Skip to content
Nonprofiteer
← WHOSE KNOWLEDGE QUESTION MARK

Form 990 for tax year 2023

Filed by WHOSE KNOWLEDGE QUESTION MARK.

Totals

Total revenue
$2,539,521
Total expenses
$1,462,770
Contributions and grants received
$2,521,802
Grants paid
$0
Program service revenue
$17,719
Investment income
$0
Other revenue
$0
Total assets, end of year
$1,560,887
Total liabilities, end of year
$1,712
Net assets or fund balances, end of year
$1,559,175
Program services expenses (Part IX)
$1,045,288
Management and general expenses
$222,542
Fundraising expenses
$194,940
Program service expenses (Part III)
$1,045,288

Program services were 71.5% of total expenses calculated — Part IX's program-services column over total expenses, both as filed.

Line items

Every line the filer filed in Parts VIII, IX and X, as filed and in filed order. Blank columns are left out, and the lines are not forced to add up to the totals above.

Revenue

Part VIII, the statement of revenue.

  • 1f · All other contributions, gifts and grants

    $2,521,802

  • 2a · Program service revenue: Consulting Services

    total $15,056 · related or exempt $15,056

  • 2b · Program service revenue: Honorariums

    total $2,663 · related or exempt $2,663

  • 3 · Investment income

    total $0

  • 4 · Income from investment of tax-exempt bond proceeds

    total $0

  • 5 · Royalties

    total $0

  • 6d · Net rental income or loss

    total $0

  • 7d · Net gain or loss

    total $0

  • 8c · Net income from fundraising events

    total $0

  • 9c · Net income from gaming

    total $0

  • 10c · Net income from sales of inventory

    total $0

  • 11e · Other revenue, total

    $0

Functional expenses

Part IX, the statement of functional expenses.

  • 1 · Grants to domestic organizations and governments

    total $0

  • 2 · Grants to domestic individuals

    total $0

  • 3 · Grants to foreign organizations and individuals

    total $0

  • 4 · Benefits paid to or for members

    total $0

  • 5 · Compensation of officers, directors and key employees

    total $95,850 · program services $47,925 · management and general $23,963 · fundraising $23,962

  • 6 · Compensation of disqualified persons

    total $0

  • 7 · Other salaries and wages

    total $0

  • 8 · Pension plan contributions

    total $0

  • 9 · Other employee benefits

    total $544 · program services $272 · management and general $136 · fundraising $136

  • 10 · Payroll taxes

    total $7,577 · program services $3,789 · management and general $1,894 · fundraising $1,894

  • 11a · Fees: management

    total $0

  • 11b · Fees: legal

    total $1,515 · management and general $1,515

  • 11c · Fees: accounting

    total $11,045 · management and general $11,045

  • 11d · Fees: lobbying

    total $0

  • 11e · Fees: professional fundraising services

    total $0

  • 11f · Fees: investment management

    total $0

  • 11g · Fees: other

    total $988,339 · program services $679,043 · management and general $160,388 · fundraising $148,908

  • 12 · Advertising and promotion

    total $0

  • 13 · Office expenses

    total $3,019 · program services $1,900 · management and general $721 · fundraising $398

  • 14 · Information technology

    total $8,981 · program services $3,791 · management and general $4,087 · fundraising $1,103

  • 15 · Royalties

    total $0

  • 16 · Occupancy

    total $0

  • 17 · Travel

    total $111,387 · program services $87,701 · management and general $15,264 · fundraising $8,422

  • 18 · Travel or entertainment for public officials

    total $0

  • 19 · Conferences, conventions and meetings

    total $0

  • 20 · Interest

    total $0

  • 21 · Payments to affiliates

    total $0

  • 22 · Depreciation, depletion and amortization

    total $0

  • 23 · Insurance

    total $0

  • 24a · Other expenses: Research Services

    total $101,826 · program services $92,475 · fundraising $9,351

  • 24b · Other expenses: Program Partner Services

    total $64,482 · program services $64,482

  • 24c · Other expenses: Meetings

    total $39,769 · program services $37,431 · management and general $1,736 · fundraising $602

  • 24d · Other expenses: Honorariums, Grants and Awards

    total $24,301 · program services $24,301

  • 24e · All other expenses

    total $4,135 · program services $2,178 · management and general $1,793 · fundraising $164

Balance sheet

Part X, book values.

