Educopia is thrilled to announce an award in the amount of $750,000 from the Mellon Foundation to our fiscal sponsee, Cita Press. This grant will support Scaling Small: Partnerships and organizational resilience for Cita Press, a three-year project involving the implementation of a strategic roadmap for capacity building and financial sustainability for Cita Press. The project will be led by Cita’s founder Juliana Castro Varón, who will serve as Cita’s Design Director, and the current project and editorial coordinator Jessi Haley, who will be Editorial Director.
Cita Press is a bilingual independent press, digital library, and creative community that publishes design and writing by women that is open licensed or in the public domain. Cita’s mission is to broaden readers’ scope of the types of identities and experiences that can be shared and received through books, and to challenge assumptions about who produces and who has produced knowledge. During Scaling Small Cita will expand the press catalog’s content and functionality, improve digital infrastructure, pursue joint projects with Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and other partners, and pilot and implement revenue-generating programs to sustain Cita in the long term. Cita’s continued commitment to decentralization, collective knowledge production, and equitable access to knowledge puts their work in direct alignment with the goals and strategies of Mellon’s Public Knowledge program.
Scaling Small follows Cita Press: Getting Fit, a two-year capacity building project that was also supported by the Mellon Foundation. Throughout Getting Fit, Cita’s partnership with Educopia Institute supported the team in their development of the roadmap this recent award provides the resources to implement.
Finally, we are deeply appreciative of the Mellon Foundation’s generosity, trust, and commitment to open knowledge. We look to the impact that Cita Press will make in the coming years as a result of their investment!
For more information about the project, please reach out to Cita Press Co-Directors Jessi Haley <jessi@citapress.org> and Juliana Castro Varón <juliana@citapress.org>.