Celebrating the WordPress community: the Yoast Care fund

WordPress is wonderful! It is a wonderful CMS and with it comes a wonderful community. At Yoast, we’re definitely WordPress fanboys and fangirls. We’re fans of the CMS, fans of the community and fans of all those kickass volunteers. That’s why we’ve decided to introduce a new fund: the Yoast Care fund. Care stands for The Community Appreciation REwards. As of today, we want to celebrate those awesome volunteers with Yoast Care!

What is Yoast Care?

The Yoast Care fund contains money. You can nominate a person who is active in the WordPress community as a volunteer, and if we reward a person with a Yoast Care, they will receive $500. Besides that, we’ll do an interview, which we’ll publish on Yoast.com. In this interview, we want to tell the world about the awesome work someone has been doing as a WordPress volunteer.

Why Yoast Care?

A lot of people at Yoast do work for WordPress and we’re able to pay for most of their time. They do awesome work but also get compensated for it. However, a lot of the people in the WordPress Community are freelancers. And, they don’t have a company that pays the hours they put into our ecosystem. They don’t get compensated for their time or energy at all. 

We get it: it’s a lot easier to contribute to WordPress if you get paid for it. But, it’s impossible for Yoast to hire all those volunteers. That wouldn’t be healthy for our business. And, more importantly, those independent volunteers are of tremendous value. Those freelancers, their independent voices: that’s important for the WordPress ecosystem, that’s something we cherish (even though we might disagree with them sometimes ;-)).  

We’ve noticed that quite some people in the WordPress community don’t feel appreciated. And, let’s face it: it’s hard to show appreciation to one another in a community that’s scattered around the world. But we should make an effort to do so. We should celebrate each other and each other’s accomplishments a bit more often. We’ve been talking about these things a lot at Yoast and decided to set some money aside to get the Yoast Care started.  

What to do?

Do you know somebody who does amazing work in WordPress? Someone, a volunteer, who deserves a bit of recognition? Don’t hesitate to nominate that person!

We’re going to give away Yoast Cares to people that are nominated for it by someone else. You’ll have to fill out our form and explain why this person deserves a Care. Read more about it on our application page.

We’ve set aside $25.000 a year to spend on Yoast Cares. So, we’re really looking forward to receiving those first applications! To whom should we give our very first Yoast Care? Please let us know!

More information?

Do you want to know more about how to nominate someone or what our specific conditions are? Read all about it on our application page! And, while you’re at it: don’t forget to read about our diversity fund!