Social platform Reddit has pledged to donate over $1.4 million in support of communities, offering grants up for $US50k for subreddits across its platform, including those based in Australia.
Reddit is home to endless human creativity, connection, and collaboration. People come together to do surprising, incredible, and inspiring things. For the past six months, Reddit has been experimenting with a program called Community Funds to help Reddit community ideas and passions come to life with financial support.
Through the experiment, Reddit funded 13 projects that communities nominated. Projects have included a comics tournament, a community-designed musical artist billboard in Times Square, and a digital conference for history buffs.
The platform hopes to foster more opportunities for connection by making Community Funds official, with $1.4 million in funding. Community Funds aligns with their mission of bringing community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world. The company believes that empowering communities to do more by awarding funds to support their best ideas is one way they can accomplish this.
“Sometimes all it takes is a little boost to make a great idea come to life, and we want to empower our communities with this support,” said Laura Nestler, Reddit vice president of community.
Beginning in June, Reddit will invite communities to submit ideas for projects, events, contests, giving, almost anything they can think of to bring people together for inspiration and delight. It will accept nominations for projects needing anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 in funding, and select grantees based on their creativity, feasibility, and community impact.
Until then, Reddit will be ironing out its submission details and guidelines.
