed actions, will in the best case scenario likely take time to respond to.
The question you pose is not a question I would expect to be answered off the cuff by anyone, and could involve a non-trivial amount of work to answer, making sure it is compliant with contracts, is factually correct, as well as other constraints we are likely unaware of. As well as what exactly is the expected transparency over such things, I don’t even know.
In my opinion, your assertiveness that your questions must be answered immediately is very ill placed. The fact you have received any engagement at all has been at the prerogative of those who have chosen to engage with you, there is no requirement for them to do so, and you have no kind of privilege, legal or otherwise, to such communication.
Shall we refocus on the questions?
Where did the 2.5 million dollar go? How much did pycon US 2025 cost? Who received the money? Did the cost of pycon US 2025 cause or impact the grant freeze?
But take your time, @Deb.
As multiple people say, there might be a non-trivial amount of work to do, or compliance questions, data protection reasons, internal multi-party alignment, etc.