Arcadia Fund


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. Its primary focus currently is preserving endangered culture, preserving endangered nature and providing open access.
Since 2002, the fund has provided in excess of $570 million in projects around the world.
The foundation is controlled by its three trustees 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. The grants are divided into 5 categories: Cultural, Environmental, Open Access, Discretionary and Discontinued Themes as shown in the following table
Type Of GrantGrant Total Percentage of Total Grants
Cultural204,585,49441%
Environmental183,564,27237%
Open Access29,922,8796%
Discretionary40,403,8168%
Discontinued Themes34,317,3847%

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.
Arcadia 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.
The Graph shows the fund's grants per years

Activities

Arcadia 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 to start the Endangered Language Documentation Program. 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

Arcadia in 2018 gave £23 million to the Cambridge Conservative Initiative for the Endangered Landscapes Programme. Arcadia in collaboration with CCI and 9 other conservation organisations aim to reserve priority landscape across Europe to support viable populations of native species, provide room for natural ecological processes, resilience of ecosystems to short or long term changes.
Arcadia in 2018 gave 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, the fund 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, which 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.". Its first grant in 2011 for the Halcyon Marine Programme has led to a programme in 72 sites in 17 countries withr 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 wil support the processing of 17th and 18th century collections in archives and underwrite conservation treatments of 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. I Arcadia provided further support to the university in 2011 with an additional $11 million grant.
In September 2015, the fund gave $450,000 over 3 years to Creative Commons. to develop tools that complement current CC licence suite.
In September 2017, the fund gave $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 gave $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.. Baldwin and Rausing have asked in tribute to the service of David Swensen that the building should be named after him.
Arcadia gave £5 million to the illuminated River Foundation in 2017 towards its program 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>

Discontinued Themes

The fund before 2009 were involved in supporting human rights, supporting organisations to help refugee scholars, educate disadvantaged children in Africa, and conduct women's right advocacy. In 2005, it provided a $5 million grant to the Mvule Trust, to provide bursaries to young women in Uganda to attend 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 to help their empirical research into persecution of women, and its fact gathering, press releases, advocacy and lobbying..

Grant Statistics and Graphs

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

Arcadia Cumulative Grant Total


The graph shows Arcadia's cumulative grant total