Outreachy report: May 2025

Highlights

• We accepted and announced 26 interns for our June 2025 cohort.
• We’re ready to start internship activities with our June 2025 cohort.
• We worked on revisions for a promising grant proposal.

Description of activities

This was a quieter month focused on administrative tasks to guarantee (1) a successful onboarding of our June 2025 interns (2) funding sources for core activities and internship payments.

I focused on tasks related to the upgrade of tools and platforms we use for our daily activities and the adjustment of specific portions of our website (e.g. retiring our Opportunities page, a part of our website we haven’t updated or used in our communications in years). I supported Omotola Omotayo in activities to connect sponsorship leads to Software Freedom Conservancy’s systems and Tilda Udufo in administrative tasks related to the registration of the participation of June 2025 mentors.

We accepted 26 interns for our June 2025 cohort, but we faced several challenges in the days before that announcement. The most important one to note is our difficulty to find funding sources to all general internship funding requests: we weren’t able to fulfill at least one request per mentoring organization for the first time in the history of our program. Such funding decisions are typically made before our announcement because we had a proved track of effective fundraising for all projects in previous years; that didn’t happen this year.

We foresee tougher fundraising years coming our way, so we’ve decided to change the timing of such decisions in future cohorts. We’re discussing making such calls as soon as we close the call for mentoring organizations, but we fear we may not be able to fund any general funding requests in the future.

Finally, we have finished revisions of a grant proposal related to our Open Mentorship Handbook initiative. We expect to hear from the grantmaker in the following weeks—and we hope to bring good news.

Upcoming activities

Our June 2025 cohort officially starts on Monday, June 2. We hope to finalize idealized design sessions and make all the necessary decisions about Outreachy’s future at the end of June.