Charitable Contributions Update

Hi, all! Quick update today—I’m going to go over some of the charitable contributions that ACRL has made over the last few weeks. I debated for a bit whether to even make this post, but I think transparency around these topics is important, particularly in 2025. So here’s a short list of organizations that I’ve sponsored through my business and why:

• NorCal Resist: In an ideal world, this organization wouldn’t exist, much less need money, but we don’t live in an ideal world. The current US administration is launching an all-out war against immigrants and people of color, and this has a direct impact on a) people’s livelihoods and basic human decency, and b) the state of science and technology in America, because guess what? A lot of science is done by immigrants. I’ve said before that the very act of “owning a business” is political, and I believe it would be irresponsible of me to own a business and not take a political stand against mass deportation and mistreatment of our fellow human beings.

• Ten of the top HBCUs: Several months ago, Mekka Okereke, a Black technologist at Google that I respect and follow on BlueSky/Mastodon posted that he made a donation to every single HBCU in the country. I was really inspired by this, and have wanted to follow along in his footsteps; after all, “Black Lives Matter” is at the bottom of every page on my website, and also in my email footer, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot by itself. I don’t have the resources (yet) to donate to every HBCU, so I reached out to Mekka and asked for his ranking of the “top 10”—he graciously responded, and I’m re-sharing the list here in case anyone else would like to join me:

  • Hampton
  • Howard
  • Spelman
  • Clark Atlanta
  • Florida A&M University (FAMU)
  • Morehouse
  • Jackson State
  • Fisk
  • Grambling
  • North Carolina A&T

Where possible I targeted my donations to the Computer Science or Computer Engineering departments. I went back and forth on whether I should be less specific in my donations, because CS departments (and science departments in general) are much better-funded than other fields, but finally decided that ACRL’s goals here are to support Black technologists in CS and related fields.

• [In progress] KubeCon or a related conference attendance scholarship: last year, ACRL sponsored scholarships for The Diana Initiative which is a diversity-oriented conference co-located-ish with DEFCON. I thought (and still think) that’s a valuable organization to support, but this year wanted to focus on a venue that is slightly more directly aligned with the work that ACRL does. So I’m currently chatting with some folks at CNCF about scholarship opportunities for KubeCon, or if that doesn’t work out I’m going to look for a different and related venue that I can help support.

So that’s it—there’s probably a lot you can say about the organizations I’m choosing to support, but my broader aim here is to encourage you to follow along with me. In a time when science and technology research, along with just, you know, basic humanity, is under direct assault by the federal government, these types of organizations need financial support more than ever. So maybe the list of places I supported aren’t the places you would necessarily support, but I’d really encourage you to support something.

As always, thanks for reading.

~drmorr