Arcadia Fund

Further information on Non-Profit Organisations: [[:Wikimedia Foundation]], [[:Endangered Languages Archive]], and [[:Smithsonian Institution]]

Arcadia Fund

Formation	2001 (2001)
Founders	Peter Baldwin Lisbet Rausing
Purpose	Preserve Endangered Cultural Heritage and Ecosystems, Promoting Open Access
Headquarters	London, England, UK
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Professor Peter Baldwin(Trustee)|Lisbet Rausing (Trustee)|Dr Johannes Burger (Trustee)|
Endowment	$570 million
Employees	9
Website	www.arcadiafund.org.uk

The Arcadia Fund is a UK charity organisation founded by Lisbet Rausing and Professor 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 involves preserving endangered culture, preserving endangered nature and providing open access. Arcadia's Mission statement outlines the organisations philosophical views in which details that Arcadia, "serves humanity to preserve cultural heritage and ecosystem's". 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 in excess of $570 million in projects around the world.

Arcadia Cumulative Grant Total

The graph reveals Arcadia's cumulative grant total

The foundation is controlled by its three trustees (Lisbet Rausing, Peter Baldwin and Dr Johannes Burger) and its team of 9 members. The fund also has an advisory board of 7 members.

History

Arcadia has since 2002 provided in excess of $570 million globally in Grants. Since its inception it has averaged a yearly grant endowment of $35,625,000. It's breakdown of grants is divided into 5 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.

Breakdown of Arcadia's Grant Structure

Type Of Grant	Grant Total ($USD)	Percentage of Total Grants
Cultural	204,585,494	41%
Environmental	183,564,272	37%
Open Access	29,922,879	6%
Discretionary	40,403,816	8%
Discontinued Themes	34,317,384	7%

The table above shows a breakdown of Arcadia's Grant structure

Arcadia's supported causes since inception in 2002 have been preserving endangered culture, preserving endangered nature and open access. Arcadia's has a selected issues criterion in which the organisation use's to choose grants. The methodology of grant choices has not changed since 2002 however, supported causes has altered slightly. Arcadia aims to provide cultural grants to universities, archives or museums that preserve cultural heritage and digitise near-extinct cultural heritage. Additionally, Arcadia provides environmental grants to organisations that preserve endangered habitats, at risk land as well as trains staff, enable research and policy development. Arcadia also aims to provide open access grants to increase access of free material such online as research papers and publications.

Further, Arcadia also supported causes such as human rights, philanthropy and education however since 2009 the support for the causes have been discontinued.

Arcadia Grant Total per year

The Graph shows Arcadia's per year Grant donations

Activities

Arcadia's activities revolve wholly around their grant program in which the fund seeks organisations that are dynamic, well researched and can deliver on the objectives of endangered culture, nature and promoting open access.

Culture

Arcadia's largest grant occurred in its first few years of operating (2002) to the School of Oriental and African Studies totalling £20 million (US$33,851,813) resulting in the inception of 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 globally. Further, the grant also funded training scholars in modern language documentation techniques in an attempt to train the next generation to preserve linguistic diversity. Arcadia additionally donated another US$11 million in April 2015 in their continued support to the program.

In 2013 and 2015 Arcadia supported the Smithsonian Institution with their collaboration with the Natural History Museum's fight on preserving cultural history. In 2013 Arcadia provided a $1 million Grant to support the Recovering Voices Initiative. This is a long term project in which aims to digitise audio recordings, manuscripts and photographs. Further the initiative aims to digitise the entire collection of ethnographic sound recordings, estimated at 3,000 hours, and 35,000 pages of manuscript materials. Further in 2015 Arcadia provided an additional $511,200 to the Smithsonian Campaign, 'The Field Book Project'. Field books are original records of scientific discovery. The project was designed to provide free online access to biodiversity research. The grant aimed to support the digitising of 2600 field books, which will be open access. . Currently, the Field Book Project has catalogued over 9,500 field books and digitised over 4,000.

