Grants awarded
You can search below for information about all grants we awarded. Our grants data is also available in csv format here.
We are committed to transparency, and believe that with better information, grant-makers can be more effective decision makers. In 2017 we started to work with 360Giving to publish information about Arcadia grants (last updated March 2025). Arcadia has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to Arcadia’s grant data, to the extent possible under law, by dedicating it to the public domain with the Creative Commons CC0 waiver. This means the data is freely accessible to anyone to use and share.
Towards the Wikimedia Endowment
To contribute to an endowment fund to support the work of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity.
$3,500,000
2018
1 year
Wildlife Defence Programme
To use legal tools and advocacy to enforce laws that protect European wildlife and habitats.
$2,992,500
2018
5 years
Documentation of maritime archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa
To document endangered maritime archaeological heritage in the Middle East and North Africa and to make the data freely available online.
$2,660,000
2018
5 years
Enhancing Unlocked University Press Books
To create high quality EPUB files of scanned university press books, to enhance the reader experience.
$2,000,000
2018
2 years
Conservation of East Asian-Australasian Flyway
Wetlands International
https://wetlands.org/news/arcadia-fund-helps-us-support-restoration-management-critical-habitats
To conserve and restore degraded habitats in the Yellow Sea region in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.
$1,740,000
2018
5 years
Core funding
To support Public.Resource.Org’s work to make legal statutes and technical and safety standards freely available online.
$1,500,000
2018
3 years
Arabic Collections Online
To help digitize 23,000 books from NYU Library’s Arabic collections and make them freely available online.
$1,340,000
2018
3 years
Liberating species descriptions from in-copyright journal articles
To support work to extract taxonomic data from scientific publications and make them findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), and to promote the resulting repository as the standard in the taxonomic community.
$1,298,000
2018
3 years
Conservation of Freshwater Biodiversity in Key River Ecosystems
International Rivers
https://www.internationalrivers.org/blogs/734/protecting-freshwater-biodiversity-how-international-r
To support International Rivers’ work to influence how rivers are governed, protected in law and valued to help ensure our rivers continue to support diverse habitats and wildlife.
$1,250,000
2018
5 years
Documentation of endangered historic buildings with frescoes in Shanxi Province, China
University College London (Institute of Archaeology)
http://shanxi-project.org/shanxi-digital-documentation-project/
To survey and document endangered buildings with frescoes in Shanxi Province from 500-1900 CE, and to create a bilingual database of the records that is freely available online.
$1,047,438
2018
6 years
Core costs
To help the foundation and its work to build a greener and more democratic Europe.
$1,018,754
2018
1 year
Unlocking University Press Books
To digitize more than 15,000 volumes of published monographs from university libraries and make them available via Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending platform.
$1,003,300
2018
4 years
Digitization of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts in Saint Catherine Monastery, Sinai
To digitize the Arabic and Syriac manuscript codices in the library of St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, and make the results freely available online.
$980,051
2018
3 years
Nepal cultural heritage documentation project
To document monuments and heritage objects in the Kathmandu Valley and make the resulting material freely available online.
$945,748
2018
2 years
Search engine for open access scholarly content
To build and support a new, non-profit free search engine that will make it easy for the public to access peer-reviewed literature.
$850,000
2018
2 years
Commons Collaborative Archive and Library
To develop tools for making openly-licensed content easier to find and use.
$800,000
2018
2 years
Maldives Heritage Survey
To document the cultural heritage of the Maldives and make the data freely available online.
$620,000
2018
2 years
Developing a new sustainable membership model
To develop training resources for academic authors who want to publish open access.
$500,000
2018
2 years
Patagonia National Park
To create a continuous area of protected natural landscape by purchasing ecologically important land next to Patagonia Park in Chile.
$490,000
2018
1 year
Deep Sea Conservation Coalition
To support DSCC’s work to protect deep-sea ecosystems from fishing and mining, and to strengthen biodiversity conservation and governance in international oceans.
$472,000
2018
5 years