Changes in the Grants Programme for 2025

TL;DR:

• We are making small changes to the Grant Programme
• We are increasing transparency and reducing ambiguity in the guidelines.
• We would like to support more events with our limited budget
• We’ve introduced caps for events in order to make sure all grants are fairly given and we can support more communities.
• We’ve set aside 10% of our budget for the local community.
  

Background:

The EPS introduced a Grant Programme in 2017. Since then, we have granted almost EUR 350k through the programme, partly via EuroPython Finaid and by directly supporting other Python events and projects across Europe. In the last two years, the Grant Programme has grown to EUR 100k per year, with even more requests coming in.

With this growth come new challenges in how to distribute funds fairly so that more events can benefit. Looking at data from the past two years, we’ve often been close to or over our budget. The guidelines haven’t been updated in a while. As grant requests become more complex, we’d like to simplify and clarify the process, and better explain it on our website.

We would also like to acknowledge that EuroPython, when traveling around Europe, has an additional impact on the host country, and we’d like to set aside part of the budget for the local community.

The Grant Programme is also a primary funding source for EuroPython Finaid. To that end, we aim to allocate 30% of the total Grant Programme budget to Finaid, an increase from the previous 25%.

Changes:

• We’ve updated the text on our website, and split it into multiple sub-pages to make it easier to navigate. The website now includes a checklist of what we would like to see in a grant application, and a checklist for the Grants Workgroup – so that when you apply for the Grant you already know the steps that it will go through later and when you can expect an answer from us.
• We looked at the data from previous years, and size and timing of the grant requests. With the growing number and size of the grants, to make it more accessible to smaller conferences and conferences happening later in the year, we decided to introduce max caps per grant and split the budget equally between the first and second half of the year. We would also explicitly split the total budget into three categories – 30% goes to the EuroPython finaid, 10% is reserved for projects in the host country. The remaining 60% of the budget goes to fund other Python Conferences. This is similar to the split in previous years, but more explicit and transparent.

Using 2024 data, and the budget available for Community Grants (60% of total), we’ve simulated different budget caps and found a sweet spot at 6000EUR, where we are able to support all the requests with most of the grants being below that limit. For 2025 we expect to receive a similar or bigger number of requests.

We are introducing a special 10% pool of money to be used on projects in the host country (in 2025 that’s again Czech Republic). This pool is set aside at the beginning of the year, with one caveat that we would like to deploy it in the first half of the year. Whatever is left unused goes back to the Community Pool to be used in second half of the year.

Expected outcome:

• Fairer Funding: By spreading our grants out during the year, conferences that happen later won’t miss out.
• Easy to Follow: Clear rules and deadlines cut down on confusion about how much you can get and what it’s for.
• Better Accountability: We ask for simple post-event reports so we can see where the money went and what impact it made.
• Stronger Community: Funding more events grows our Python network across Europe, helping everyone learn, connect, and collaborate.