When Bess Sadler, Andromeda Yelton, Chris Bourg, and Mark Matienzo pledged to match up to $5120 donated by librarians to the Ada Initiative, they hoped to reach their goal in 6 days. Instead, they met it in less than 24 hours! But they didn’t stop there – they announced stretch goals that grew to over $15,000. As of this post, they are only a few hundred dollars away from the latest goal: $16,384 to create a cat-themed skin for an open source online library catalog system.

All told, the library community has raised over $21,000 in just 7 days for the Ada Initiative. Join them in donating now (libraries campaign link here):

We are still in awe of the way that the library community has mobilized in support of our work – and taken the lead when it comes to putting the Ada Initiative’s work into practice. For example, Stanford University Libraries is the only organization we know of with an official written policy strongly encouraging its employees to only attend conferences with codes of conduct, and we look forward to teaching the Ally Skills Workshop at the Digital Libraries Forum in October. We hope that other open tech/culture communities will follow the library community’s lead!

We can’t thank you all enough for your collective support, your powerful words that bring attention to important issues in library tech as well as our work, and your sheer enthusiasm! We are also thrilled that you seemed to have a pretty good time doing it:

With the donations from the library community and the rest of our fundraising drive, we looking forward to running four AdaCamps in 2015, teaching even more Ally Skills Workshops, and much more!

A special thank you to Andromeda Yelton, Bess Sadler, Chris Bourg, and Mark Matienzo for organizing this spectacularly successful donation campaign and joining in the matching challenge. Chris’s stretch challenges were unforgettable.

And our deepest gratitude to everyone who wrote blog posts for and donated to this campaign. Some of the many related blog posts are here (thanks Galen Charlton for collecting these):

• Why this librarian supports the Ada Initiative by Erin R. White
• Why I support the Ada Initiative. (You, too?) by Andromeda Yelton
• This librarian supports the Ada Initiative by Chris Bourg
• The Ada Initiative Has My Back by Bess Sadler
• Libraries, the Ada Initiative, and a challenge by Galen Charlton
• Support the Ada Initiative by Jason Griffey
• i support the Ada Initiative by Amy Buckland
• The Ada Initiative Needs Your Help by Jacob Berg
• Why the Loon supports the Ada Initiative by the Library Loon
• Support the Ada Initiative by Grace Dunbar
• Thank You, Ada by Misty De Meo
• Using our Influence: Why I support the Ada Initiative by Jennifer Vinopal
• Why I Don’t Talk Much About Gender or Race & Why I Support the Ada Initiative by Bohyun Kim
• Librarians donate over $10,000 to the Ada Initiative!
• The Power of Powers of 2 by Roy Tennant
• “Dressing” for the cause #libs4ada by Chris Bourg
• Thursday Threads: Sakai Reverberations, Ada Initiative Fundraising, Cost of Bandwidth by Peter Murray
• Supporting The Ada Initiative #libs4ada by Jenn Riley
• Why I give to the Ada Initiative (and hope you will too) by Coral Sheldon-Hess

Join the library community in supporting women in open technology today! If you donate $128 or more, you will get our new “Not afraid to say the F-word: Feminism” sticker, too!