👋,

Since our last donor update, it’s been a year (quite a year, to be honest), so here’s what’s happened since.

Community Project Selection

After our Call For Proposals, we received 61 applications from all over Latin America. With the input from 5 anonymous judges, we selected 13 community projects across the region. We have representation from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Peru, El Salvador, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador in the selected projects.

The projects we selected are diverse in approach, format, impact, and, most importantly, organizing team. They’re all community-oriented, focused on education at a local, regional or global level. Crews are working on podcasts, workshops, and courses either as a new initiative or part of a pre-existing community. Your funding will maximize their impact.

For the moment, we won’t be publicizing the specific projects or communities we funded until they get a chance to make progress and we have some impact to report.

Funding Disbursement

We released the funds for 11 selected projects during the first half of the year. We’re still waiting to hear back from the remaining two, and we will reinvest these grants if we don’t hear back by next week.

Once we conclude with the disbursement, we will share a breakdown of the fund allocation. As a reminder, all your donations go towards the fund while operational costs are financed independently.

Impact Report

We recently sent out an impact survey to all projects to gather the initial results after funding (projects were financed in Q1). We also held a meetup with community organizers and will continue to support community efforts to maximize their impact. We plan to collect impact data, and publish a report one year from when we funded projects.

🤘 Thanks for reading and stay safe 😷,

🥟 The Empanada Fund Team

PS. Here's a short video of the empanadas I grew up with - @buritica