  • 1 · Cash, non-interest-bearing

    beginning of year $175,630 · end of year $538,873

  • 2 · Savings and temporary cash investments

    end of year $0

  • 3 · Pledges and grants receivable

    end of year $0

  • 4 · Accounts receivable

    beginning of year $306,894 · end of year $1,012,021

  • 5 · Loans and receivables from officers and key people

    end of year $0

  • 6 · Loans and receivables from disqualified persons

    end of year $0

  • 7 · Other notes and loans receivable

    end of year $0

  • 8 · Inventories for sale or use

    end of year $0

  • 9 · Prepaid expenses and deferred charges

    end of year $6,993

  • 10c · Land, buildings and equipment, net

    end of year $0

  • 11 · Investments: publicly traded securities

    end of year $0

  • 12 · Investments: other securities

    end of year $0

  • 13 · Investments: program-related

    end of year $0

  • 14 · Intangible assets

    end of year $0

  • 15 · Other assets

    end of year $3,000

  • 17 · Accounts payable and accrued expenses

    beginning of year $100 · end of year $1,712

  • 31 · Retained earnings, endowment or other funds

    beginning of year $482,424 · end of year $1,559,175

Mission and programs · 2023

Mission

Whose Knowledge? is a global multilingual campaign to center on the internet the histories, knowledges, leadership, design, and imaginations of the minoritised majority of the world - minoritized and marginalized by historical and ongoing structures of power and privilege. We practice as a feminist anti-oppressions collective striving towards shared liberations through knowledge justice, led by Black and brown women and trans folks from and in the communities and movements we serve, particularly of the Global South and Global Majority.

Activities or mission (Part I)

Whose Knowledge? is a global multilingual campaign to center on the internet the histories, knowledges, leadership, design, and imaginations of the minoritised majority of the world.

  • Honoring Our Guardians - Activities 2023 Through our Honouring Our Guardians program, the Guardians have been meeting online regularly throughout 2023 as a bilingual group across multiple time zones; English/Brazilian Portuguese (with simultaneous interpretation) with the Guardians from the Yomba Valley, Turtle Island (United States), the Great Ocean States of the Pacific (Fiji and Aotearoa/New Zealand), and the (Brazilian) Amazon. The space grew out of the need to specifically have Indigenous women from across the world meet to reflect on knowledge and climate justice, from their own place-based work, but also in collective solidarity. We also began to explore the intersections of this work with digital justice, including the possibilities of Indigenous leadership in an ecologically sound internet. In September 2023, we gathered with Indigenous women from the Pacific Islands and the Brazilian Amazon to reflect on the program, and join the III Indigenous Women's March: Women Biomes in Defense of Biodiversity through Ancestral Roots. The march gathered over 8,000 women from the 247 Indigenous peoples in Brazil, as well as international allies. We were in solidarity with our Brazilian partners ANMIGA, the National Articulation of Ancestral Warriors Women against the Marco Temporal bill, which put Indigenous peoples and territories at risk and has since been vetoed. In the III Indigenous Women's March, we documented the presence of Indigenous womxn for the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. As a result, important articles have images now, like the biographies of Mnica Chuji Gualinga and Jannie Lasimbang. We are now working on a soundscape as a multimodal reflection and learnings from the convening, and a production of a childrens book.

