Global Voices Announces Investment from Omidyar Network · Global Voices
Ethan Zuckerman

I'm thrilled to announce that the Omidyar Network has made a $1.2 million investment in Global Voices's work. Omidyar is a philanthropic foundation created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam to improve people's lives through “harnessing the power of markets”. Omidyar has supported some of the organizations we most admire – the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, Ushahidi, WITNESS – and we're particularly honored to be part of a “class” that includes UK-based transparency organization MySociety and Kenyan political satire troupe, The XYZ Show.
Omidyar is known for challenging their grantees to move towards financial stability, a path that we'd already made a high organizational priority. With support from Omidyar, we're planning to expand our readership online and via email, to enter into syndication agreements (like the ones we have with La Stampa and Reuters) with at least five new partners and to start creating original content in French and Spanish as well as in English.
Funding from Omidyar is also helping us shore up the infrastructures necessary to manage our complex and international team. GV editors and contributors are on every continent but Antarctica and our management team is scattered across the globe. While we're committed to being a virtual organization without offices or filing cabinets, we've got a lot of practical and administrative challenges to face to ensure we're able to continue amplifying and sharing citizen voices from around the world. Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit community understands that support for these unsexy sorts of activities is the hardest sort of money to raise – we're particularly grateful that Omidyar is making an investment in our whole organization and not just a specific project.
We're really excited about this new development and to working closely with our friends at Omidyar, especially Stephen King, Omidyar's Senior Director of Investments. Later this year, we'll be expanding our board of directors by two members, including Stephen and a third representative elected from our staff and volunteer community. Thanks to Omidyar – and all our wonderful supporters – for making this community possible.