Past Microgrants

Launched in 2020, The Microgrants and Small Project Support program is designed to support digital security and privacy education and software development through low overhead financial support to organizations and individuals working on projects that support the Calyx Institute's mission. We accept applications for our themed funds subject to certain restrictions detailed in the call for proposal pages. General grants the Sepal Fund are currently by invitation only.

Throughout the period of this program, we have supported the following projects and organizations, organized by fiscal year.

Fiscal Year 2023

Digital Fourth is a Massachusetts-based nonprofit focusing on advocacy around privacy and surveillance issues. With funding from Calyx, they are developing curricula to be used in Massachusetts high school Government classes, which will teach students about the Fourth Amendment and its implications for cell phone surveillance and school-monitoring. This will bring to light what mechanisms are in place to protect student privacy, what, if any, information is being shared with law enforcement, how long student data is maintained, and how consent is or is not requested for the use of the monitoring technology.

Caroline Sinders is an artist and researcher who works within the intersections of public good, civil society and technology. Through funding from Calyx to Superbloom, Sinders is researching the extent of surveillance and smart city technologies across cities in the Deep South, such as Mobile, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; Houston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi. Mid-sized cities in the American South are under-reported within the United States on a national journalism level, but these cities are the ones that become surveillance testing grounds against communities of color. From the information gathered through qualitative interviews with community organizers, tech and criminal justice journalists, criminal justice advocates, civil servants, city officials, and technology researchers in these cities, Sinders will produce reports that can be used both by local communities, and on a national scale.

Restore the Fourth Minnesota is a grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the protections of the Fourth Amendment and ending mass government surveillance. With funding from Calyx, they are researching the use of surveillance technology in Minnesota. Through their research, they will compile and publish a resource which lists which Minnesota government entities have used what kinds of surveillance technologies, including a timeline of adaption, data on Use Policies, how polices compare baselines set by state law, permissiveness of the policy, enforcement mechanisms, and amount of oversight and public participation in policy-crafting process.

Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) is a non-profit that exists to enable the free transmission of data in the public interest, promote and support journalism, freedom of speech and government and corporate accountability. They engage in outreach, education, advocacy, and other work primarily through our collaborative index of datasets. This grant supports infrastructure costs, including hosting, web development, and seeding capabilities for the nearly 50 TB of data in DDoSecret’s archive. We are currently providing financial support to DDoSecrets through our Sepal Fund.

Team CommUNITY, a program of ARTICLE 19 offers a variety of in-demand services to the International digital rights community, which is made up of open-source technologists, frontline human rights defenders, and researchers. Calyx Institute support provided interim funding for Team CommUNITY to offer critical programming and training and continue important conversations during a time that individuals are unable to gather in person.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a volunteer-run housing justice collective using data visualization, critical cartography, and community organizing to fight dispossession and evictions upon gentrifying landscapes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. In collaboration with other local organizations, the AEMP launched Landlord Tech Watch as a platform for information on harms associated with landlord technology. Our funding supports the research and writing of two reports on landlord tech harms in San Francisco and New York City - both epicenters of proptech development and deployment. These reports will hopefully empower tenants and serve coalition, policy, and housing justice work in the fight against landlord tech abuse.

Theorem Media, an educational 501(c)(3) nonprofit, builds coalitions and advisory boards of the very best and brightest from across dozens of disciplines that share a passion for making complex issues not only accessible, but also entertaining. Theorem Media creates and distributes digital first content using multiple formats and channels. Through funding from Calyx, they are creating a handful of short videos, created by widely-known, funny social media personalities, covering some fundamentals of how the internet works: focusing heavily on protecting users' privacy and security. By producing a few super-short, entertaining, spreadable explainer videos, this will give millions of people a better grasp on these fundamental concepts, and give them “tools to think with” as they encounter breaking news about security and privacy threats. Viewers will come away from these videos with more confidence in their ability to protect their online privacy and security on mobile telecommunications services and the importance of privacy-protecting tools.

LEAP Encryption Access Project is a nonprofit organization that develops the LEAP VPN, an open-source virtual private network platform designed for ease of use and developed for utility within censored environments. They work with service providers including the Calyx Institute to build and brand their VPN service. LEAP VPN is the shared code base for Bitmask, CalyxVPN, RiseupVPN, SurVPN and more. As the number of users has increased rapidly in the past year, this grant will enable them to improve UX, work on user-requested feature development and contribute to the overall maintenance of their servers.

Fiscal Year 2022

The Youth Action Institute, formerly known as the Youth Justice Board, is a public policy research fellowship that supports young New Yorkers in investigating and testing solutions to the issues and policies that affect their lives. Through the grant from Calyx, the Institute conducted a research study with youth to discover what conflicts they encounter online, how they escalated or de-escalated, and what kinds of support and online conflict management techniques they want to have readily available to them. From this study, the fellows generated educational materials for young people to build skills and access appropriate digital conflict resolution tools. All of the resources were disseminated through social media via images, infographics, videos and text posts.

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) is a non-profit advocacy organization and legal services provider that litigates and advocates for privacy, working to abolish local governments’ systems of mass surveillance. Funding from Calyx supported S.T.O.P.'s campaign activities focused on “Ban the Scan” which raised awareness of the dangers of facial recognition in New York City, including amplifying media engagement and launching a community education effort to expand their grassroots base and turn the tide of public opinion against facial recognition. This project was funded by our Regional and Local Microgrants Fund.