Environment

Arcadia more recently in 2018 donated a substantial £23 million (USD $31,441,100) and continued its support to preserving natural habitat with its collaboration and contributions to the Cambridge Conservative Initiative (CCI) through the Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP). Arcadia in collaboration with CCI and 9 other conservative organisations aim to reserve priority landscape across Europe in an attempt to " transform the global understanding and conservation of biodiversity and, through this, secure a sustainable future for biodiversity and society". ELP aims to deliver its vision in which wants to support viable populations of native species, provide room for natural ecological processes, resilience of ecosystems to short or long term changes. . The ELP founders show their gratitude to this contribution revealing their ambitious plans can greatly attributed to Arcadia's support and funding.

Arcadia in 2018 has strengthened its long running partnership with Fauna & Flora International with a grant of $USD 27,000,000 to 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 across 25 countries, protecting 55.8 million hectares of habitat. Since 2011, Arcadia has provided large scale 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 results provided positive conclusions where it was stated 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.". Arcadia's impact on FFI can be seen through their first grant in 2011 developing the Halcyon Marine Programme. The programme operates across 72 sites in 17 countries engaging 88 partners and 35 community-based institutions and has already resulted in threat reduction of biodiversity recovery at 10 sites.

Open Access

In September 2015, Arcadia provided a grant totalling $450,000 over 3 years to Creative Commons. CC's intended to use the donation to develop tools that complement current CC licence suite and gives the ability for authors to retain or regain their right to publish so they can make their scholarly or academic works publicly available.

In September 2017, Arcadia donated $5 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. This contribution was the largest contribution to the foundation to date and was vital to help support the growth of the Wikimedia Campaign. Further, the Grant was matched by another $5 million in donations from major gifts teams in FY 2016/17. Additionally in 2019 the foundation gave $3.5 million to the organisation bringing their endowment total to $8.5 million.

Grant Statistics/Graphs

Arcadia's Largest Grants ($USD)

Recipient	Title of Grant	Date of Grant (D/M/Y)	Value ($USD)	Type Of Grant	Description of Grant
School of Oriental and African Studies	Endangered Languages Documentation Programme	25/07/2002	33,851,813	Cultural	The Academic Programme to train linguists documenting endangered languages.
University of Cambridge	Cambridge Conservation Initiative:  Endangered Landscapes Programme	30/01/2018	31,441,100	Environmental	To develop and support large-scale projects seeking to create habitats that are rich in biodiversity and resilient to environmental change.
Fauna & Flora International	Halcyon Programmes and core institutional support	01/10/2017	27,000,000	Environemental	To expand the success of both the Halcyon Land & Sea Fund and the Halcyon Marine Programme to date, increasing focus on long-term sustainability.
Yale University	Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage	01/06/2011	25,000,000	Cultural	To build a new cultural conservation and digitisation centre.
Yale University	The Hall of Graduate Studies	01/07/2017	25,000,000	Discretionary	To refurbish the Hall of Graduate Studies and to support the programmatic agenda that will transform it into a central home for the humanities at Yale
British Library	Endangered Archives Programme	27/01/2004	16,960,153	Cultural	To establish a grants programme that funds projects that digitise neglected, vulnerable or inaccessible archives relating to pre-industrial societies.
School of Oriental and African Studies	Endangered Languages Documentation Programme	01/12/2016	11,000,000	Cultural	To continue to support the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme.
Harvard University	College fellows fund	01/06/2011	10,000,000	Cultural	To support Harvard College Fellows Program.
University of California Los Angeles	Endowment to Department of History	28/06/2012	10,000,000	Cultural	To establish the Endowed History Department Chair and History Department Chair Quasi-Endowment Fund.
University of Cambridge	Cambridge Conservation Initiative: Endowment of Directorship	03/07/2017	10,000,000	Environmental	To establish an endowment fund for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Directorship.
Harvard University	Supporting Open Access with Harvard Library	30/11/2011	9,000,000	Open Access	To improve acquisition policies and access to the library's collections.

The Table Breakdowns Arcadia largest grants and a description of the purpose of the grant