It's the end of another year in BPD and I wanted to check in with those that follow and support our work.

How much did we raise?

In 2025, we raised $15,717.02! This was lead primarily by fundraising at PyCon US and the outreach from amazing folks in the community.

We supported a total of 24 events this year. This almost doubled the number of events in 2024. We also had a few events that we couldn't support due to lack of time.

What we need to do better

This year was great and we did a fantastic job, but we definitely identified many changes that need to happen.

Working with advisors

In speaking with a couple advisors (reminder advisors are those that offer us as an org guidance), they mentioned that they didn't know what we were doing until after it had happened.

While the advisors are meant to not play an active role in the organization, they are meant to provide guidance in the decisions based on their experience. Them not being aware of things happening does not give them the ability to help us succeed.

I will mention that all times I was advised this year, there was positive growth.

I will work to connect with the advisors listed at least quarterly with ideas and goals for the org.

Meeting Regularly and Transparency in decisions

We also didn't do well in letting folks know what the leadership was up to. This came up mostly in the elections when council members were hesitant to self-nominate for leadership positions. This was due to many not knowing what would be their responsibility.

This was mostly due to the asynchronous nature of how the org was run. Many of the discussions and tasks were handled in 1:1 messages with the only communication chain being in email.

To fix this I'm proposing there be a monthly 1-hour meeting with the leadership to discuss matters, hold votes when necessary. These will also be recorded with transcriptions and minutes generated. These will be stored in the policy repo.

Lack of Gender Diversity in our candidates

The last two sections resulted in a low selection for the 7 leadership positions open. The most painful point was that we had only 1 person that identifies as female.

This is a major problem. Diversity by Inclusion is one of our tenets. The lack of diversity in our leadership is a serious issue that we will work to address.

There are two things we have planned to fix this problem.

Next October before the election window opens, there will be an open call to all about the roles and responsibilities of the leadership. I believe this plus the minutes from each meeting being made public will show more people they can be a Black Python Devs Leader for one year.

The other thing we hope to fix is to encourage each existing member to nominate someone for the position.

This will require those leaders to encourage other members to run.

The last thing we will do is make the leadership elections available to all members of the council.

Continue to increase the number of council members

Speaking of the council there is hope that we can continue to increase the number of people in the leadership council.

Reminder, the council are the local representatives of their communities. This means that they have the ear of our leadership and have the opportunity to represent their community in BPD.

It's important that we have more and more leaders appear and develop.

This year we had 4 members join. This is great but there should have been more, based on the number of black leaders we worked with.

The action to take on this is to remind existing members that they should nominate other members more often.

Council members are nominated and seconded by an existing council member. Then there is a 24 hour period for any existing member to submit either publicly/privately why this member should not be added to the council. If a reason is submitted then a vote is taken, otherwise the person is admitted.

Supporting Black communities in their existing locations and communities

It was great to have an opportunity to talk with folks that were not part of the "Python community" but were definitely in connected spaces. This is important because we have some fundamental ideas of how we extend the Python Community to Black Communities around the world. The first is to support the existing communities and work with them to be Black-friendly spaces. The other is to fill the void in spaces where there is no Python community.

We have not done a great job with the scientific community. We also haven't connected with general communities in Black spaces. After attending some events in DC and NYC, it was obvious that we should be working with other organizations to let folks know about things happening in the Python community and how more Black devs are using Python.

Securing corporate sponsor

Stepping away from leadership to talk about everyone's favorite topic, MONEY.

Black Python Devs has been trying since May to secure a new corporate sponsor that would increase our operating budget 33%. We also have increased our operating costs in order to make sure we're prepared to handle the increasing workload.

We're working with our parent org, GNOME, to try and secure better corporate sponsors.

We know that we'll likely need to rely on individual donations for the majority of our financial support but corporate sponsors would reduce the amount of individual support funds going to things like stickers and traveling to support events. Our goal is to always make sure that as much of your support goes directly into supporting the community.

Beginning formal work for me to step down by 2028

I have been relatively public about this but I am often the bottleneck in processes and have been battling burnout for a few years as my work has been more demanding over the years.

I wanted to give myself 5 years to work on BPD and then I wanted to make sure that someone else has the opportunity to make an impact on the community globally. This is year 3 and I want to start making sure that all the things that we're doing are documented so that someone new can come in and bring some new ideas to the org.

What excites me about 2026

Now that we got that out of the way I wanted to quickly share my vision for 2026.

This year I want us to try more things that we've been a little afraid to do in the last few years.

Here are a few things that I'm hoping to see us do.

• Sending out members to local events. So you see them and they are more and more involved.
• Speaking about Black Python Devs in more spaces outside of Python
• Letting Africa and LATAM do things they've been asking about for years
• Automating the release of more information to the community via the newsletter and social media

I can't speak on all of this just yet but hopefully you'll be hearing a lot about things in the upcoming weeks.

If you were one of the now 500 supporters of BPD, thank you for all that you did to help us make 2025 truly amazing. We're still in the early days and I'm excited to see what is to come in 2026.