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Join us in welcoming the 2025 Sepal Fund recipients, including Library Freedom Project (LFP), CryptoHarlem, Abya Yala Network, Open Archive, and more! You can find detailed recipient descriptions below.
Founded in 2015, Library Freedom Project (LFP) is a non-profit organization rethinking the role of librarianship by building a network of values-driven librarians committed to fostering information democracy. The mission of LFP is rooted in empowering library workers to take bold action in the face of censorship, surveillance, and other threats to intellectual freedom. By equipping librarians with privacy-first tools, advocacy strategies, and professional development opportunities, LFP helps libraries become hubs of equity, access, and resistance.
From intensive trainings to curated resources and coalition building, LFP bridges gaps in the library world, turning libraries into safe havens where individuals can access knowledge, express ideas, and protect their digital privacy without fear.
CryptoHarlem's work is rooted in community protection, digital justice, and long-term empowerment. CryptoHarlem delivers direct cybersecurity support to grassroots organizations, produces community-informed research on digital harms, and amplifies the voice of underserved communities that are impacted by surveillance and exclusion from the tech sector.
Abya Yala Network brings together activists, developers, and people's technicians working with organizations and communities to appropriate autonomous and secure digital platforms by hosting and administering themselves. The network is formed by Centro de Autonomía Digital, Espora, Laboratorio Popular de Medios Libres, Numérica Latina, and Sutty.
OpenArchive is dedicated to protecting people and their histories. They are a non-profit organization that conducts community co-research to develop privacy-first mobile archiving solutions, create guides, and host training workshops. Since 2014, the organization has collaborated with communities world-wide to infuse co-research outcomes into free tools that are as easy to use as they are secure.
Their open-source flagship mobile application Save, securely archives, verifies, and encrypts media to ensure it is authenticated, preserved, and accessible. Their goal is to foster freedom, autonomy, and accountability by ensuring the historical record endures as technologies change.
To further support organizations with limited resources to unleash their potential and grow and eliminate barriers for community building, we were able to provide single-year discretionary funding to the following Sepal Fund finalists.
Center for Intimacy Justice (CIJ) is the leading global expert on censorship of women’s health information — advocating to improve freedom of expression and access to an open internet on these topics. CIJ released the first investigation in major media outlets (NY Times and 100+ others) on this issue in 2022, and in 2025, CIJ released a new investigation (in WIRED) that is the first to illuminate this censorship of women’s health on four major tech platforms. CIJ is creating more open, free, equitable spaces online by changing technology platforms’ gender-biased, discriminatory suppression of health information for women and people of diverse genders.
S.T.O.P. is a legal service provider and advocacy organization working to abolish local governments' mass surveillance that disproportionately impacts Muslim Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, indigenous peoples, and communities of color.
The De|Center works to reduce harm and advance privacy, safety, and equity in connected technologies through our Design from the Margins (DFM) methodology. We work closely with highly marginalized and criminalized people (who we call “decenteredˮ). We believe they hold the knowledge necessary to identify the highest harms and largest safety gaps from technologies and systems, as they are those most impacted by the unjust exercise of power. These communities possess an enormous amount of expertise on how technologyʼs harms can be ameliorated, since they navigate them daily.
Convocation Research and Design Labs (CoRD Labs) is an interdisciplinary think tank investigating the intersections of cybersecurity, design, and human rights. We focus on how technology is built, the harms it amplifies, and its impact on marginalized communities. Our collaborations include the United Nations, Mozilla Foundation, Coalition Against Online Violence, Interledger Foundation, Plan C Pills, Palestine Legal, National Democratic Institute, trust and safety teams at BandCamp, Facebook, and Wikimedia Foundation.
Launched in 2020, the Calyx Institute’s grantmaking program has focused on funding designed to support the internet freedom ecosystem through unrestricted, general operating support to organizations and individuals working on projects that align with Calyx’s mission. Projects supported have focused on digital security, privacy education, and software development, among others. All of Calyx’s grant recipients are working (as is the Calyx Institute) to educate the public about privacy in digital communications and to develop tools that anyone can use. In 2022, Calyx launched the Fusion Center Research Fund* which disbursed nearly $200,000 to projects focused on researching fusion centers1 and their impact on digital privacy and freedom of expression.
Learning from these grantmaking efforts and our overall work in the internet freedom space, Calyx is launching a multi-year funding opportunity and pilot program for small organizations and collectives working in alignment with Calyx’s mission and values. The Sepal Fund will provide five (5) organizations, collectives, or projects a yearly (unrestricted) grant of up to $50,000 for a total of three (3) years. This fund will further include professional development support and community building over the three-year grant term, which we hope will contribute to strengthening the digital privacy ecosystem overall. We aim to utilize the learning gleaned from this pilot program to better understand what we and other funders can offer to the larger ecosystem, as well as to develop an analysis plan. The findings from that research will be made public via the Calyx website once completed.
* Fusion centers are law enforcement intelligence-sharing centers that integrate local, federal, and private intelligence gathering and dissemination. These have documented deleterious impacts on privacy and freedom of expression. Visit this page for more information about this fund.