It isn't easy to build a strong community. Many event organizers work to bring people together for Drupal. Community Cultivation Grants are one tool to make the work a little easier. With a grant, you can strengthen the local community. You can help drive the adoption of Drupal.
Drupal Association members fund these grants. A few grant recipients have told us their stories. I'd like to share more about what has happened since the grants were awarded.
Today we launch the membership campaign focused on the Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grants program. Association members fund grants to kickstart community-strengthening projects around the world.
The campaign runs through October 28 and our goals are 265 new members signed up and $10,918 in revenue. These are a 10% increase over the same period of time last year.
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.
This post by Cathy Theys was previously published on GDO, but she gave us permission to repost it here. So many things in this story to love, from the multi-generational meetups to the start of Global Sprint Weekend. If you have a Drupal community initiative you want to get off the ground, check out the info on Community Cultivation Grants to see if you might qualify for funding.
If you know Drupal well enough to find yourself reading this, you probably know that Drupal is powered by a global community. In practice, though, it is very easy to look at your local community, your co-workers, and the people you meet at DrupalCons and think, “This is the Drupal community.”
The reality is that we each know and understand a limited slice of the community; the experiences and perspectives are different from locale to locale, sector to sector, function to function, and of course individual to individual.
Getting things off the ground in any open source community is a challenge. Beyond motivation, you need some resources to help get things moving with outreach and educational programs. To help you overcome some of the barriers, the Drupal Association has been piloting the Community Cultivation Grant program, drawing on the same awesome attitude that has earned the Drupal Community its community-oriented reputation within the open source universe.