    Expenses $231,939

  • Liberatory Archives and Memory (formerly Whose Digital Archives) - Activities 2023 We welcomed Sally Al-Haq to our team as a co-lead for our program Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAM). LAM is a broad container for reimagining the archive and sites of memory as powerful spaces and acts of resistance, healing, and transformation. It includes the Whose (Digital) Archives? initiative in the United Kingdom and our work globally. Central to the program are the infrastructures of (liberatory) archives and memory in imagining alternatives to Big Knowledge (archives, museums, libraries and other memory institutions such as academic and publishing) and their infrastructures. We have been building a network of community archivists and historians across the Global Majority, mapping connections in different contexts. In collaboration with Shubra Archives in Cairo, we presented an introductory session on Liberatory Archives in Arabic. We are expanding our advisory circle for archives globally through exploratory conversations with community-led initiatives across Global Majority World, and we are connecting with a constellation of foundational scholars in the Liberatory Archives field. We organized 2 learning circles Re-imagining the Public Domain. We convened a group of 35 participants with a diverse range of experiences and expertise: activists, community organizers, tech-builders, wikimedians, and other allies - coming together to reimagine new possibilities for a more just and equitable Public Domain. Our learning circles were held online in Spanish, English and Bengali languages, with interpretation and documentation support. We also participated in different critical spaces, such as the Leipzig conference on One Day the Future Has Died. Impossible Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence; Creative Commons roundtable on Open Culture in Lisbon; Towards a Treaty for the Public Domain workshop organized by Communia; Cast in Stone Summer School, Paris, among others.

    Expenses $194,760 · Revenue $2,663

  • Language Justice (formerly State of the Internets Languages) -Activities 2023 In celebration of the International Mother Language Day, we published the International Sign (IS) translation of the State of the Internet's Languages (STIL) summary report on February 21st, 2023. It comprises a series of 19 short videos, signaled by deaf interpreters, researchers, advocates for sign language, and translators Laura Lesmana Wijaya and Razaq Fakir, from Southeast Asia and Africa respectively. The videos are hosted in the STIL website and, as part of our open knowledge practices, they are also available for download via archive.org. As part of the STIL report, the videos are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. We balance openness of content with the dignity and security of marginalized communities, and we chose this license because the STIL report includes work from and with communities who have historically seen their knowledge exploited by others. This is our way to respect all that they generously shared with us and the world. We started two research-in-action processes to look at critical language justice issues online: "Accessibility/Languages/Tech: Advancing language justice for persons with visual disabilities" is a research-in-action that bridges the gap between language justice and disability rightsparticularly from the South Asian perspectivewhile it brings to the front the intersections of disability, gender, colonialism, and class. Secondly, our research-in-action process "Advocacy, practice and sovereign language tech for language justice" is about centering community values in designing language technologies, more precisely, Automatic Speech Recognition systems and Automatic translation of content for Wikipedia, in African languages Amharic and Tigrinya. Success for us is embedded in the process of collective work with our communities.This year through the Language Justice work, we have centered and amplified voices from people from the Global Majority, honoring their multiple forms and systems of knowledge. Critically, we have affirmed and advocated for greater leadership of disability rights activists in language justice and internet access/accessibility. We have succeeded in modeling an intersectional approach to language, disability rights and justice that we trust will be adopted by different communities, movements, and sectors committed to human rights, social justice, and internet freedoms.

    Expenses $186,445

As filed on the 2023 return. The filer continues this part on Schedule O, which is not shown here.

Listed in Part VII

  • Adele Mara Godoy Vrana

    Co-Found./Dir.

    Total calculated
    $95,850
    From this org
    $95,850
    From related orgs
    $0
    Other
    $0
    Hours/week
    40
  • Ashima Bhardwaj

    Board Member

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    40
  • Camille E Acey

    Board Chair

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    2
  • Oona Castro

    Board Member

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    2
  • Dumisani Ndubane

    Board Member

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    2
  • Shamillah Wilson

    Board Member

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    20
  • Garfield Byrd

    Treasurer

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    10
  • Anasuya Sengupta

    Co-Found./Dir.

    Total calculated
    $0
    Hours/week
    40

Compensation is as filed in Part VII: reportable pay from this organization and from related organizations, other compensation, and hours per week. The total, marked calculated, is our sum of the three dollar columns, with a blank column counted as $0; the form itself has no total. On a Form 990-EZ the columns are Part IV's instead, and on a Form 990-PF Part VIII's — compensation, contributions to benefit plans, and expense account — and the total sums those.

Grants on this return

No itemized grants to organizations on this return.

Provenance

Return type
form_990
Tax year
2023
Filed
13 November 2024
IRS schema version
2023v5.1
Source object
202443189349302134

Check it against the return as filed: the GivingTuesday Data Lake hosts a public copy of the original XML.

The source document this was parsed from is served over the API, which is where bulk and document access live.