Foundation Grants

The Unicode Consortium is deeply indebted to the generosity of foundations that support the mission of the Consortium through financial grants. These grants are used to expand the Consortium's support of the languages of the world. As additional scripts are encoded and enabled in our freely-available specifications and data, more people in all regions of the globe can use computers, search engines, applications, and mobile devices in their native languages.

The grants awarded to the Unicode Consortium and their purpose are listed here.

Henry Luce Foundation

2015

The Henry Luce Foundation has made a grant to the Unicode Consortium in support of three meetings between Unicode specialists, experts, and user communities in Mongolia and China. The meetings, which will take place from 2015 to 2017, will discuss encoding issues relating to specific scripts in the region, such as Mongolian Square and Soyombo. The goal of the meetings is to move the scripts forward in the encoding process, so scholars and the relevant user communities will eventually be able to create, send, and search materials in these scripts electronically. The project is headed by Dr. Deborah Anderson, Technical Director of the Consortium, and Project Leader of the UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative.

2013

The Henry Luce Foundation has made a one-time grant to the Unicode Consortium to support a December 2013 meeting to further progress the Tangut script for its eventual incorporation into the Unicode Standard and the associated ISO/IEC 10646 International Standard. The meeting brings together scholars of Tangut and experts in the character encoding process to agree on the character repertoire for this large and complex script. Once encoded, scholars and users of this writing system will be able to more easily use software to represent Tangut, opening the ability of usage in modern computing environments, including mobile technologies, the Internet, and World Wide Web. Work on this grant is directed by Dr. Deborah Anderson, Technical Director of the Consortium and the Project Leader of the UC Berkeley’s Script Encoding Initiative.

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation has made a Project and Event grant to the Unicode Consortium to support a meeting in Kathmandu, Nepal in October 2014. Participants include the user communities of the Prachalit Nepal and Ranjana scripts, Wikimedians from Nepal, script specialists, and Unicode experts. The goal of the meeting is to establish a framework for reaching consensus, and to agree on a plan to progress the two script proposals for eventual incorporation into the Unicode Standard and the associated ISO/IEC 10646 International Standard. Work on this grant is directed by Dr. Deborah Anderson, Technical Director of the Consortium and the Project Leader of the UC Berkeley’s Script Encoding Initiative.

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