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)
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. Its Mission statement outlines the organisations philosophical views to, "serve humanity (and) 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.

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

The fund has since 2002 provided in excess of $570 million globally in grants. Since its inception it has averaged yearly grant awards 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.

Its supported causes since inception in 2002 have been preserving endangered culture, preserving endangered nature and open access. The fund 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. It aims to provide cultural grants to universities, archives or museums that preserve cultural heritage and digitise near-extinct cultural heritage. Additionally, it provides environmental grants to organisations that preserve endangered habitats, at risk land as well as trains staff, enable research and policy development. It also aims to provide open access grants to increase access of free material such online as research papers and publications.

Previously, the fund also supported causes such as human rights, philanthropy and education; however since 2009 the support for the causes have been discontinued. The fund supported organisations around these discontinued themes 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 was in 2002, to the School of Oriental and African Studies— totalling £20 million (US$33,851,813) 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 Sept 2018, the program has supported more than 350 documentation programs in 90 countries, with over 6.5 million images and 25,000 sound tracks being preserved. 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 l £23 million (US$31,441,100) to the Cambridge Conservative Initiative (CCI) for its Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP). Arcadia in collaboration with CCI and 9 other conservation organisations aim to restore priority landscape across Europe in an attempt to support viable populations of native species, provide room for natural ecological processes, resilience of ecosystems to short or long term changes.

The fund in 2018 awarded Fauna & Flora International $USD 27,000,000 for 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 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

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 . Thefund provided further support to the university in 2011 with an additional $11 million grant.

In September 2015, the fund provided $450,000 over 3 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 Yale Hall of Graduates Studies enabling the university to co-locate the dispersed humanities departments to under one roof. offering a setting for cross-disciplinary collaboration and advance research. T . Baldwin and Rausing have asked in tribute to the service of David Swensen (Who built Yale's endowment from $1.3 billion to $23.9 billion) that the building should be named after him.

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 art commission in the world at 2.5 miles long. ref>"The Illuminated River Foundation". Arcadia Fund. 2018-10-08. Retrieved 2019-05-31.</ref> "Illuminated River". The Developer. Retrieved 2019-05-31.</ref>

Discontinued themes

Arcadia before 2009 were involved in supporting human rights. It supported organisations that helped refugee scholars, educate disadvantaged children in Africa, and conduct women's right 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 2005–06 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

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