Get to know our recipients of the Yoast Range Fund 2021! • yogurt

By Daniel K. On Sep 19, 2021

Francesca Marano

Francesca is the lead WordPress core team, where she can work full-time on the open source project with some of the brightest minds in the industry. She is an accomplished educator, community leader, and speaker.

Diversity is an important aspect of any community. It encourages discussion, change, and growth. It brings new voices and ideas into the mix. Diversity opens the door to new possibilities and keeps this door open to everyone, not just the privileged few. This is why we created the Yoast Diversity Fund: to support underrepresented groups that have a huge impact in the WordPress community around the world.

The Yoast Diversity Fund in brief

Our Diversity Fund 2021 offers financial support to people who are working on a project that will benefit WordPress. Projects can range from teaching a group of people how to work with WordPress to writing patches for Core. Very simple: Anyone can apply as long as the project uses WordPress and makes the WordPress project varied in a certain way.

The applications have now been completed and the scholarship holders have been selected. We are therefore very proud to be able to announce the following people and projects that are sponsored by Yoast! Check out the amazing projects below to see the great things our awardees are working on:

Milana Cap / documentation focus management

“There was a huge gap between the release team and the documentation team. I want to change that. “

Milana has over a decade of volunteering experience at WordPress.org and has used the Diversity Fund to help her take on the lead role of documentation focus for the WordPress 5.8 release.

She has a strong vision for improving approval processes and workflows to ensure the documentation team gets all the information they need. As the Head of Documentation Focus, she was responsible for writing developer notes about changes and new features introduced in 5.8 and ensuring that the end-user documentation (HelpHub) and developer documentation (DevHub) are up to date with the new version.

We think this is a great project and Milana has certainly convinced us of the importance of good documentation! Would you like to help with projects like this one? You can get involved on WordPress.org.

Mary Job / Uwani Hub

“We need this next generation to bring their fresher perspectives to WordPress, including new creative ways to further democratize WordPress”

Mary founded Uwani Hub to provide a safe place to practice tech for teenagers in her underserved community in the Ijebu-Imusin area of Ogun state. In their village center, the team introduces teenagers to digital skills, WordPress, technology history, trends, software development, robotics, graphics, art, and character development.

In short, the goals of the Uwani Hub are:

Train 5,000 teenagers and women in WordPress software and digital skills by 2030.
By 2030, build a community of 500 active contributors to the WordPress software, especially among our teenagers, within our hub community.
Train linguists in our community to translate WordPress into our main local languages and build a community of polyglots willing to teach others what they have learned.

We are excited to support this empowering and impactful project. You can also donate to Uwani Hub if you wish.

TC Cazy / Contribution to the WordPress documentation

“When underrepresented people see my post, they are contributing to it. I love to share what I have learned. I can share, learn and grow with the WordPress community. “

TC is a young developer with a mission: He wants to make the WordPress ecosystem more attractive to underrepresented groups by making documentation more accessible.

He is training to become a Certified Professional Technical Communicator and will use the skills he has learned to teach, supervise and contribute to WordPress documentation for five hours per week. In particular, he wants to work on understandable documentation, as exclusive language can create hurdles for underrepresented groups.

We are very excited to sponsor TC and we believe that his project will make a huge contribution to the global WordPress community.

David Towoju / WordPress BootCamp for Nigerians

“There are a lot of underrepresented people in Africa and this will help a lot of people to become rock solid developers in Nigeria.”

David takes the initiative to set up WordPress BootCamps for his Nigerian compatriots. He will offer in-depth interactive training programs that will teach other Nigerians to code and help them become WordPress developers. These BootCamps include topics such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React / Vue, PHP and the WordPress Framework.

The goals are:

Teach people to be seasoned WordPress developers
Raising the standard of living of the participants by increasing their chances of better employment
Raise the awareness of WordPress in my community.

We are very excited to be supporting this project and we believe it can have a tremendous impact on many lives as well as the WordPress project as a whole.

Estela Rueda Landeros / Redesign of the HelpHub documentation

“The user documentation must be easy to find for new and non-technical users”

Estela is working on a redesign of the WordPress.org HelpHub documentation to ensure that Help articles are up-to-date and easy to find.

In this project, Estela will reclassify more than 170 items in end-user documentation, add new features and improve accessibility. In particular, she wants to mark outdated information and links, change article titles from one-word titles in action and object form, and add features like change logs and breadcrumbs. Also, she wants to create a completely different navigation menu!

We are excited to support Estela and her project, and we think her hard work and dedication to improving documentation will benefit countless users.

Abel Lifaefi Mbula / Kali Academy

“We are the Kali Academy, a non-profit organization that teaches young people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo how to contribute to open source. “

Abel is the founder of Kali Academy, a non-profit that aims to attract developers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to participate in open source via WordPress and related software.

This new project is aimed at college students and developers from Kisangani and the surrounding cities. The project will introduce them to WordPress and Open Source through training and mentoring. They want to achieve the following:

Goal # 1 – Create awareness of WordPress open source contributions among university students
- Goal # 1.1 – Educate the DRCongo public about WordPress and related open source software
- Goal # 1.2 – Run fundraising days and / or charity hackathons at universities.
Goal # 2 – Support DRCongo folk developers who are contributing to WordPress
- Goal # 2.1 – Host monthly online live sessions and answer questions
- Goal # 2.2 – Mentor Developers on their WordPress Contribution Journey.

It looks like a great project! We are proud to offer our support to Abel and the Kali Academy as they work towards these admirable goals.

It doesn’t end here!

It’s great to find out what different people are doing in the WordPress community around the world. We have to admit that we are quite impressed and inspired after reading about these projects. We wish all recipients of the Yoast Diversity Fund 2021 every success. Stay tuned for updates on our Diversity Fund 2021 projects over time!

After all, there are a lot more people out there doing great things and bringing more diversity to the world of WordPress. We can’t offer funding to every project, but they are Everyone great and we wish anyone good luck in your endeavors. Big or small, every contribution counts when it comes to diversity. So keep it up!

We then hope to be able to continue the next round of the Yoast Diversity Fund in 2022. In the meantime, have you known anyone who makes a notable (voluntary) contribution to a Make WordPress team? Nominate them for the Yoast Care Fund!