Arcadia Fund

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's serves humanity to preserve cultural heritage and ecosystem's. The organisation believes that once the small complexities of life are lost it is hard to replicate and consequently want to preserve.

Since 2002, the fund has provided in excess of $570 million in projects around the world.

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 graph 41% of grant funding is cultural, 37% Environmental, 6% Open Access, 8% Discretionary and 7% Legacy.

Arcadia's supported cause since inception in 2002 have been preserving endangered culture, preserving endangered nature and open access. Arcadia's has a selected issues in which they use to choose grants which has not changed since 2002. The fund aims to provide cultural grants to universities, archives or museums that preserve cultural heritage and digitise near-extinct cultural heritage. The fund aims to provide environmental grants to organisations that preserve endangered habitats and at risk land as well as trains staff, enables research and policy development. The fund aims to provide open access grants to increase access of free material such online as research papers and publications.

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

Activities

Arcadia’s activities revolve wholly around their grant program in which the Fund aims to look for organisations that are 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 ($33,851,813 USD) 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 $11 million USD 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 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.

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)

Recipiant	Title of Grant	Date of Grant	Value ($USD)	Type Of Grant	Description of Grant
School of Oriental and African Studies	Endangered Languages Documentation Programme		33,851,813	Cultural	The Academic Programme to train linguists documenting endangered languages.
University of Cambridge	Cambridge Conservation Initiative:  Endangered Landscapes Programme		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		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		25,000,000	Cultural	To build a new cultural conservation and digitisation centre.
Yale University	The Hall of Graduate Studies		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		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		11,000,000	Cultural	To continue to support the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme.
Harvard University	College fellows fund		10,000,000	Cultural	To support Harvard College Fellows Program.
University of California Los Angeles	Endowment to Department of History		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		10,000,000	Environmental	To establish an endowment fund for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Directorship.
Harvard University	Supporting Open Access with Harvard Library		9,000,000	Open Access	To improve acquisition policies and access to the library's collections.