The Middle East Programme of the Centre for Emerging Futures (Comet-ME) is an Israeli-Palestinian NGO providing off-grid energy and water services to vulnerable Palestinian herding communities. This project entailed designing and building a cellular-based community wireless network in Comet-ME’s energy install base, focusing on digital literacy, digital rights, safety, and privacy. Two facilitators completed workshops in five rural communities. This empowered members of the community, particularly the women, to expand their horizons, learn new things, and communicate more easily with family members beyond and even within the boundaries of their community.

Fiscal Year 2021

Team CommUNITY, a program of ARTICLE 19, offers a variety of in-demand services to the international digital rights community, which is made up of open-source technologists, frontline human rights defenders, and researchers. Calyx Institute support provided interim funding for Team CommUNITY to offer critical programming and training and continue important conversations during a time that individuals are unable to gather at the Internet Freedom Festival because of COVID-19. They launched a VPN Initiative, which focuses on increasing information-sharing between trusted open source and for profit VPN services; this increases more communication between frontline users and trusted VPN providers. They were also successful in designing an online wiki repository, which will contain a host of useful information for both developers and users.

Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) is a charitable Chicago-based collaboration between data scientists, transparency activists, artists, and technologists that sheds light on the intersection of digital rights and on-the-streets issues. LPL used public records FOIA requests, consulted with local experts, and dug through several pre-existing resources on the study of facial recognition use by local, state, and federal actors, to research and document where fusion centers are using facial recognition technology. Based on the research funded by Calyx, they were able to research and publicize how these technologies are being used.

Library Freedom Project (LFP) is a privacy-focused community of practice for librarians. LFP’s community of librarians worked with their teen patrons to create high-quality privacy resources for young people focused on their unique needs. The goal was to create content on topics they care about, using language and formats they understand - like a meme. After consulting with teen patrons, they developed a total of 54 privacy memes reaching a diverse set of teens; most of which were young people of color. These discussed privacy issues like school surveillance, facial recognition, policing, the broad data-gathering of apps like Uber and Facebook, and the creepiness of online advertising in a way easily digestable to teens. Through these interactions, the participants gained a better understanding of privacy issues. At the conclusion of the project, an exhibition was displayed at the Boston Public Library.

Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) is a non-profit that exists to enable the free transmission of data in the public interest, promote and support journalism, freedom of speech and government and corporate accountability. They engage in outreach, education, advocacy, and other work primarily through our collaborative index of datasets. The Calyx Institute supported infrastructure costs, including hosting, web development, and seeding capabilities for the nearly 50 TB of data in DDoSecret’s archive.

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) is a non-profit advocacy organization and legal services provider that litigates and advocates for privacy, working to abolish local governments’ systems of mass surveillance. S.T.O.P. produced two educational reports on the impact of Community Control of Police Surveillance (CCOPS) Legislation. The Community Control of Police Surveillance (CCOPS) is a combined effort by a wide range of nonprofits focused on increasing community oversight of and transparency about privacy-invasive technologies used by government agencies and departments throughout the country. Legislation modeled on the CCOPS initiative has passed in over a dozen towns, cities, and counties. The first report, “New CCOPS on the Beat”, was released in February 2021. It examined the range of statutes that have been enacted to date, creating a framework for evaluating the implementation of specific CCOPS laws in varying jurisdictions. A second report, "Above the Law?" applied this framework to the first round of NYPD privacy and use policies per the POST Act.

SignalBoost was an open-source tool that let activists, journalists, rapid response workers, and everyone else use the encrypted messaging app Signal to send text blasts and receive hotline tips with minimal metadata exposure. It was designed for situations in which organizers needed to spin up secure communications loops quickly for massive groups of strangers. SignalBoost improved the scalability, maintainability, and usability of their tool as part of this grant during a period of rapid growth. Calyx Institute support acted as gateway funding, helping the SignalBoost team focus on the project full-time while pursuing long-term funding. SignalBoost was fiscally-sponsored by Aspiration Tech, received Emmerson Collective Fellowships, and received a $100,000 grant from Mozilla. The project shut down in August 2021.

Fiscal Year 2020

We coordinated with national security reporters to ensure timely coverage of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. JOSHUA ADAM SCHULTE trial through the daily procurement of the trial transcripts to assist journalists and reporters in covering the court case of the accused Vault 7 leaker. The Vault 7 leaks were one of the largest leaks of information from the CIA, and understanding what happened and how the U.S. government responded is crucial for the public’s knowledge of the privacy and security vulnerabilities the world’s digital networks face. The transcripts are hosted with other related exhibits and court documents by Alexa O'Brien. Transcripts for the 2022 retrial are hosted on our website here.

MuckRock Foundation’s Hacking History Freedom of Information Act project, which aims to educate the public on the cyber domain, government investigations, and hacktivism by identifying and filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents on hackers, hacking groups, and high profile hacks. With over 500 FOIA requests filed, this project served to inform the public's understanding of the political and legal dimensions of online privacy, digital speech and political organizing, and criminal law relating to cybersecurity through the release and analysis of primary source documents. As of the conclusion of the grant period, the Hacking History project includes 855 requests and continues to grow. The filing of these requests now also has special value — each month, the FBI destroys hundreds of thousands of pages of its files, but a FOIA request delays this destruction and allows them to ensure a public copy is released to be preserved in perpetuity. All of the materials continue to remain available at the Hacking History project page.