Access to knowledge and information may seem like a strange issue to prioritize in the 21st century. After all, the digital age has put an endless wealth of information at the tips of our fingers thanks to smartphones and other devices. But this isn’t the case for everyone. Stubborn barriers to equitable access to knowledge persist, including affordability, lack of access to broadband, shortcomings in infrastructure, institutional interference and issues around language justice.
Moreover, the digital age has only multiplied opportunities for mis- and disinformation to spread, even as an accurately informed population remains essential to a functioning democracy. As the U.N. puts it: “Informed citizens can make informed decisions, for instance, when going to the polls. Only when citizens know how they are governed can they hold their governments accountable for their decisions and actions. Information is power. Therefore, universal access to information is a cornerstone of healthy and inclusive knowledge societies.”
While other paths to knowledge, including K-12 education, higher education and journalism, receive significant support from philanthropy, universal public knowledge — which includes resources like libraries, archives and Wikipedia — is comparatively underfunded.
The Trump administration is exacerbating the problem, removing information on government websites about topics such as gender, health, climate change, equity, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and other efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Other right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, have sought to defund and delegitimize Wikipedia, one of the biggest sources of free information on the internet. Meanwhile, the ease with which right-leaning media has flooded the zone with inaccurate information poses a big threat to liberal philanthropy’s longstanding strategy of bankrolling policy solutions based on the facts — facts which can simply be drowned out.
Ensuring universal access to knowledge, whether that’s through funding efforts to expand broadband availability, supporting libraries or advocating for fair-use laws, is about more than just allowing people to learn more — a noble goal in and of itself — it is vital to protecting democracy in the U.S. and around the globe.
To that end, here are some of the funders working to safeguard and expand universal access to knowledge.
Mellon Foundation
The Mellon Foundation’s core grantmaking areas include a Public Knowledge program that strives to make knowledge accessible to everyone to build a more informed and engaged society. To do so, Mellon relies on three interconnected strategies: preserving original source materials, focusing particularly on materials from historically underrepresented cultures and populations; funding efforts to advance equitable digital access, digital inclusion and the digitization of original sources, which benefits libraries, archives and presses; and creating and supporting networks to increase knowledge sharing among institutions and communities.
Mellon’s recent move to fill the gaps left by the Trump administration’s pullback from the humanities speaks to this funder’s willingness to step up at a crucial moment for the future of public knowledge infrastructure in America — and hopefully portends further support to come. As Patricia Hswe, program officer for the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program, has noted, “Public knowledge means ensuring that knowledge access and production are treated as public and social goods: that is, goods in the public interest for purposes that matter to them, such as learning, justice, self-determination and memory-keeping.”
Some of Mellon’s grantees in this space include Dartmouth College’s Reviews in Digital Humanities, Educopia’s Cita Press, the College of Wooster’s Black Web Archives Collective, the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Collections, Whose Knowledge?, Invisible Histories Project, the Internet Archive, Movement Alliance Project and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Sloan Foundation
Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is primarily focused on supporting research related to science, technology, engineering, math and economics. It also seeks to create a diverse scientific workforce and strengthen the public’s understanding and engagement with science and support the health of scientific institutions.
Through its now completed Universal Access to Knowledge program, the Sloan Foundation supported efforts to make all knowledge in the digital age more open and accessible for the benefit of the public. Grantmaking ranged from supporting digitizing collections — including at the Library of Congress, other major libraries, archives and museums — to grants for the Wikimedia Foundation to support the creation of the Digital Public Library of America.
Although the program has now ended, the Sloan Foundation continues to fund grantees engaged in this work through its Special Initiatives program, including Wikipedia, the Digital Public Library of America and Open eBooks Initiative. As part of its Public Understanding of Science and Technology program, the foundation seeks to commission, develop, produce and distribute work that mainstreams science and technology for the general public and builds bridges between the cultures of science and the humanities.
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, which was founded in 2003, is the host of the free internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, as well as a number of other projects, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikibooks and Wikisource. The foundation describes itself as “the people who keep knowledge free.”
Available in 300 languages, Wikipedia alone facilitates access to knowledge around the globe. But the work of the Wikimedia Foundation, whose funders include author Antoine Bello, Arcadia Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Knight Foundation, extends beyond its Wikimedia projects. It also awards grants to Wikimedia community members, nonprofits and affiliates, supports education and learning, and promotes knowledge equity. The foundation also launched a $4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund in 2020, which provides funding to organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial justice inequities that hinder access and participation in free knowledge.
Like other funders who support universal access to knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation has supported advocacy work to protect the rights to access and share knowledge, oppose government censorship, promote open copyright licenses, protect privacy and fight disinformation. The foundation also works to innovate and build features and tools to make Wikimedia projects easier to read, edit and share.
“Open the Knowledge” is Wikimedia’s call to promote “radical knowledge equity, creating a living record of history, stories, and contexts for and by all people.” The foundation is actively working to close knowledge gaps and achieve knowledge equity across its projects, especially gaps concerning women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ communities, people with disabilities, and people of color.
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Knight Foundation
In addition to being one of the most important philanthropic funders of journalism and media, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation also supports access to knowledge outside its journalism lens. Through its Communities program, the Knight Foundation supports libraries and the “vital role they play in building informed and engaged communities.” In recent years, Knight has increasingly focused on helping libraries adapt to people’s needs and preferences in the digital age.
For example, in 2021, the Knight Foundation awarded $5 million to LYRASIS and partnered with Digital Public Library of America to support The Palace Project, which worked to develop services and tools to deliver ebooks, audiobooks and other digital media to public libraries and patrons. In 2022, The Palace project launched a platform and app.
Other Knight grants to support library innovation amid the demands of the digital age include: Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the MIT Media Lab, Peer 2 Peer University and Richland Library. Knight also supported the launch of the Digital Public Library of America.
Arcadia Fund
Founded in 2002 by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the London-based Arcadia Fund works across three grantmaking areas: conserving and restoring nature, recording cultural heritage and promoting open access to knowledge. Through its Promoting Open Access program, Arcadia aims to both make information available for free online, as well as help people find and use information. The program’s three main priorities are supporting efforts to change and improve copyright laws, regulations and limitations so that people can better access knowledge, supporting initiatives that provide free online access to scholarly books, and awarding grants to help people find free versions of government documents, publicly funded research, standards and laws.
Some of Arcadia’s grantees include Creative Commons, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, New Venture Fund’s SPARC, the American Council of Learned Society, the Internet Archive, New York Public Library, Educopia Institution, Confederation of Open Access Repositories and Wikimedia Deutschland.
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Other funders that have backed public knowledge over the years include the Henry Luce Foundation, Brewster Kahle, Brian and Tegan Acton, Open Society Foundations, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
