Arcadia Fund

The Arcadia Fund is a UK charity organization founded by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Established in 2001, the organisation provides grants on a worldwide basis focusing on numerous projects outside the UK. The primary focus of the organisation is to preserve endangered culture and nature and to provide open access. The organisation believes that "once memories, knowledge, skills, variety, and intricacy disappear – once the old complexities are lost – they are hard to replicate or replace" and consequently want to "build a vibrant, resilient, green future".

Since 2002, the fund has provided more than $910 million in projects around the world. According to the OECD, the Arcadia Fund's financing for 2019 development increased by 6% to US$55 million.

The foundation is controlled by its three trustees ( Lisbet Rausing, Peter Baldwin and Johannes Burger) and its team of nine members. The fund also has an advisory board of seven members.

History

Since its inception, the fund has averaged yearly grant awards of $35,625,000. Its grants are divided into five categories: Cultural, Environmental, Open Access, Discretionary and Discontinued Themes. As seen by the Table 41% of grant funding is cultural, 37% Environmental, 6% Open Access, 8% Discretionary and 7% Legacy.

Its supported causes have been-as mentioned earlier-the preservation of endangered culture and nature and the provision of open access. The fund has a selected issues criterion which the organization uses to choose grants. The methodology of grant choices has not changed since 2002. However, supported causes have altered slightly.

Aims

The organization aims to provide cultural grants to universities, archives or museums that preserve cultural heritage and digitize near-extinct cultural heritage. Additionally, it intends to supply environmental grants to organizations that preserve endangered habitats at risk land as well as trains staff and enable research and policy development. It also aims to provide open access grants to increase obtention of free material such online as research papers and publications.

Previously, the fund also supported causes such as human rights, philanthropy and education; however, the support for these causes have been discontinued since 2009. Before this support was discontinued, the fund supported organizations that helped refugee scholars, educated disadvantaged children in Africa, and conducted women's right advocacy.

Activities

The fund awards grants to organisations preserving endangered culture, preserving nature, and promoting open access.

Culture

Arcadia's largest grant, totalling £20 million (US$33,851,813), was given in 2002 to the School of Oriental and African Studies to start the Endangered Language Documentation Program (ELDP). The program enables scholars to undertake documentation of disappearing languages. By 2015, the program has documented over 350 languages. The grant also funds training scholars in modern language documentation techniques. The fund donated another US$11 million in April 2015.

In 2004, the fund founded the Endangered Archives Program at the British Library with a $25 million grant supporting the digitisation of at risk collections around the world. By September 2018, the program has supported more than 350 documentation programs in 90 countries, preserving over 6.5 million images and 25,000 sound tracks. The material is available freely online as part of the Endangered Archives Programme. In 2018, the fund gave an additional £9 million to fund the program for a further 7 years.

In 2013 and 2015 provide $1 million to the Smithsonian Institution's collaboration with the Natural History Museum's 'Recovering Voices Initiative', a long-term project to digitise audio recordings, manuscripts and photographs. It aims to digitise the entire collection of ethnographic sound recordings, estimated at 3,000 hours, and 35,000 pages of manuscript materials. In 2015 it provided a $511,200 to the Smithsonian Campaign, 'The Field Book Project', to preserve field books, the original records of scientific expeditions. The grant aimed to support the digitising of 2600 field books, all which will be open access. Currently, the project has catalogued over 9,500 field books and digitised over 4,000.

Environment

The fund in 2018 donated £23 million (US$31,441,100) to the Cambridge Conservative Initiative (CCI) for its Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP). Through the ELP, the CCI and 9 other conservation organisations aimed to restore priority landscape across Europe in an attempt to support viable populations of native species, provide room for natural ecological processes, and improve resilience of ecosystems to short or long term changes.

The fund in 2018 awarded Fauna & Flora International $USD 27,000,000 for the Halcyon Land & Sea Fund. The partnership started in 1998 where Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing developed the idea in conjunction with FFI to develop the Halcyon Fund in which secures highly threatened sites to protect them under local management. As of 2018, the Fund has supported 46 projects in 25 countries, protecting 55.8 million hectares of habitat. Since 2011, Arcadia has provided support in which has supported 34 initiatives across 18 countries. Currently, Arcadia's total funding to FFI is $USD 51,550,000 million. In 2015, Arcadia ordered an independent expert review of the work it had funded through FFI. The review concluded that "The report clearly recognises the invaluable role that Arcadia has played in helping FFI evolve into the organisation it is today, by providing long-term and flexible funding for a considerable and effective body of work." Their first grant in 2011 helped develop the Halcyon Marine Programme, which operates across 72 sites in 17 countries, engaging 88 partners and 35 community-based institutions. It has resulted in threat reduction of biodiversity recovery at 10 sites.

Open access

Arcadia has provided multiple grants to Harvard University to improve open access at the university. In 2009 it awarded $5 million over a 5-year period. The grant will support the processing of 17th and 18th century collections in archives and underwrite conservation treatments to fragile or damaged 17th or 18th century collections. It will also help to catalogue and digitise documents on Harvard's history, and to run the Library Lab programme to improve digital services. The fund provided further support to the university in 2011 with an additional $11 million grant.

In September 2015, the fund provided $450,000 over three years to Creative Commons to develop tools that complement current CC licence suite.

In September 2017, Arcadia donated $5 million to the Wikimedia Foundation, the largest contribution to the foundation at the time. It gave another $3.5 million in 2019.

Discretionary

The Arcadia Fund in 2015 provided $25 million to Yale University to renovate the Hall of Graduate Studies, enabling the university to co-locate the dispersed humanities departments under one roof to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. Baldwin and Rausing have asked that the building should be named after in tribute to the service of David Swensen (who built Yale's endowment from $1.3 billion to $23.9 billion) in tribute to his service.

Arcadia gave £5 million to the Illuminated River Foundation in 2017 for a commissioned art installation of light to 15 of Central London's bridges along the River Thames. When the project is completed, it would be the longest piece of commissioned art in the world at 2.5 miles long.

Discontinued themes

Before 2009 the Arcadia Find was involved in supporting human rights. It supported organisations that helped refugee scholars, educated disadvantaged children in Africa, and conducted women's rights advocacy. In 2005, Arcadia provided a $5 million grant to the Mvule Trust to provide bursaries to young women in Uganda so they can go to secondary school. The grant and trust gave 75% of scholarships to girls and by 2007 and the trust had supported the education of 1,868 children.

Arcadia has provided a total of $6 million in 2005–2006 to the Human Rights Watch (US) to help their empirical research into persecution of women, and its fact gathering, press releases, advocacy and lobbying.

Grant statistics and graphs

The following table breaks down Arcadia's largest grants and provides a description of the purpose of the grant.

References

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Charities based in the United Kingdom