Support Ada Lovelace Day and women in STEM

UPDATE: Thanks to the Ada Lovelace Day community's generosity, our archives and newsletter have been saved, and I've been able to take part in a four events that would otherwise have been difficult to attend (see the updates for details).

My aim now is to fund this year's Ada Lovelace Day celebrations. I want to come up with something new for the day, something which brings our community and our history together online. And I'd like to do more outreach to our indie event organisers and to encourage them to continue events that celebrate Ada Lovelace Day locally.

And I'm also hoping to fund the development of Fieldwork, my eco-sitcom which aims to engage the public with solutions to the biodiversity crisis, explain a bit about what ecologists do all day, and normalise the idea of women working in the field.

So please do contribute a little if you can, and please share this link with your communities.

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Last year, I took the difficult decision not to organise another Ada Lovelace Day Live event, effectively marking the end of ALD as an organisation. It was a tough choice to make, but ultimately the right one, given how many tech companies have pulled back from investing in gender equality.

Since then, I've kept the website, social media accounts, and weekly newsletter going myself. I've also been invited to speak at two online events, and one in-person event. And there is still more work that I'd really like to be able to do to support women in STEM.

But there are ongoing costs, and I need some help covering them.

If we hit our first goal of £1,300, I'll be able to cover the cost of event travel, as well as the costs of maintaining the Ada Lovelace Day website, including the rather expensive plugin that runs our indie event calendar.

If we hit our second goal of £2,000, I'll be able to move the website onto a new and cheaper host, and spend some time tidying it up. We have over 650 blog posts and pages on our website, including over 160 profiles of women in STEM; over 150 videos on YouTube, including 70 from Ada Lovelace Day Live events over the years; and hundreds of photos from our events. We also have details of nearly 1,000 indie events in our archive. This is all valuable to the community and really does deserve to be saved.

If we hit our third goal of £3,500, I'll be able to spend some time looking into the upcoming Employment Rights Bill to understand how that affects the women in STEM movement, talk to activists and business leaders to see what their next steps are to keep DEI alive, and then share what I learn with the community.

It's always worth saying that I would be very happy to talk to companies that would like to sponsor the website and the newsletter, which goes out weekly with profiles of women in STEM, videos and more.