Blog post author Thomas Turnbull is one of the three members of the grants committee, along with Michael Anello and Amye Scavarda. He is a web developer at Google, previously building Drupal sites at Zagat and Sony Music. He has helped to run Drupal Camps and meetups in New York City, and is co-author of Mapping with Drupal. 

Since the Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grants (CCG) launched two years ago, $31,000 has been given to 28 projects. These grants have supported Drupal camps, meetups and lecture series all over the world in areas with emerging Drupal communities. Intended to kickstart community growth, CCGs are designed to provide seed money to help a community gain some initial momentum while identifying future paths to fiscal sustainability.

Highlights from the past few months of grant awards includes a $1,500 grant to the organizers of Drupalcamp Arad (Romania) 2012, a community where developers are plenty, but local financial support is lacking. $1,500 was also awarded to the organizers of the first DrupalCamp China - a collaboration with an existing BarCamp event with over 600 people in attendance, with over 300 people specifically attending Drupal-related sessions.

These grants are still available, so if you want to organize an event that will help grow Drupal in a community where Drupal is not well known and sponsorships are not yet readily available, then you should apply! Full details and the application form are at https://association.drupal.org/grants. Grants are awarded on a rolling basis and the application process is intended to be quick and simple. The grants awarded since our last update in October are:

• DrupalCamp Seoul (South Korea)

• DrupalCamp Arad (Romania)

• DrupalCamp North West 2012 (UK)

• Drupal Balkan Summit Zagreb 2012 (Croatia)

• DrupalCamp China

• Drupal Code Drop In (India)

• Philippine Drupal Campus Tours

• Drupal Education Days (Romania)

Full details of all these events and the amount awarded are at https://association.drupal.org/grants/awarded.